Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)

It’s true that the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was just a warm up for bigger things to come, and the show did become frustratingly uneven towards the end. But when it was at the top of its game it managed to capture lightning in bottle and proved itself as one of television’s most unlikely masterpieces. Today serialized dramas are commonplace, but when Buffy debuted back in 1997 television shows were still usually designed to be watched on an episode by episode basis. Creator/geek messiah Joss Whedon wasn’t the first person to explore television’s potential to tell long-form stories (Hill Street Blues had tried it as early as the eighties), but he helped promote the idea that a lowly TV show could offer the sort of epic plotting and gradual character development that even the best movies can’t match.

Just as importantly, Whedon used his time at Buffy to craft a number of episodes with a level of individuality difficult to achieve when you have to turn out 22 hours of entertainment a year. The show reached the peak of its emotional resonance in “Innocence,” when Buffy lost her virginity only to realize that sex transformed her boyfriend into a sadistic monster –- a brutally direct metaphor for our own fears of how we’ll be treated on the morning after. “Hush”, a nearly silent episode that resembled a nightmarish fairy tale, saw Buffy and her friends robbed of their voices by a pack of heart-stealing demons. The characters confessed their innermost feelings via song in the musical “Once More with Feeling”, and Buffy was forced to deal with the sudden horror of finding her mother dead from a brain aneurysm in “The Body”, an introspective, largely monster-free episode. Its individual pieces and storylines are impressive enough, but taken together Buffy the Vampire Slayer is among the greatest coming-of-age stories ever made.

The collector’s set puts all seven seasons on DVD together in one box and even adds an extra disc of bonus content not available anywhere else (frustrating suckers like myself who purchased all of them when they were first released). The extras are too numerous to list here, but among the best are the audio commentary for “Wild at Heart”, which features Whedon, writer Marti Noxon and actor Seth Green making fun of themselves and catching up; a fluff piece on the previous jobs of the cast and crew called “Buffy Goes to Work”; and a making-of-documentary on the musical that’s long enough to be an episode by itself. Taken together, seven years of Buffy and a multitude of extras in one package make this a must have for any serious DVD collection.

—Jack Rodgers

If Buffy was about the trial of getting to adulthood, battling through the hell that is adolescence and its attendant horrors (which, in the Buffyverse, are manifest as actual vampires and demons), Angel was about the hell of adulthood. Its hero, and often its antihero, was a vampire cursed with a soul, neither man nor beast, yet profoundly both, who loved Buffy so much he had to leave her. It’s all very romantic stuff, especially when you throw in the exquisite twist that, should he ever experience even a moment of true happiness, he would lose his soul and revert back to his damned, homicidal state. (Something that happens to great dramatic effect every once in a while...)

As Angel sets about trying to atone for his sins, he teams up with a variety of characters, all of whom have pasts they are trying to overcome. There’s Cordelia, the ex-über-bitch, Doyle, the ne’er do well half-demon, Wesley, who could never do enough to impress his parents, Lorne, a show tune spouting ambiguously gay green demon from a hell dimension, and Gunn, who couldn’t save his own sister from an early death. Together they run what amounts to a paranormal detective agency, helping the helpless. As with everything in the Buffyverse, magic, mystical elements, ghosts, kung-fu violence, and hugely witty banter abound.

Super cool, right? No? Incredibly geeky and kinda sad? Whatever –- this is exactly what TV on DVD is all about. These are eminently re-watchable shows, each of them a self-contained mini-film but, taken as a whole, season by season, comprising a steadily-developing series of arcs, each built around a particular theme. And, as with all things created by Joss Whedon (of Buffy and Firefly fame), faithful viewers are rewarded for their pleasure and interest. It all adds up, always, and because of that, getting to know the characters and falling under the whammy of the unfolding narrative is actually worthwhile. In this meticulously-constructed fantasy world, everything is realistic, and everything pays off. It’s a DVD collection that you’ll actually not be wasting your time watching more than once.

—Stuart Henderson