What is “The least-watched great show on TV”? Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And, before you chuckle too hard, note the amount of writing that went even into its title, which was designed to capture the three themes of the show — comedy, horror, and action — in just 3 words (plus the the).
As Slate says:
For five years, Buffy has been the least-watched great show on television, the most ridiculed by ignorati who think they’re literati. Like its peers (The West Wing, The Sopranos, ER), Buffy is better than movies because its writer is the most important guy on the set….
Like a comet, the most brilliant monster metaphor knocked the whole show onto a new course: Whedon and Noxon had Buffy lose her virginity on her 17th birthday, and the next morning her kindly boyfriend turned cold and cruel due to an ancient curse. Same thing happened last week, after Buffy’s kid sister Dawn’s first kiss. Nota bene, girls: Boys will be vampires. Buffy is reality programming….
After Willow Rosenberg, the witch, got an enchanted gal-pal, scandalizing viewers shocked by realistic lesbian characters, Whedon spoke out: “I’ve made a mistake by trying to shove this lifestyle — which is embraced by, maybe, at most, 10 percent of Americans — down people’s throats. So I’m going to take it back, and from now on, Willow will no longer be a Jew.” His is the first show truly to master the teen native tongue, sarcasm….
Noxon’s crew valiantly strives to fulfill Buffy’s ambition: “I realize every slayer comes with an expiration mark on the package, but I want mine to be a long time from now, like a Cheeto.”
And here is the NYT with some similar thoughts, more high falutin’ of course:
The central metaphor of adolescence as a supernatural battleground has had a rich yield for Mr. Whedon — who’s a kind of genius at imaginative re-creations of the teen psyche — and for his collaborators. The show finds ways of dramatizing every feeling that, in teenagers, threatens to become an explosion: alienation from the grown-up world and from one another, fear of not belonging, distrust of authority, and the panoply of emotions that accompany our first romantic impulses.
The NYT has this clever analysis of a paper from the Center for Strategic and International Studies titled (really) “Biological Warfare and the Buffy Paradigm”. An excerpt:
Buffy Paradigm: “[An] aspect of the Buffy Paradigm is a lack of any systematic net assessment of the overall nature of the threat. This has been equally true of the U.S. government, and its lack of any clear net assessment of the probable trends in the offensive and defensive capabilities of biotechnology.”
On the Show: “In the episode `Welcome to the Hellmouth,’ we meet Buffy, who believes she can ignore the dangers that lurk around her. She hopes that a recent move to the town of Sunnydale and a change of school will allow her to put her slaying days behind her.”
Finally, here is a book filled with essays by PhD lit-crit types deconstructing the series and a website of the same.
milbertus | 28-Dec-02 at 2:03 pm | Permalink
I saw your comment on SixApart, and didn’t see an e-mail link, so here’s how I think that he hides the Trackback link if there aren’t any Trackbacks.
My method will require PHP. Your filename will have to end in .php, and PHP will have to be installed on your server.
In place of your current Trackback link, do something like this:
<?php
if(<$MTEnryTrackbackCount$> != 0)
{
print(“<a href=\”<$MTCGIPath$><$MTTrackbackScript$>?__mode=view&entry_id=<$MTEntryID$>\” onclick=\”OpenTrackback(this.href); return false\”>TrackBack
(<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$>)”);
}
?>
I don’t know if the Trackback code is what you use or not, but it’s what I have on my blog.
Hope this helps.