Buffy The Vampire Slayer

The story of Buffy the Vampire Story becoming a television series is an improbable one. Joss Whedon, in fact, was not the instigator. Gail Berman was in the mid-1990s looking for new projects to develop for television. In 1992 the film Buffy the Vampire Slayer had been released, based on Joss Whedon’s original screenplay. Exasperated with changes being made to his script during filming, Whedon eventually left the set and avoided the set during the later stages of filming. He had, in fact, put Buffy behind him and had gone on to a highly remunerative career as script doctor. Berman, however, presciently thought that the movie would provide the basis for an excellent series and approached Whedon about the idea. Although Berman would later be mercilessly castigated for pulling the plug on Firefly when she was head of programming at FOX, the fact is that without her initiative, neither Buffy nor Firefly would ever have been produced.

Berman and Whedon took the idea of Buffy to all of the major networks but were rejected by each one. The fledgling WB network, however, agreed to a pilot, and while they did not place it on their schedule for the fall of 1996, they did order it to series as a mid-season replacement in the winter of 1997. While a number of major TV critics were immediately taken with its clever dialogue and meshing of comedy and drama with fighting vampires and demons (Matt Roush of TV Guide was perhaps the show’s first high profile fan), the ratings through its first season were never strong and renewal was uncertain. The WB finally decided to give the show another chance and during its second season, with greatly improved writing and a larger budget that provided higher production values, the show became a hit.

The TV series picks up with Buffy Summers relocating to a new school in Sunnydale, California, having been kicked out of her former high school in Los Angeles after burning down the high school gym, an event planned in the original screenplay for the movie but eliminated due to budgetary concerns. The series in terms of the actual narrative is therefore not strictly speaking a sequel to the movie, but to the screenplay that Joss wrote that the movie was based on. [Those wishing to see something like what he had in mind in writing the screenplay should see “Buffy: The Origin” in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus: Volume 1, a comic that was “Adapted from Joss Whedon’s original screenplay” by Dan Brereton & Christopher Golden.]

In the film Buffy learned that she was the Chosen One; the formulation receives sharpening in the TV series: “Into every generation a Slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers. She is The Slayer.” The WB actually wanted to lose the movie title and simply call the series The Slayer, something that can be seen in the original previews run on the WB and also in the intro to each episode of Season One and the early episodes of Season Two. The WB, however, was never able to eliminate Buffy from the title.

As Joss Whedon has pointed out, as silly as the name of the show is, it hints at several of the major aspects of the series. “Buffy” is intrinsically comical and leads the viewer to expect humor; “Vampire” indicates that the viewer can anticipate scary and supernatural elements; while “slayer” gestures towards action, with the expectation that the action will feature a female hero.

One of the major differences in the film and series is that in the movie Buffy, though with some help from her love interest Pike, fights more or less on her own; in the series she instantly acquires a group of friends who form a team to aid her in her struggle against the demons and vampires. Willow and Xander, along with Giles, become the core of the Scooby Gang, helping Buffy both as friends and sidekicks, as well as engaging in the ceaseless research that backgrounds all their activity. The normal paradigm of the hero—such as Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name—is of a loner, someone who can neither afford nor desire friends or companions. In Buffy’s team approach to heroism Buffy may be the most powerful (though rivaled in later seasons by Willow’s witchcraft) and the only one who has no choice about struggling against the powers of darkness, but what sets her apart as a hero is the support she receives from friends and family. As the vampire Spike (later himself to be a member of the Scoobies) remarks after his first encounter with Buffy, “A Slayer with family and friends, that sure as hell wasn’t in the brochure.”

The format of Buffy was established in Season One. A Big Bad (in the first season, an extremely ancient vampire known as The Master) is established and then in most episodes the season long arc dealing with Buffy defeating them is gradually developed. There are several standalone episodes, but even in those some portion of the longer arc is developed. The season long arcs are restricted mainly to that season’s Big Bad, but, however, do not necessarily apply to the members of the Scoobies, whose individual stories extend over longer periods of time. Buffy, Willow, or Xander’s story is not precisely articulated in one season bites, while those of The Master, The Mayor, or Glory are.

Joss Whedon is a risk taker, and that fact accounts for some of the most thrilling as well as some of the most disappointment moments in Buffy. The great virtue of taking risks is that when they pay off, you can get some truly extraordinary results. Seasons Two and Five are examples of the risks paying off, with some of the most amazing seasons in the history of TV. The downside of risks is that they don’t always pay off, so that Season Four, with its rather unconvincing season long arc dealing with the Initiative and the Cyborg Adam does not compare favorably with the show’s best seasons, despite a large number of superb standalone episodes.

The impact of Buffy on TV can hardly be overstated. Sometimes the influence is explicit, sometimes less so. The show either initiated certain changes on TV or anticipated a mood that seized a host of other television creators. An example of the former is The Body Count. Because two other essays in this Spotlight on Joss Whedon will take up his willingness to kill his characters, I will not expand on this here except to point out that while previous TV series had occasionally killed off characters, this was always either as a means to let a character out of a contract (such as Denise Crosby in Star Trek: The Next Generation or Jean Stapleton in All in the Family) or involved a minor character on a show (such as Deepthroat or Mr. X on The X-Files). Starting with Jenny Calendar in Season Two, however, Whedon embarked on a killing spree of his own characters unlike anything ever seen before in TV. On previous shows, these characters would have survived somehow, and in fact, the first time one watches “Passion” (2.17) the natural assumption is that Jenny will escape Angelus. After all, recurring characters like hers had for decades escaped death by the narrowest of margins again and again and again. But when Angelus grabs Jenny and unceremoniously breaks her neck, something changed in television: danger became a part of the TV landscape.

A host of action television series since Buffy have racked up Body Counts: Farscape, Alias, Veronica Mars, Lost, The Shield (created by Angel alum Shawn Ryan), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Primeval, Torchwood, Battlestar Galactica, and many, many others. These shows have a sense of tension, suspense, and danger lacking in other series, all thanks to the possibility of the Body Count. On a “safe” series, there is no real tension, because the viewer knows that all the regular characters will return the following week. And this period in television was initiated by Angelus killing Jenny Calendar in Sunnydale High School.

There are many other aspects of Buffy worth singling out. Such as its genre bending, that, is, the way it meshed drama, action, horror, and comedy, often seconds after one another. Buffy is, in fact, credited with being the first “dramedy”, a format followed by a large number of other series, from Gilmore Girls to Six Feet Under to Chuck to The Human Target to Fringe. Or one could detail the importance of Buffy for showing normalized lesbian relationships (Willow and Tara in Seasons Four through Six and Willow and Kennedy in Season Seven). Or one could discuss the role it played in reestablishing the rules for series dealing with high school.

Out of the many important aspects of Buffy, the focus here will be on two: the important of Buffy in establishing female heroes on television and the show’s impact on long narrative on television. ’Buffy’ and the Rise of Female Heroes on Television

As an experiment, count the number of significant female heroes on television prior to 1997, the year Buffy debuted. One assumes that there will be many, but surprise and disappointment will set in pretty quickly. In the 1950s, for instance, there is Gail Davis’s Annie Oakley. After that it gets pretty tough.

In the 1960s there are a string of female agents who partner with John Steed in The Avengers, most famously Mrs. Emma Peel, but after that it gets pretty depressing. The two most powerful female characters of the decade, for instance, were not only not heroic, they were spectacularly submissive to the men to whom they were yoked (telling you something, perhaps, about male fears in the face of increased opportunities for women in the real world): Jeannie in I Dream of Jeannie and Samantha in Bewitched. While Jeannie was a genie capable of doing virtually anything merely by wishing it—making her argubly the most powerful female character in the history of TV—she completely subordinated her powers to serving the whims of her master, who was, of course, male. Samantha was very nearly as powerful as Jeannie, but after confessing her wedding night to her husband Darren that she was a witch, she agrees not to engage in witchcraft any longer, apparently so Darren won’t feel threatened in any way.

In a way the 1970s looks superficially better, but deeper examination reveals an even bleaker situation. Wonder Woman features one of the iconic superheroes, but in this version she is obsessed with making her love interest Steve Trevor look good. When she is heroic, she seems almost apologetic for it, as if it somehow puts Steve in a bad light. Pepper Anderson on Police Woman might seem a candidate for a heroic female, but while she got to wield a gun and subdue bad guys, all too often her duty required her to dress up as a hooker or stripper; the point of the show seemed to be to create as many opportunities as possible for Angie Dickinson to show off her legs. The Bionic Woman was hampered in attempts at heroism by the archaic state of special effects at the time and exceptionally weak writing. The various women on Charlie’s Angels came across more like manikins than super-skilled action heroines.

The one exception to the rather lame run of weak female heroes in the 1970s came in Great Britain with Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen) on Doctor Who. From 1973 to 1976 Sarah Jane served as the companion to the Third (Jon Pertwee) and Fourth (Tom Baker) Doctors, and over thirty years later in 2007 was given her own series, The Sarah Jane Adventures. But Sarah Jane was a rare exception in a decade where heroic roles for women were few and far between.

Female heroes began to be found in film in the 1980s, in particular Ripley in the Alien movies, but television continued to provide few female heroes. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) lasted a season on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but was not particularly convincing as the security chief for the Enterprise and certainly captured no one’s imagination. Among the best in a bad decade for female heroes was perhaps Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist) in Remington Steele. Maddie on Moonlighting ran a detective agency, but her real function on the show was as David’s (Bruce Willis) romantic foil. But emblematic for the decade was the series Hunter and McCall, which quickly saw the female half of the detective team, McCall (Stephanie Kramer), made second fiddle to the tough male half, so that the title of the show was shortened simply to Hunter.

Mention should be made of two female characters in the decade did indicate that perhaps there was a desire for a change: Cagney and Lacey. While not heroic in a traditional sense, they were two increasingly rare female characters who were characterized by their extreme professionalism as police detectives. Most importantly, neither was subservient to men nor defined by their sexuality. While the studio and network did their utmost not to support the show despite significant critical acclaim, the popularity with fans indicated that there was a hunger for strong, independent women on television (Susan Faludi in Backlash chronicles in detail the show’s many critical and popular successes on the one hand, and the attempts by the studio and network to shut down a series that gave out a message with which they were not in agreement).

Strictly speaking, the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were not devoid of strong women. The Waltons had several strong women and a host of comedies and family dramas featured women who were the backbone of families. There were also spunky girls in a number of series, as early as Penny in Sky King (1952-1959). But true female heroes (“heroine” is avoided here, because the word generally denotes a female who is in need of a male hero, not a woman who is herself in any way heroic) were rare. We find Mary Richards and Grandma Walton and Maude and similar strong women, but not female counterparts of the almost endless string of male heroes found in any decade on television. The message was clear: it was the job of men to save the world; it was the job of women to hold the family together.

In the nineties everything changed. The first hint came on The X-Files where Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) represented a new kind of female character. While attractive, her looks was not a major factor in her character; she was instead portrayed as an extraordinarily gifted FBI agent, intellectually brilliant with considerable courage and exceptional medical expertise. While not quite an action hero, Dana was as competent an FBI agent as her male partner Fox Mulder, and even slightly more likely than Mulder to shoot her gun (though neither was particular trigger happy over the course of the series). She was also the rational, sceptical half of the team, while he was the credible, more emotional half, between them countering many traditional gender stereotypes.

Dana Scully was the first of three pivotal female heroes in the decade, the third being Buffy. The second was the title character on Xena: Warrior Princess. Traveling with her companion Gabrielle (Ren e O’Connor), the show was pure camp, a wonderfully absurd romp through the ancient world, essentially a female buddy show with mythical monsters and opponents tossed in. Although Gabrielle was initially little more of a poet and storyteller, she eventually became nearly as heroic as Xena herself. Xena gave TV viewers the first female hero in the epic mode. In fact, while Xena was a spinoff of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena resonated more strongly with a majority of viewers than did Hercules.

The appearance of Dana Scully and Xena (along with Gabrielle) was a sign that things on TV might well be changing. The precise importance of Scully and Xena can be debated and perhaps no clear conclusion can be drawn. But it is difficult to believe that TV would have been permanently safe for female heroes after Dana Scully, while Xena was too remote, too mythic, and too larger-than-life to provide a template for additional female heroes. And indeed, there are not really any female heroes to come after Xena who really resemble her.

With Buffy everything changed. She was easily as heroic as Xena or Dana, yet provided a more viable model for further female heroes. While prettier than your average human being, Buffy’s problems were a lot more like an average human being than Xena’s. Buffy was someone who like us who just happened to have some powers that we did not, while Xena was someone with powers who only gradually was humanized in her series.

The appearance of Buffy was a tipping point in the history of heroic women on TV. In the survey attempted above, the number of major female heroes prior to Buffy can be counted on the fingers of two hands, with perhaps several fingers left unused. Take a quick inventory of female heroes after Buffy and you get Aeryn Sun (Farscape), Max Guevera (Dark Angel), Sydney Bristow (Alias), Veronica Mars (Veronica Mars), Kara “Starbuck” Thrace and Sharon Agathon from Battlestar Galactica, Sarah Connor and Cameron on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Olivia Dunham on Fringe, and several others. As well, an enormous number of strong, confident women appeared on various series, like Kate Austen on Lost or Laura Roslin on Battlestar Galactica.

While Xena and Dana Scully indicated that TV viewers were both willing and anxious for heroic women, it was post-Buffy that the entire culture of TV seemed to have changed. It is today inconceivable that a team of heroic individuals would be all male. That this is the case is largely, though not entirely, due to Buffy. Buffy’s Impact on TV Narrative, or, The End of Narrative Waffling

Buffy did not create long narrative on TV, but it did consolidate certain tendencies in TV narrative that had been emerging over the previous few decades. To understand the impact that Buffy had on narrative, it is necessary to provide a brief history of what went on before.

Beginning with Hill Street Blues, a number of series had expanded what was possible with television narrative. Prior to Hill Street, virtually all prime time television series were committed to the episodic format, which meant that each week featured an almost completely self-contained story. (The major exception was the nighttime soap opera, such as Peyton Place in the 1960s and Dallas in the 1970s, as well as Soap, a comedic parody of the soaps. More about soaps in a second)

The episodic format had a number of consequences. One was that none of the events of one episode would carry over to the next. Even if a character were shot, tortured, or otherwise physically—or emotionally—traumatized, the next episode would wipe the slate clean. No actions, in other words, had long-term consequences for any of the characters. This was to some degree true even of the soap operas. Although there was narrative memory from one episode to the next, the character development was superficial—cartoonish even—and contained not a little self-parody. The soap opera narrative has many problems—not least the sense that it isn’t important that something significant happen but merely that somethinghappen—and contains at its heart something of pure camp. Soap opera narratives almost make fun of themselves. But most significantly, the narrative arcs on soaps are inherently inconsequential. They are supreme examples of narrative waffling, arcs moving here and there, but never anywhere definite. One character can rape a woman on one episode, and then marry her on a later one (it wasn’t male violence against women! It was just his way of saying he cared – this story line famously happened on General Hospital.

Another consequence of the episodic format was that the order of the episodes was arbitrary. If you watch Gunsmoke or The Wild, Wild West or To Catch a Thief or Star Trek or any series prior to 1981, you can jumble the order of the episodes with no real consequence. One may be able to date the approximate order of an episode by the loss or addition of a cast member, but there is no ongoing narrative that makes any difference. In The Fugitive, it is really only the first and last episodes that are different from any of the others.

Hill Street Blues hit television like something of a bombshell, and if it makes for tough viewing today (it is not merely that the show has not aged well but that so many other shows advanced the changes in narrative that it commenced), the new possibilities that it created for American TV narrative cannot be overstressed. Hill Street Blues broke through the single-episode narrative barrier, introducing as well a multiple story arc format. Unlike prior shows, Hill Street Blues had to be seen in the correct order to be understood. And while the network ordered the producers to allow no arc to extend longer than six weeks and to resolve at least one arc each week, the show nonetheless revolutionized what was possible on American TV in telling a story.

Almost immediately other series like China Beach, St. Elsewhere, and L.A. Law continued the narrative revolution that Hill Street Blues began. But while these series broke down earlier narrative limitations, they remained constructed around relatively short-term narratives. Like the soaps, they all engaged in a degree of narrative waffling. An arc might last more than few episodes, but it was unlikely to last more than that, and rarely would a show be built around a dominant narrative. The stories in all of the shows of the 1980s were rather directionless, at least viewed in the long run (though there are some minor exceptions in St. Elsewhere). A series—at least in the 1980s—would never become a story containing a beginning, middle, and end. Serial television had acquired a timeline and memory and had escaped the limitations of the one-hour episode, but it still did not attempt ambitious long-term narratives. The standard format was serial waffling. This would change in 1990 with one of the most brilliant failures in the history of television.

Twin Peaks is heartbreaking to watch because while it promised so much and changed television so profoundly, it nonetheless failed on its own terms. Even today watching the episodes that comprise Season One of Twin Peaks can generate awe at its elegance and beauty and surreal twists. Even if Season Two quickly degenerated into an incoherent gobbledygook that created something akin to nausea, one can’t overemphasize the importance of the show’s absolutely stunning beginning. Leaving aside the pacing and timing that made the earlier episodes so gorgeous, the series was arguably the first ongoing series to be structured around a single very long narrative. (This stating this, the numerous BBC miniseries are being set aside as special cases. There is no evidence that American television creators looked at these series for inspiration, which in fact is rather unfortunate, because it meant that some of the finest television of earlier decades—the series of, for instance, Dennis Potter—were neglected.) “Who killed Laura Palmer and why?” presented itself as a question to be answered over the long run. Sadly, the “long run” turned out to be shockingly short, due to a number of errors the producers and writers made over the course of the second season, piling up mystery after mystery while resolving few of them, constructing a clumsy narrative that could not be sustained, and becoming sillier and sillier. Nonetheless, Twin Peaks gave both viewers and those within the television industry a vision of the possibilities of TV narrative.

Two other series merit acknowledgment at this point, both debuting in 1993. The X-Files was the first network television series that was not a soap opera to extend a narrative over the course of several seasons. This acknowledgment has to come with several qualifiers. First, the narrative was not clearly thought out ahead of time. The story of an alien colonization program that the governments of the world were intent upon covering up was, as creator Chris Carter acknowledged, made up as they went along. While the main arc would extend well over six seasons and a feature film, it was fraught with inconsistencies and self-corrections. How many different answers were we given to questions like “Who was Mulder’s father?” and “What happened to Mulder’s sister?” We were given explanations, only to have later, contradictory answers provided.

Second, the show’s narratives focused on plot, not people. While Mulder and Scully were two brilliant characters, the show was less about them than the conspiracy that they unearthed. Some character development took place despite this, but ultimately the show was not particularly about the lives of Mulder and Scully. It was about the adventures two people had, not about two people who just happened to have adventures.

Finally, the best of The X-Files probably did not lie in the so-called Mythology episodes, but in the standalone episodes. For many, the show was at its best at moments like “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” or “Home” or “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” a brilliant standalone episode that mocked the show’s own mythology.

The other show to mention—though I am personally sceptical that it has had much or any influence on subsequent TV narrative—is J. Michael Strycyznski’s Babylon 5. The show’s most ardent defenders—and while not a large group, they are passionate—argue that it was the series that created very long narrative on TV. Stracyznski outlined the entire series beforehand, though he was unable to carry out the five-year arc due to network interference; told the show was going to be cancelled at the mid-point of Season Four, he had to squeeze a season and a half worth of narrative into a few episodes, and the strain does show. But on top of the havoc created by the network’s first promising to cancel and then renewing the series, there is not much evidence that it influenced subsequent TV creators. (Note: I must confess that like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, I believe Babylon 5 to be a very bad show, so perhaps my comments have to be taken with a grain of salt.)

What Buffy did was jettison narrative waffling. Unlike Hill Street Blues, Buffy had a story to tell. Unlike Twin Peaks and The X-Files, it had a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and an end. Unfortunately, the stories had to be framed in one season hunks (unlike many TV producers, Whedon has always feared possible cancellation and has planned his shows defensively; the one time that this didn’t help him was withFirefly, when cancellation meant shutting down the production before he was able to provide narrative closure as on Angel and Dollhouse so that they were not as rich as some shows that came afterwards, like Battlestar Galactica.

Did Buffy change TV narrative? This is impossible to answer with precision. There is no question that many TV creators have looked at Joss Whedon’s shows in general and Buffy in particular as a guide to how to do long narrative on TV. Alan Ball has frequently spoke of Buffy with approval and admiration, as has many other producers. The truth is probably that while Buffy directly inspired some creators, it was at the vanguard of a particular change that was beginning to overtake writer-producers on television in the late 1990s.

But clearly Buffy had a concrete impact. In an Entertainment Weekly interview in the spring of 2005, showrunner Damon Lindelhof of Lost stated that he had wanted his writers to understand the correct way to frame long term narrative. To that end he and his writers watched together episodes from Twin Peaks and The X-Files as cautionary tales of how not to write long narrative. He then had them watch another show to see how to correctly balance character development and plot in a long narrative: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.