Buffy The Vampire Slayer

W e h a v e m e t t h e e n e m y , a n d s h e i s u s .

The new fan book "Ally McBeal: The Totally Unauthorized Guide" is such a silly compendium — and purposefully so — that I’m above making fun of it. I mean, you thought the show was saccharine? But for all its cute glossaries and sections imagining the contents of gamin Ally McBeal’s refrigerator (mineral water, half a lime), author Kathy Mitchell nails down one unshakable truth: "If Ally’s whom we’ve elected our latest TV sweetheart, she’s the one we deserve in these uncertain times." Damn right. Don’t we always elect the one we deserve? When we complain about her flightiness, her solipsism, her pettiness, her jealousies, her insecurities, her dearth of ambition, we complain about ourselves. Ally McBeal is America: a malnourished, nostalgic, hair-brained klutz who can’t keep her balance, let alone an important thought in her pretty little head.

One of the downsides of the new fall television schedule is "Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s" move from Monday to Tuesday. Because I’ll miss the compare-and-contrast channel flipping between that and "Ally McBeal." "Buffy," which happens to be my favorite TV show, bears cosmetic similarities to "Ally": Both programs are dramatic comedies starring smart-alecky blond female protagonists with less-than-respectful first names. Since Ally (Calista Flockhart) practices law in Boston and Buffy kills demons in Southern California, both story lines revolve around work and the workplace. But if Ally McBeal is who we are as a culture, the reason Buffy Summers is so exciting, so entertaining, is that Buffy is who we as a nation used to be.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is all good-vs.-evil, heroes-and-villains, American Century stuff. It’s basically a Western in which the town of Sunnydale stands in for a Monument Valley where the righteous sling guns at the wicked. Buffy, as played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, is John Wayne in a tank top. (And who could watch the scene last year in which Buffy takes a sledgehammer to the bones of the deceased "Master" vampire without thinking about the Duke shooting at the Indian skeleton in "The Searchers"?)

"McBeal," on the other hand, is post-heroes, post-feminism and decidedly post-Cold War. Ally’s enemy, Georgia, the wife of her true love Billy, is just so nice! Just like Clinton and Yeltsin getting together and sharing "you think you’re fucked up!" war stories, Ally and Georgia have to work together and become friends and bottle up their hatred in a morally ambiguous mess of nuance and innuendo. Wouldn’t the stories be more fun if they’d just aim their missiles at each other and shout childish, "evil empire"-style insults across the Bering Strait?

"Ally McBeal" has been a vortex of criticism because it makes people nervous. I can’t watch it without squirming and writhing and — last year at least — hoping the "Buffy" commercials were over so I could be reassured by watching the undead get knifed into a smoke puff. Ally, like every other figure in current events, is both heroine and antagonist. She’s her own worst enemy — and ours. When Georgia asked Ally why she operates as if her problems were more important than everyone else’s, Ally replied, "Because they’re mine." If Buffy’s best friend Willow asked her that question, Buffy would undoubtedly snap out of her self-absorption and apologize. One wants to applaud the honesty of "McBeal’s" writer, David Kelley, for making his main character utter such a cold, hard — albeit self-centered — fact, because it completely subverts her likability. And with the possible exception of "Seinfeld," TV ratings are won and lost based on viewer’s affinity for characters and the actors who play them. (Mitchell calls Ally "George Costanza in a minidress.")

I can’t watch "Ally McBeal" or the Cable News Network without wanting to punch out my TV. Because whether you watch the lawyer show or "Headline News," the story’s basically the same: My problems are more urgent "because they’re mine." Ally is every narcissistic citizen who lords his or her quibbles over the rest of us: She’s Paula Jones and Ken Starr and Rudy Giuliani and Courtney Love. She’s probably not Sammy Sosa, though given the way she kept confusing "mazeltov" with "mistletoe" she’s certainly Carol Mosely-Braun, who called her state’s favorite son Sammy Sousa.

Ally McBeal isn’t a symptom of the fall of American civilization because of her miniskirts (Gloria Steinem was wearing the same style back when we believed in changing the world); or because she’s a bad role model for girls (she’s no less weird than Lynda Carter’s "Wonder Woman"); or because she carries a torch for her first love (no one minds this quality in Barbara Bush). She’s a bratty anti-hero lost in her private world who’s greatest dream isn’t truth or beauty or justice, it’s to live in a country whose national anthem is the theme song to "Friends"; all she wants is some nice-looking fellow idiot who’ll whisper in her ear, "I’ll be there for you." SALON | Sept. 21, 1998

Sarah Vowell’s American Squirm column runs every other Monday in Salon.