Buffy Season One Episode Five

[koganbot]

Saw this three days ago. What I remember most is that Sarah Michelle Gellar came through as an actress. She was required to be all flustered when the handsome brooding boy asked her out for a date, and she was required to ache convincingly when demon fighting interfered with her love life. In fact, I thought the conflict was written rather clumsily - Nikita did this much more pointedly - but I was feeling it as I was watching it.

Still don't think the show has done enough in creating either its world or its relationships. So far it relies on conventions regarding high schools rather than bringing the high school to life, and this is why it bothers me that police don't show up to investigate murders and students don't show up to screw around in or take books out of a library, except when suddenly the plot demands it. If you don't create your world then conventions are what you've got. Hewing to conventions for cheerleaders and dating but inexplicably ignoring them for libraries and murder investigations makes the latter stick out. If you do the work of creating your world, you can create your own conventions. Like in WKRP In Cincinnati it made perfect sense that receptionist was the highest paid position at the station. Anyway, we'll see how this develops, and you guys have promised me that explanations will appear, eventually.

(Double-checking the spelling of "Gellar," I typed "Sarah" into the Google box, and the sixth suggestion down was "Sarah Michelle Gellar." "Sarah Palin" was first and "Sarah Connor Chronicles" second, whatever "Sarah Connor Chronicles" is. (Well, a quick Wiki and now I know...))

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

my experience of the first series generally is that, when you went straight back to after seeing eps in much later series, it seemed clumsier and flimsier (it was after all this team's first ever TV show); but when you came to it fresh -- i mean after a gap of not watching the later shows either -- it seemed less clumsy and flimsy than you were anticipating

i think i would argue that the world being created is "life on a hellmouth", rather than california smalltown ordinaire, so that the gradual reveal of exceptional and bizarre dysfunctionality (masked by conventions ppl assume are there and sort of are and sort of aren't) is key* -- how like actual ordinary frontier life are towns in westerns? aren't they sequences of conventions also: settings as formalised as a proscenium arch? the very set-bound street scenes in buffy are like westerns this way: the quasi-adobe buildings and backs-streets are one step away from flats on wheels

*there are/were, after all, a ton of TV progs which take school life as their centre -- i think (for good or ill contentwise; but likely for good popularity-wise) one of buffy's early distinguishing marks may have been its "take this as read and move on" attitude to school-as-setting... speed-of-cultural-apperception is a value in buffy, which means it is constantly (in the backchat, in the individual stories) saying "look, we all know the lame conventions, that's our shared culture: the content is where we go from the lameness...)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Talking about this while trying not to spoiler you is v difficult Frank! I haven't watched the first series since it was first shown on telly here in c.1997 but I can still remember what happens thanks to subsequent references by the cast in later series (e.g. "haha Xander, you might be in a pickle now but at least you're not being seduced by a giant praying mantis"). But I do clearly remember how witty the script was (esp Cordelia's lines) and how much better it was than any of the other US high school drama settings I'd seen (My So-Called Life etc).

What they didn't really cover in the first series was how the rest of the population was completely accustomed to Hellmouth activities - the police don't show up because they know that last time their colleague went to investigate a weird happening, he didn't come back. Weird stuff didn't start happening in Sunnydale just when Buffy arrived (although she definitely serves as a trouble magnet later on when her reputation increases), and this is clearly acknowledged by the population of Sunnydale in series 3/4. However *Buffy* doesn't know the extent that this is normal levels of weird for the area at first, and quite sensibly thinks that keeping a low profile (secret identity, not telling the authorities and so on) is a good idea if you have superpowers & friends/family to protect. Look what happened to Lois Lane when Superman's enemies found out he fancied her...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

^^^yikes multiple spoilers ahoy!!

My So-Called Life hit the ground running in its first series -- did it even get a second series? Buffy ages seven years over seven series (realistically or not): I wonder if the degree of close attention to creating a realistic world (school isn't the backdrop in MSCL, it's the subject) is a trap, for long-arc projects... Whedon has repeatedly said he conceived the show in a seven-series arc, and wrote to that much longer narrative-development structure (an incredibly risky approach, given what happened to firefly, which was similarly sketched i believe, only to be cancelled halfway thru its first series)

I haven't seen any of Dollhouse yet: I've heard very good things about it (also what Martin said -- it is Joe 90 with a sexy girl...)

[thenipper.livejournal.com]

Dollhouse was a disaster I thought :(

[koganbot]

"Realistic settings" isn't what I mean. Vampire comedies are inherently unrealistic. I'll accept what the show presents me if it does present it to me, but so far it hasn't created its own rules and its own world, and most crucially it hasn't created a strong sense of the relationships among the main characters. There's more telling than showing. But then again, it has a special set of difficult tasks. As you said, My So-Called Life is something different. But there are points of comparison. Buffy is new to the school, plus she's in a vampire comedy, whereas Angela was already at the school and was in a series of ongoing relationships. But actually what My So-Called Life did that was very canny was to start the series at a point where Angela is changing the relationships in her life, meanwhile loner Brian is tentatively creating new friendships, and Angela's restless dad doesn't know quite what he wants out of his job or marriage (or does he want out of the marriage?), and an English teacher quits and a couple other teachers try out in that position, etc., so the show gives itself an excuse to, as it were, introduce not just us but the characters to an unfolding world, the second being a natural way to do the first.

Whereas Buffy wants to introduce us to action and vampire slaying real fast. But at the same time it does want to give us warm rich relations among the main characters, Buffy and mom, Buffy and friends, and the school as a setting where social life and personality is on stage. Hard to do both at once, and it doesn't have the freedom of something like Rocky and Bullwinkle, a latter-day version of which could have taken care of the library in two seconds. "We need a place where we won't be interrupted or overheard so that we can plan in secret." "I know! We'll use the school library! It has books in it so no one goes there!" The problem with the Buffy library is it's inconsistent. The plot needs someone to overhear Buffy without her knowing it, so it puts that person in the stacks, like a regular student in the library. Then it needs the library as a planning center for anti-demon activities, so no random students bother to come in. Then the plot needs Buffy to meet a handsome inappropriate guy, so it walks him into the library to look for a book.

Where the show is totally assured so far is with Angel. It's clear on what it knows and what we don't, what it's going to tell us and what it's going to conceal, and how it's going to make us care.

The series is setting us up for something potentially rich: Buffy as a force whom other people care about and whose action gives them something to do where otherwise they'd be at a loss, but Buffy being mostly unaware of the caring or the role she's having in pulling people together (in both senses of "pulling people together"; pulling someone's behavior together, and connecting people to one another). I think the script could have done this faster and more deftly. But I've never been any good at developing stories myself, so I couldn't tell you how. (By copying Howard Hawks movies, perhaps.) And as you guys are saying, Whedon has seven years to teach himself how.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

since you've already gone there, the rocky and bullwinkle library dodge does emerge at some point, but it's an afterthought (a joke about the slightly silly plot conventions they're living in)

i think the characters do start off quite schematic -- and i've actually always argued that it's a help that SMG is quite a wooden actress -- bcz a lot of the emotional rub is within and against imposed roles (normal or supernatural), and a very smart way of signalling this is for the characters to be moodily aware of the genre conventions they seem to be unable not to mimic

(not for a while yet, but they start to call themselves the scoobies, after the gang of kids in scoobydoo who every week unmask another disgrunted employer pretending to be a ghost at a haunted funfair: "are we in a play?" is a classic absurdist device for looking at free will versus destiny

(i assume whedon gets it from comics rather than ionesco: the tension between the artist-author and character in comics and cartoons has -- for some format-related reason -- long been more overtly meta-conflicted than in other art-forms)

[koganbot]

The library