Buffy The Vampire Slayer

A television series to rival Shakespeare? Why not, asks Thornton McCamish, who believes programs at their best should be considered art.

Late one winter Tuesday night I was slumped in front of the tube with my baby son watching The West Wing. The president’s grumpy speechwriter, Toby, was trying to draft the president’s inauguration speech and it wasn’t going well. Miserable, frustrated, he scrunches up another page of false starts and throws it away, missing the bin. He always misses the bin.

The scene is just a quiet aside in an otherwise busy storyline, but we were gripped. We care about Toby. We know about his gummed-up emotions; we’ve seen his cynicism and hopefulness trying to get the better of one another for a hundred episodes.

I was suddenly struck by what an extraordinary work of narrative art The West Wing is. All of the show’s characters are this conflicted and interesting. The storylines are compelling; the dialogue is dense and sharp.

Inside the TV industry Aaron Sorkin, the show’s creator-producer, is considered a genius. Why is it that for most of us outside it he is just some guy who writes TV?

Richard Schiff, the actor who plays Toby on The West Wing , once compared the meter and "music" of Sorkin’s teleplays with Shakespeare, which might be pushing it a bit. But he is right about this: "The thing about West Wing is, it’s incredibly sophisticated storytelling. A lot of times, Aaron doesn’t even know how layered his material is, because when you point something out, he’ll go, ’Oh wow, I didn’t even think of that.’ It’s really amazing craftsmanship."

We are living in a golden age of storytelling and we don’t realise it because most of the greatest stories are being told on television. The West Wing isn’t the only show of this quality around. During the ad breaks we flicked over to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which, with The Sopranos , is probably the most celebrated TV series of the past decade.

My baby and I were just passing time between wrestles with the milk bottle, yet here were two brilliant shows playing in one cobwebby corner of the week’s TV schedule. In terms of their ability to move and disturb us, to show us the tragi-comic business of living, these shows compare with our best novels, plays and films. And somehow we have not really noticed.

This is not a view you hear much. "Greatness is not a category that has traditionally been used in thinking about television programming," observes Alan McKee in his book, Australian Television: A Genealogy of Great Moments . "Other media (books, painting, even film) have established commonsensical procedures for deciding on the greatness of individual texts - the concepts of canon and of cultural heritage - but television has rarely been thought of in this way."

He’s right. People pride themselves on being well-read, but not "well-watched". Film connoisseurs are cineastes. TV lovers are addicts.

Why won’t we even debate TV series as art? Partly it’s the company they keep. A lot of TV is very bad, as I was reminded when West Wing and Buffy went off air and I was left face to face with Temptation Island . I thought I was hallucinating. Being stuck in front of TV this bad can feel, as Clive James once put it, like "mental suicide".

But the main reason these shows don’t qualify as enduring artworks is that TV doesn’t fit our idea of how great art is made. It seems instinctively wrong that art could be produced in precise timeslots, crunched out at high speed, written by 10 different people and gussied up with effects and slick editing.

When we think of creative genius, we still tend to fall back on the Romantic image of the artist. Artists are supposed to be outsiders, a bit odd-ball, preferably poor, labouring in a leaky garret with only their demons for company.

TV is not like this. For a sense of just how unartistic TV production is, read Conversations with My Agent, Rob Long’s hilarious account of his scriptwriting career in Los Angeles. When his co-writing gig on Cheers ends, Long finds himself in a world of long, bitter lunches, paranoia and toadying yes-men who are really saying no. "The dirty little secret of the entertainment industry," he writes, "is that everyone in it is a salesman."

TV is, after all, a business. Right now, at the start of the fall (autumn) season on US television, some 25 new dramas and sitcoms are trying to elbow into the evenings of America’s lounge rooms. Many sound trite and overfamiliar; most are doomed to early cancellation. How can the ones that make it in such a crass business be anything but craven, knee-licking entertainment?

Well, partly because TV is a business and the cash flow pays for a lot of resources; like lots of well-paid writers. Forget about the lonely poet in her garret. Most TV series are produced by staffs of crack writers working closely together on stories and rewrites.

This is especially the case in sitcoms. Every week, the nine writers on Will & Grace break into two groups to nut out the two story threads that will be pleated together into one episode. On Roseanne , writer turnover was notorious. Hacks were discarded like the star’s ciggie butts after only a few stressful weeks of work.

On drama series, too, scripts are submitted to intense workshopping. On Buffy, stories were worked out by the writing group, then one or two people wrote up a draft. But of that draft, says Marti Noxon, a supervising producer, "only about 70 per cent" remained after comic lines had been pitched in by the writing room and the whole thing had been scoured for flaws by Joss Whedon, Buffy’s head honcho. Few novelists or playwrights would tolerate that kind of interference.

It may look more like a frenzied version of Santa’s workshop than a noble garret, but it can really work. At a time when literary fiction is becoming increasingly obsessed with voice and style, some TV is pushing storytelling to a high art.

"The best writing, consistently, week to week, seems to be on television," says Rob Osborn, a writer on The West Wing. "You can isolate a half-a-dozen great shows where, on a weekly basis, they’re turning out better dialogue and character arcs than (film) features that have been in development for two years."

Like, say, The Sopranos, which The New York Times described as "episode by episode as good or better than any Hollywood movie to be released in ages".

The essence of writing TV series, the authors of Successful Television Writing tell us, is understanding a central contradiction: "It has to be the same show each week and yet, at the same time, it has to be new, fresh and different."

The best TV takes this dictum as far as it can go, twisting the series formula into new idioms of storytelling, as in the Buffy episodes "Hush" and "Once More with Feeling". The first plays out mostly in silence after the characters’ voices are stolen; the second, told entirely in song, is a kind of high-school Sondheim, with cheesy gags and arias sung - movingly - by arch demons.

Great TV shows are not cramped by their soapy, episodic form; they revel in it. For one thing, the industrial speed at which series are produced means they can reflect modern life back at us through a mirror of characters and situations we already know. The West Wing episode "Isaac and Ishmael", written in response to September 11, was aired just three weeks after the terrorist attacks.

More importantly, the ongoing nature of a TV series allows for slow-burning ideas and characters and themes to emerge over time. It takes time to build a milieu as richly complex as the "Buffyverse". But the results can be profound.

When Buffy is brought back to life by her posse of pals at the beginning of her last series, she is cold and remote. Not because she has recently been dead, but because she has glimpsed the afterlife and it looked good. Part of her hates her friends for bringing her back, back to them and their difficult world of evil and pyjama parties.

She can’t tell them how she feels. But we know. Her unbearable sadness is deepened for us by the accumulated weight of the relationships that have evolved over a hundred episodes.

Does it matter anyway if TV fiction is ignored by history? For the people who really savour them, TV series are not about greatness. They’re about comfort, habit, diversion. It’s entertainment. Fans don’t need to be told what is good, because they already know what they like.

It matters because our dismissive attitude to quality TV reflects a wider pessimism about our culture. TV is the dominant storytelling medium of our age. Ignoring its achievements means signing on to the widespread view that modern art - everything from literature to drama, visual art, architecture - is somehow in entropic decline, getting thinner, more tricky, more PR-driven.

The trouble with TV is that it brings together two things widely suspected of causing this decline: technology and mass audiences.

There is a weird prejudice about the impact of technology across all areas of creativity. Ten years ago I sat with my tutor in her small office listening to her sigh over a draft of my master’s thesis. My problem, she said, was the same problem all students of my generation had: the computer. Word processors had ruined students’ ability to think in straight, logical lines, she said. When you have only a typewriter and a bottle of white-out, you tend to think more carefully about the next sentence.

I remembered this during a visit to London later that year. Of all the marvels contained within the British Museum, the one that astonished me most was the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, a small notebook in a drop-lit glass case, opened at two pages of neat, sloping cursive. There were, I noted incredulously, just one or two crossings-out per page, like discreet burps.

Two things struck me. The first was the alarmingly wide gap in achievement separating my thesis and Jane Eyre .

The other was more heretical. Maybe Jane Eyre would have been even better if Charlotte Bronte hadn’t been stuck with pen and ink. With a word processor she would have been able to explore possibilities, take risks and edit without endless rewrites. Surely it could only have been better?

We will never know. Maybe a 21st-century Bronte would have wasted weeks playing Freecell on her computer or obsessively reformatting her chapter headings. But maybe she would have tossed in the novels and written TV instead, unable, like many talented young writers, to resist a medium with such a vast reach.

Our real gripe with TV is that it is popular. Like Elizabethan theatre, or Dickens’s serialised novels, TV shows live or die at the mercy of the punters. If the public doesn’t like it, it goes. To accept that TV is where some of the best stories are being told is to accept that millions of square-eyed schmos in their reclining chairs know great art when they see it and choose to watch it.

In his essay What Is a Classic? novelist J. M. Coetzee invokes Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s view that great artworks are those that survive an ongoing struggle against the forces of barbarism, against ignorance, amnesia and bad art. A classic is something that survives "because generations of people cannot afford to let go of it and therefore hold on to it at all costs".

It’s too early to say whether West Wing, Grass Roots or South Park will endure in this way, though there are signs that a critical apparatus is creaking into gear. Buffy has already spawned at least a dozen book-length studies. Now that entire TV series are available on DVD, academics can settle into their squeaky chairs with the remote control and pass their verdicts for posterity.

For now, let’s just give Buffy due credit. Late on Tuesday nights, Buffy fought the forces of barbarism. With a smart mouth and wooden stakes, she triumphed over the ghouls of cliche and defeatism. Usually just in time to go shopping.

Thornton McCamish is a Melbourne writer and fellow of OzProspect, a non-partisan think tank.

ART FOR TV’S SAKE

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

TV’s most engaging ensemble since Cheers keeps the world safe from blood-suckers. "The mere existence of Buffy proves the detractors wrong about one thing," said one critic. "Hollywood commercialism can produce great art." An epic parable about good, evil, and dating.

The West Wing

Another fantasy milieu, this time a White House in which everyone has an IQ above 150 and believes in what they’re doing. Terrific actors enjoying the sharpest dialogue on the box.

The Sopranos

Oedipus Rex in New Jersey: all the pleasures of mob family life, including murderous moms, fine cooking and psychotherapy.

South Park

A recent episode of this animated satire depicted American cookery queen Martha Stewart inserting a turkey into her behind. Effortlessly filthy, cynical and hilarious, South Park proves, if nothing else, that commercial TV doesn’t have to be mainstream.

Grass Roots

Alternating farce, satire and real drama, Geoffrey Atherden’s show boasts great scripts, and, in Mayor Col Dunkley, one of the most loveable monsters in fiction.

Conversations with My Agent By Rob Long

Long was a "show-runner" on Cheers for two years. Then he spent a year in the "development hell" described here, trying to get another show on the air. An insider’s take on a surreal industry.

Successful Television Writing By Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin

Fancy being the next Joss Whedon? Try this how-to manual, which is less about writing than the tough business of breaking into American TV.