US BROADCAST NEWS: BUFFY

YES, SHE'S A VAMPIRE SLAYER.
NO, HER SHOW ISN'T KIDS' STUFF

04.01.2001 - From the New York Times, 1 October 2000:

Though it's popular with high school and college audiences and has a small following among older viewers, WB's Buffy the Vampire Slayer has yet to be taken seriously - to be removed from the status of cult entertainment.  Yet the show is a knockout: as much as The West Wing, which dominated the recent Emmy Awards, it demonstrates what television can accomplish.

The notion that has lingered into its fifth season, which began last Tuesday, is that Buffy is high camp.  That misperception may be partly due to the fact that the 1992 movie of the same name that engendered the series was disposable nonsense, or that WB is also home to a number of fatuous young-adult shows, slick, unconvincing portraits of adolescent angst like Dawson's Creek and Felicity.  As of last spring, Buffy was the only show on television in which both the characters and the dialogue remind us of the way real teenagers interact - with adults, with one another, and with their own feelings and impulses.

But the main reason Buffy is undervalued is that Joss Whedon, who created the series and has written and directed many of its most memorable episodes (and, oddly enough, wrote the movie), sets the exploration of the nature of adolescence in the disreputable horror genre.  In the 70s, in pictures like Carrie and The Fury, Brian De Palma showed that horror movies could operate as stylized expressions of the outsize emotions with which teenagers grapple.  Mr. Whedon works the same territory.  The premise of Buffy is that Sunnydale, the sleepy California town where Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her divorced mom (Kristine Sutherland), L.A. natives, have relocated, is built on the Hellmouth, a convergence of supernatural energies that draws a wide variety of vampires and demons.  So, Sunnydale is the site of repeated attempts by unholy entities to bring about the apocalypse.  For the first three seasons, Sunnydale High and the local teen hangout, the Bronze, were the favoured hunting ground of the undead.

It's an ingenious metaphor: adolescence as the Hellmouth.  Buffy is the Slayer, divinely chosen to combat evil.  But since the Slayer traditionally works in secrecy, Buffy's behaviour often seems violent and antisocial to those who have authority over her, such as high school administrators and even her loving but baffled mother.  Much of the show's humour has derived from the tensions between the limitations placed on Buffy by her not-yet-adult status and her obligation to patrol against the incursion of demonic forces.  Much of its pathos, too, since Buffy has the same needs and desires as any other girl of her age.

Joyce Summers wasn't let in on the secret until late in the second season, but there's always been a steady cadre of friends who, bucking the rules set by the organisation known as the Watchers' Council, have served as Buffy's confidants and allies.  Besides her personal watcher, the school librarian Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), and Angel (David Boreanaz), the vampire with a soul (it was restored by a Gypsy curse, to haunt him with the horrors of two centuries of misdeeds), Buffy's gang has included a number of other youngsters.  The original crew included the sweet-natured science and computer brain Willow (Alyson Hannigan), who struggles with wallflower tendencies; the hormone-driven Xander (Nicholas Brendon); and Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), a debutante whose self-absorption and shallowness, initially just a running gag, turned out to be a protective shield forged out of teen insecurities.  The second season added Oz (Seth Green), a guitarist with a deadpan ironic style whose affections started to bring Willow out of her shell - a process that has continued, unexpectedly, with her current romance with another young woman, Tara (Amber Benson).

Inevitably, now that Buffy and Willow have gone on to the local college, the show has shed some of these characters.  Angel moved on to his own show on WB, taking Cordelia with him, and for the moment Oz seems to have departed as well.  So, irrevocably, has Jenny Calendar (Robia La Morte), the computer teacher briefly linked with Giles until - in the most terrifying and upsetting phase of the show - Angel lost his soul again and, still obsessed with Buffy, the girl who made him feel human, began to prey on her friends.

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.

Watching the characters figure out how to negotiate the implications of living on the Hellmouth, we become aware of how teenagers naturally learn to negotiate the puzzling and infuriating obstacles constantly dropping in their path.  Oz becomes a werewolf, but Willow still adores him; she decides, finally, that if he can handle her moodiness around her periods, she can put up with his enslavement to the full moon.  (Giles simply locks him in a cage until he's recovered.)  The discovery that Sunnydale's mayor (Harry Groener) is scheming with the denizens of the Hellmouth to acquire demon status makes him merely a more flamboyant breed of corrupt politician; Buffy and her friends wise up fast.  The school was burned to the ground in a full-scale combat with the mayor in his demon-snake mode at Buffy's graduation - an inspired emblem for how the end of high school catapults often unwilling teenagers into the next phase of their lives.

When Buffy loses her virginity to Angel on her 17th birthday, the moment of perfect happiness he achieves triggers the other side of the Gypsy curse, and his soul vanishes.  What she experiences is a high school girl's worst nightmare: she sleeps with the boy she loves and wakes up the next morning to find that he's turned cold and cruel.  And in Faith (Eliza Dusku), a second slayer added in the third season and seduced over to the mayor's camp, the show considers the case of the adolescent so deeply damaged that she confuses love with weakness.

Like Brian De Palma, Mr. Whedon loves mixed tones.  The wisecracks and farce moments don't defuse the suspense or the horror, or devalue the high-running passions of the characters.  He loves actors, too: the ensemble work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer is no less impressive than it is on The West Wing.  Performers like Ms. Gellar, Ms. Hannigan and Ms. Duskhu, over and over again, meet the harrowing emotional demands of characters who are asked to engage continuously with the terrors of burgeoning adulthood.  Mr. Brendon, Ms. Carpenter in her three seasons with the show, and especially Mr. Head have witty styles that crack open every now and then, and the suppressed anguish of the characters leaks out through the fissures.  Mr. Head's Giles has a twee Englishness that his faithful charges are forever joshing, but anyone who saw the episode in which Jenny was murdered knows what this actor is capable of: he seemed paralysed, as if every other emotion had been sponged up by grief.  In his stint as the brooding half-caste Angel, Mr. Boreanaz illuminated both the tender and rotted sides of romantic obsession.

And the show has produced a supporting cast of superb villains.  The resourceful stage actor Harry Groener's playful ironies had a surprising underside of wistfulness in his scenes with Faith.  Julie Benz was a too-brief presence early on as a baby-doll vamp.  On the other hand, the scene-stealing James Marsters, as a Brit-punk bloodsucker named Spike, has become a regular, and this season marks the return of the maddened semi-invalid vampire who jilted him, Drusilla.  The wildly gifted Juliet Landau (the daughter of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain) plays Dru like an acid-addled cross between Ophelia and Cassandra.

Buffy has had rocky patches.  Mr. Whedon and his writing staff have sometimes had to scramble to find ways to deal with the new phases in the characters' lives - like Buffy's depression in the aftermath of the Angel crisis and the onset of college for Buffy and Willow.  It took the show most of last season to work out the alterations in this intimate group of friends that time has conspired to scatter.  These challenges grow out of the series' insistence on remaining true to its contract: to articulate the realities of growing up, when perception and loyalties are constantly shifting.  Mr. Whedon keeps faith with his subjects as they approach adulthood: he honors the drama of their turbulent lives.

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