BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, 1997-2003:

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, 1997-2003: I’m in mourning today, as my favorite television series ever went off the air last night. I could try to explain why I loved the show so much, but I suspect it would come off as flat. I can link like crazy, however. For reviews of the final episode, Salon raves while Slate pans. CNN provides a wealth of back story for the uninitiated. Connie Ogle has an excellent essay of why Buffy was so good. Jonathan Last has a great overview of his top-ten favorite episodes. Joyce Millman has an exhaustive archive of odes to Buffy in Salon. The best ones are here and here. And don’t miss Slayage: The Online Journal of Buffy Studies, including this exhaustive academic bibliography of scholarship devoted to the Buffyverse. [Isn’t that all a bit pretentious?–ed. Go read this Stephanie Zacharek article on the phenomenon from a non-academic perspective. And then read this Rita Kempley piece on why Buffy is so appealing to theologians] The Parents Television Council labeled Buffy the least family-friendly show of 2001-2 — and I must admit, their description of the show is pretty dead-on in terms of its potentially objectionable material. However, it’s telling that Christianity Today praised the show’s use of such material:

[S]ometimes it isn’t enough merely to list the contents in a show or a book to determine its merit. How a taboo topic is dealt with can be just as important. In Buffy, the “how” is intriguing because of the show’s honest portrayal of consequences…. What saves the show is its realistic grounding. Sure, it’s about a skinny girl who throws demons around, but the writing honestly depicts how individuals struggle in their lives. Characters make mistakes and sin but pay consequences and change over time. In this way, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has consistently confronted human suffering and addressed compelling themes.

When a television show earns cultural praise from Christianity Today,The American Prospect, National Review Online (though they hated the finale), FHM Magazine, Reason (according to Virginia Postrel) and the New York Times editorial page, you know you’re talking about something that cannot be reduced to a whiff of transient pop culture — you’re talking about a pathbreaking work of art. I’ll close with two quotes. The first is from an Onion interview with the show’s creator, Joss Whedon:

I designed the show to create that strong reaction. I designed Buffy to be an icon, to be an emotional experience, to be loved in a way that other shows can’t be loved. Because it’s about adolescence, which is the most important thing people go through in their development, becoming an adult. And it mythologizes it in such a way, such a romantic way—it basically says, “Everybody who made it through adolescence is a hero.” And I think that’s very personal, that people get something from that that’s very real. And I don’t think I could be more pompous. But I mean every word of it. I wanted her to be a cultural phenomenon. I wanted there to be dolls, Barbie with kung-fu grip. I wanted people to embrace it in a way that exists beyond, “Oh, that was a wonderful show about lawyers, let’s have dinner.” I wanted people to internalize it, and make up fantasies where they were in the story, to take it home with them, for it to exist beyond the TV show.

The second is from Zacharek again, capturing how I’m feeling today:

[T]here have been many days when, after a particularly potent “Buffy” episode, I’ve found myself feeling vaguely off my game, my mind clouded with a gauzy, muted sense of dread. When a show jostles your equilibrium to the point of haunting your days or robbing you of sleep, when it finds a place in your imagination that also rubs, hard, at the core of who you think you really are, it starts to look like something more than what we simply call TV.

Mission accomplished, Joss.