Buffy The Vampire Slayer

This was the decade in which television became art. So argues Emily Nussbuam in a recent New York Magazine essay, “When TV Became Art”. She certainly makes a strong case that 2000-2009 was a pivotal age for TV and I strongly recommend her essay to anyone interested in the development of television over the past decade. I agree that this was, all in all, the finest decade for great television. Others have argued that TV had arisen as an art form in earlier decades, some (though in dwindling numbers) arguing for the fifties, based on the series that presented staged plays for a television audience, including such original masterpieces as “Twelve Angry Men”, written by Reginald Rose for Studio One, and “Requiem for a Heavyweight”, written by Rod Serling for Playhouse 90. Later, Robert J. Thompson, in his widely cited Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER, argued for the eighties as the crucial period. But Nussbaum has numbers on her side; it is difficult to argue against the sheer quantity of very fine shows that emerged in the past ten years. The number of truly great series from the past ten years is so substantial that it might surpass the number of great shows from all previous decades combined.

Nonetheless, I want to take issue with Nussbaum. I think that chopping the overall picture up into decade-sized blocks obscures the reality. I believe that one can point at a precise point where TV became art, and that point was the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. No one questions the enormous influence that Joss Whedon’s quirky series exerted on other shows, but I do not believe that many people realize the degree to which it altered the TV landscape. TV was not art before Buffy, but it was afterwards. In contrast, the show that Nussbaum promotes as the apex of TV as Art, The Wire, has not actually played a crucial role in that development. The Wire is a beneficiary of the birth of TV as art, a promulgator of that development, not its cause. There is no question it is a truly great show, but it really did nothing to change TV. Television had already changed, and we largely have Buffy to thank for that. To be fair, Nussbaum does mention Buffy and Joss Whedon frequently in her essay, obviously crediting both the show and the creator for much of the best that the decade had to offer, but she seems to imply that TV as art was a work in progress as the decade began and it most definitely was not.

Although many realize just how revolutionary Buffy was as a series and the impact that it made on the medium (many TV creators site it as their favorite show while others acknowledge its direct influence), not everyone is aware of how groundbreaking the series was or of the number of concrete changes it wrought on television. It was not merely a great TV series in its own right, it helped redefine what TV could do. Let me enumerate some of the changes made, all of them rather substantial.

One of the most important changes that Buffy brought about was a new understanding of long story arcs on TV. A very brief history of narrative on television is in order to provide a context for my point. For most of the history of television, the format of series was episodic. On almost all shows (excepting soap operas), no matter what happened on one episode of a series, the next week would witness a complete reset. If James West was beaten to a pulp or even shot on The Wild, Wild West, the next week he would be as fine as ever. No matter what happens on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Dick and Laura would never refer to it again. As a result, each episode was self-contained and ignored any kind of narrative order. Watch the episodes of It Takes a Thief in any order that you wish; juxtapose an episode from season four and then from season two and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. This began to change with Hill Street Blues and the shows that Robert J. Thompson applauded: St. Elsewhere, China Beach, L. A. Law, and thirtysomething. For the first time on primetime television, stories got messy and spilled over from one episode to another. A character would suffer trauma and recall it the next several episodes. It suddenly mattered in which order the episodes where shown and some story arcs extended over many episodes. Nonetheless, the narratives were largely kept short (on Hill Street Blues there was a network requirement that at least one of the several story arcs had to be resolved each week and none could extend beyond six episodes). While this shift from episodic to serial format represented an enormous change, the lack of any genuine long-term direction limited the ultimate depth of the shows, though a series like St. Elsewhere could manage some remarkable things within the limitations. Everything changed with Twin Peaks, a flawed masterpiece that revolutionized TV by establishing a central and dominant story arc, instead of a collection of lesser ones. Hill Street Blues told stories, while Twin Peaks more or less told a story. Granted, the series imploded in its second season with one new mysterious twist after another getting introduced without corresponding resolutions, but nonetheless it established a new paradigm. The X-Files quickly took up the idea of telling an overarching story over the course of several seasons with its alien colonization arc, but it was hurt by its making-it-up-on-the-fly approach. Chris Carter didn’t really have a story to tell; he simply knew that he wanted to tell some story with no quick or easy resolution. Babylon 5 also tried to tell a story over several seasons, but on the one hand network interference messed up the purity of J. Michael Stracyznski’s vision while on the other it had no discernible influence on other TV series, making it a fascinating dead end.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed TV narrative. Unlike the soaps and the Hill Street Blues-type series, it established, beginning with the extraordinary second season, an approach in which a season consisted of a long story arc that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Always leery of cancellation, Whedon structured his arcs in season-long segments, though he also began setting up major events seasons ahead of time. Both Buffy’s death and the arrival of her sister Dawn–events of season five–were both hinted at in season three, and Willow’s experimentation with magic that began in earnest in season three was clearly going to lead to bad things at some point, though this didn’t happen until the end of Season Six. Buffy made it possible for television to tell a story, as opposed to a bunch of stories, a story that came to a conclusion, as opposed to stories with no end. It still had plenty of standalone episodes, but even in the middle of those, small scenes would move the central arc forward, a technique employed by a host of shows today, from Fringe to Chuck to Dexter. Damon Lindelhof, during the first season of Lost, had his writing team watch Buffy a model of how he wanted to the central narrative of the show to proceed. It is fascinating that a huge number of TV creators and producers have cited Buffy as either a major influence or actually worked under Whedon on one of his shows.

But this was hardly the only change that the show brought about on television. Buffy reinvented what television could do with genre, breaking down the barriers that separated one form another, blending them all together, and then employing the elements of each as needed. The series was a high school drama, a comedy, a horror/fantasy show, and, in one memorable episode, a musical, all at once. I can’t think of a series before Buffy that would routinely have you laughing your guts out one minute, on the edge of your seat the next, and emotionally devastated soon after within the confines of a ten-minute segment. This fluidity that Buffy introduced has allowed television a degree of flexibility not found on shows of the past.

Buffy’s influence went further. Without any question, Buffy revolutionized the role of women on television, more even than Mary Tyler Moore or Cagney and Lacey or Murphy Brown or Ally McBeal. If you look at female heroes (as opposed to hapless heroines–I have always thought that the definition of heroine should be “endangered female in need of rescue by male hero”) in the history of TV, you will be astonished at how few there are prior to the nineties. You have Annie Oakley in the fifties and Emma Peel on The Avengers in the sixties, and to a degree Wonder Woman (who spent a great deal of her time worrying about impressing her boss Col. Steve Trevor) and The Bionic Woman (the weaker spin off to The Six Million Dollar Man). This all changed in the nineties, first with Dana Scully on The X-Files and then with Xena. But the former, as competent as she was as an FBI professional, was not sufficiently iconic to change TV, while the latter, sufficiently iconic, was too cartoonish to inspire future female heroes. Buffy was the turning point. You can write the history of female heroes on TV as Before Buffy and After Buffy. It is not a coincidence that most of the female heroes on TV arose in the wake of the little blonde vampire slayer. Look at the roster: Aeryn Sun (Farscape), Max (Dark Angel), Sydney Bristow (Alias), Kate Austin (Lost), Kara “Starbuck” Thrace (along with a plethora of other strong women on Battlestar Galactica), Olivia Dunham (Fringe), Sarah Connor and Cameron (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles), Veronica Mars, and an almost uncountable number of lesser characters. Buffy made TV safe for strong women. This isn’t art, but it is the content of art. Buffy guaranteed that TV as art would make a place for heroic women.

The series also brought character development to a new level. Typically on most previous series, characters never really changed, never realistically retained memories of traumas that they had suffered, never truly evolved. On Buffy (and carrying over to its spin-off Angel), characters changed radically. Take any character on Buffy and think about how they changed and grew over the course of the show, and then try the same experiment on almost any other show before (or after). Consider Cordelia Chase. On Buffy she starts off as the most superficial person imaginable, a one-dimensional character obsessed on social status. Gradually her character deepens and evolves, to the point where on Angel she becomes a genuine hero in her own right.

One could go on to cite several other major influences that Buffy brought to bear on television. The show was one of the key series, along with the earlier My So-Called Life and the later Freaks and Geeks that altered the style and tone of shows dealing with teens. Or consider the way that Buffy–along with shows like The West Wing and The Gilmore Girls–brought TV dialogue to a new level of sophistication. Or, again, take one of the more concrete contributions of Buffy to television: the body count. Shows prior to Buffy had killed off important secondary characters (e.g., Deep Throat and X on The X-Files), but Buffy began the practice of killing off important characters. The episode in which Angelus kills Jenny Calendar, a shocking, visceral scene, not least because a character we had previously loved killed a character who was in the act of seeking redemption, and he had fun doing it. Buffy and its spin off Angel would eventually kill off over a dozen and a half sympathetic recurring characters. And it revolutionized television, as other shows imitated it in killing off characters that in the previous history of television would have been safe, no matter how dire their situation. But after Buffy, characters could die. Shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Veronica Mars, Supernatural, and many others would see the body count mount in each season. And the result was a ratcheting up of danger on TV. Watching a show in 1993, you knew no recurring character was going to die, but by 2002, Buffy had changed that.

I understand Nussbaum’s desire to fit the birth of TV as art into a decade framework, but the truth is that art, like life, is messier than that. TV had become art before 2000 and it was largely thanks to Buffy. What had changed was that TV had become a safe place for artistically satisfying TV. In the end of her article Nussbaum expresses concern that the economics of TV may threaten the future of quality TV. I’m more sanguine. I believe the genie is out of the bottle and that high-quality TV will continue to flourish. I am not, however, convinced that it will be on broadcast TV. Many if not most of the best shows currently on television can be seen on cable networks. It may well be that very soon virtually all quality television series will be on cable with only the rare exception appearing on one of the broadcast networks. And then there is the Internet. Nussbaum cites Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog as a harbinger of things to come, as producers bypass the studio/network system to produce works directly for fans. It would be appropriate if the person who brought us Buffy and set the scene for the explosion of great television in the past decade had already laid a pattern for its expansion onto the Internet. Interestingly, perhaps the most successful ongoing internet series is The Guild, created and written by, as well as starring, Felicia Day, who has deep roots in the Whedonverse, having appeared in Buffy, guest starred in “Epitaph One”, the most celebrated episode of Whedon’s flawed masterpiece Dollhouse, and played Dr. Horrible’s love interest.

TV has become art, but that was achieved well before the first episode of The Wire and even before the advent of this decade. TV became art when what should have been the antithesis of art, a teen drama about a cheerleader who against her wishes was forced to become a vampire slayer, redefined what could be done in the context of popular television.