Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Storytelling Engines: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (or "Can’t Stop The Changes")

So, now that we’ve discussed Batman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Superman, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Man-Thing, the Flash, the Martian Manhunter, the Legion of Super-Heroes, Captain Marvel (both of them), Thor, Captain America, and Daredevil, let’s see what’s on TV, shall we?

Of course, ’Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ isn’t on TV anymore, except in reruns. It started out as a movie, then became a TV series (with ancillary books and comics), and now continues on exclusively as a comic book. Why? Why not keep going with the TV show indefinitely? The answer to that question provides a valuable insight into why it is that even the best of TV series don’t last as long as a comic or book series. It’s all down to the storytelling engine...and those pesky, fickle beasts known as actors.

’Buffy’, of course, has one of the all-time great high concept storytelling engines. Sunnydale High is sitting, quite literally, on the mouth of Hell, and all sorts of demons, vampires, and long-leggedy beasties crawl out every week to menace the student body...opposed only by Buffy Summers, who wants to be popular and academically successful, but who has this side job that keeps getting in the way, and her loyal band of friends. Xander and Willow fill the roles of kid sidekicks, providing valuable sources of exposition and convenient sources of peril for Buffy to rescue, and Giles works well both as her mentor, and as a further source of exposition. The series also rounds out with Angel as a love interest/secondary hero, Cordelia as comic relief, and a wide range of good tertiary supporting characters. Heck, it’s even got a good rogue’s gallery. The Mayor, for example, is an absolutely brilliant villain.

"High school is hell." It’s an idea that sells itself. Nobody was ever so popular that the traumas of high school don’t have a little hold on their soul, and everyone has some sort of horror story about their teenage years. And all they need to do is ramp that horror story up with a little supernatural horror, and voila! Instant Buffy story, just add vampires.

And if this was where they stayed, it would be a perfect storytelling engine. Indeed, the Buffy comics released by Dark Horse tended to do exactly that. With the exception of a few stories written to fill obvious continuity gaps (how did Giles become Buffy’s Watcher, how did the move to Sunnydale go, et cetera), most of the Dark Horse comic series tended to be set during Season Three, the period where the storytelling engine was most stable. Even the proposed animated series was going to be set during the group’s high school era. So why didn’t they just keep them in high school?

Because actors, unlike pen-and-ink drawings, have an annoying tendency to age. Sarah Michelle Gellar was already playing a character four years younger than her; trying to stretch her high school years out over seven seasons simply wasn’t an option. So, three years into the series, Buffy and the gang graduate...and things are never quite the same after that. Which isn’t unusual for a series set around a high school environment; high school works because it’s universal, but we all go on to do different things after graduation. ’Dawson’s Creek’ never recovered from having its characters graduate, nor did ’Beverly Hills 90210’...could Buffy break that curse?

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