Comments on: Better Late Than Never – Buffy Seasons 1-3

By: Pete Schueler

Pete Schueler — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:52:37 +0000

Damn! Didn’t mean juvenile, but silly. Stupid copy/paste drafting on a sticky-note…

By: Pete Schueler

Pete Schueler — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:51:26 +0000

First off: great article! I’m always happy to see some Whedon-love spreading about.
Now, I’m a huge Buffy fan, going so far, that this show is partly responsible for my desire to become a writer. I didn’t watch the first three seasons week to week, but instead really started with the fourth one, by and large regarded as the weakest, even though it contains the mighty “Hush” AND the eternal “Restless”.
What I love most about this show are the characters. Seeing Willow, Xander and Buffy grow as people from the very start until the very end is something that is worth recognizing. Because all too often in TV, characters stay the same. They appear to change, but at their core, they’re the same. Not so in Buffy and later on Angel. Everything matters, and everything is influencing future decisions.
And you cannot forget the subtext in that show! My god, every demon, every vampire, every mystical or technological creature is a stand-in for a real world problem. And yes, they look corny. Yes, the dialog can be cheesy from time to time. But that’s the genius of Whedon: Making you believe you watch something juvenile, while presenting you very profound messages about life.

By: Merin

Merin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:26:47 +0000

So many people have such similar experiences that they’ve got a name – Conversions. The Signal, a Firefly/Serenity podcast series I occasionally listen to, has a segment for Conversion Stories – for how people became browncoats – but this phenomenon existed for Buffy pre-Firefly as well.

I’ll give mine as an example – I had gone to the theater for the Buffy movie, and while amused I thought it was pretty bad (though Paul Reubens was pretty good!) When I was in college I heard they were making a tv show based on that movie on the crappy pseudo-network the WB. I pretty much thought “what a waste of time” and more or less ignored it. Here and there I caught an episode, but found the show ultimately corny and unsatisfying – I was predispositioned, had basically prejudged, and caught parts of episodes largely out of context.

Come season 4 of Buffy (a show I didn’t even really know if it was on anymore or not) my wife and I (fiancé at the time, though) would always chose shows to watch together and we saw ads for Angel. We didn’t know it was a spinoff, it looked like a vampire detective series and although I knew of Forever Knight, it sounded fairly original and dark. We watched it and fell in love with it even as we learned it was a spin-off of that “corny, horrible” Buffy show.

But there was the whole cross-over / tie-in thing that Angel, following Buffy on the WB each Tuesday night, would do several times that made me watch the corresponding Buffy episode when we knew it would be a two-parter.

Sarah and I move to Chicago and the next season of tv starts – we discuss it and I coerce Sarah into agreeing to give Buffy Season 5 a try while we watch Angel, and the rest is history. Going to cons looking for bootleg VHS tapes, scowering the filesharing programs for old episodes, this was all in the days before any (let alone EVERY) tv series was available on DVD.

I know the reluctance, Benton. I not only was a big nay-sayer on Buffy for years (add it to my Clerks and South Park list of things I love now that I prejudged for years) but I know that my brother-in-law, Marc, would mock his sister and I for watching Buffy – we got him to watch the Season 3 premiere of Angel, and I think it was shortly after that where he fell in love himself. Fastforward to his wedding where the wedding party entered the reception to the Angel theme song. Or my friend, Chad, who it took years of me coaxing him (a failure) and finally him seeing Firefly on his own to discover that maybe, just maybe, Whedon wasn’t a hack.

Good article!