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Comment by brighteyes | Hacker News Reader

I've been a fan of Buffy since it aired. It certainly was amazing.

At the same time, I feel the article goes a bit overboard with "birth of TV as art". For example, you can go back earlier to Twin Peaks as raising the bar for TV to the level of art. Other shows have gotten similar acclaim.

Not to diminish Buffy, it's a classic and it certainly transcended the "teen entertainment" genre.

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Oddly, "what about Twin Peaks" was my immediate thought as well. I'm guessing that if I were older, I'd probably have thought of an even earlier example.

Still, there was definitely a change from the way TV told stories in the 90s to the way it tells them now, and I think that the article is right about Buffy being an early part of that.

I do remember watching Twin Peaks, it was certainly odd. Quite a few X-Files episodes had this same oddness as well. I think X-Files also made the whole supernatural thing popular in the 90's and I remember that by the time Buffy came along it was pretty much hyping.

I think the thing with "Buffy..." is that over the 7 seasons it moves from more-or-less a series of self contained episodes to full season length arcs. This was a broader trend in TV as we moved towards box set binging and then on-demand viewing and I think it's key to Buffy's place in the TV canon that not only is it well written gripping and bold TV but it speaks to -- and seems to crystallise -- broader cultural trends in TV consumption.

Other shows had moved in this direction (eg. the Star Trek franchise esp. over the span of DS9) but none I think as fully or as satisfyingly as Buffy did.

Babylon 5 did the full series arc before Buffy, as did Earth 2, and space: above and beyond, though those series were less successful.

Likely because sci-fi seems to be a hard sell in general. They are likely to be expensive to make (can't just rent a school for a vacation to shoot some scenes, or reuse some generic back lot) and appeal to a narrower audience.

Buffy was basically suburban/teen drama with some supernatural/horror comedy spoofs tossed on top.

sorry, the punctuation was unclear. I meant to imply that B5 was successful. I'm not personally a huge fan of B5 (just kind of like it so-so), but the series did spin off several telefilms and at least one series. The series was also not too expensive to make because of heavy use of CGI.

It took me the longest time to start watching it because I had it classified as a teenage girl tv series. It does get crincy in some places, but it is definitely awesome.

There is an episode in the first season with a demon inside a computer, and they have to figure out if one of the cast is at home, so they call her landline(!) because if they don't get a busy signal, she isn't on the internet - talk about a blast from my youth.

> You can go back even earlier to Twin Peaks

Yep. Or Homicide: Life on the Street.

Another good example is Oz (which coincidentally started and ended the same years as Buffy).

I remember stumbling across Oz late one night not knowing anything about it and thinking "whoa. This is different..."

But - as others have said - there is a gradual evolution. The trend in TV content didn't have a miraculous genesis. There's amazing stuff going back much earlier - it depends on what factors you are including.

The Twilight Zone?

Looney Tunes?

the 4th dimension?

the prisoner?

The Prisoner (and US series Nowhere Man) is great.

Do you have a link for 4th Dimension? Is it a UK TV series? Available on DVD, streaming or ..?

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