Jennifer Ouellette is coming to campus this week to give a talk about her book The Physics of the Buffyverse. Having never been a Buffy fan, and not seen more than snippets of a few episodes here and there, I figured I should at least watch a few representative episodes before the talk, just to have some context. Accordingly, I got the first two discs of Season 1 from Netflix, and asked a colleague who is known to be a huge fan for recommendations (he loaned me his Season Five DVD’s, and particularly recommended Episodes 5 and 12).
Kate and I watched the first two episodes last night. She didn’t like the horror aspect, and so won’t be watching more. My opinion is a little more complicated. An interesting thing about this is that it’s impossible to watch the early episodes without knowing that there are seven full seasons of the show out there. Absent that knowledge, I doubt I’d watch any more, but knowing that it had a long run, I’ll at least watch a couple of the Season Five episodes, just to see if it eventually works better.
More specific comments (with spoilers for people who haven’t seen the show) below the fold.
I actually watched the original movie, way back in the day (I can’t recall when or why, but I know we rented it at some point), so I’m familiar with the basic conceit, which has some potential. I liked the fact that the first episode of the show picks up after that, with Buffy already aware that she’s the Slayer, thus sparing us from a full-on origin story plot.
For those who don’t recall, the basic plot of the first two episodes is this: Buffy Summers arrives in the town of Sunnydale, having been kicked out of her previous school after burning down the gym in order to destroy a vampire infestation. She and her mother are determined to make a new start, and she settles into the standard teen process of making friends in a new school, etc. Unfortunately for her, Sunnydale turns out to be a mystical hotspot, and a large group of vampires living below the town are planning to bring about the end of the world.
The new school librarian turns out to be a Watcher, sent there to advise and keep an eye on Buffy, and she quickly befriends a couple of nerdy students, one of whom overhears her talking with Giles, the librarian, about vampire slaying. Her new friends are, of course, the first local teens grabbed by the vampires, and Buffy has to resume her Slayer role in order to save them and prevent the end of the world.
The basic premise allows for a good mix of humor and action, and there’s potential there. The problem is, it’s mostly just potential– the execution of these first two episodes just doesn’t really work that well for me.
First of all, everybody is much too cute. The actors playing Willow and Xander too obviously good-looking twenty-somethings trying to play high school outcasts, and they’re much too polished to be believable. The snappy dialogue is way too snappy, and hugely overdone.
The mundane teenage stuff is moderately excruciating. I hate, hate, hate the cliche where the New Kid arrives in town and is provisionally accepted into the popular clique, but turns them down to hang out with the mistreated nerds and losers, and the version presented here is particularly bad. The Cordelia character is over-the-top awful, the stuff with the principal is just stupid, and the bit where Buffy’s mother grounds her is completely pointless– it feels like a scene that was stuck in because they were contractually obligated to give Buffy’s mother a couple of lines of dialogue in every episode.
On the horror/action side, idiot plotting abounds. Buffy’s supernatural abilities seem to come and go as required by the plot– sometimes she has super strength, other times she doesn’t, sometimes she knows kung fu, and other times she stands perfectly still and allows the evil vampire to punch her in the face. Stakes used to kill vampires dissolve into dust with the body of the vampire, except when they need to have a stake lying around for somebody to pick up later. The Intrepid Heroes casually discuss the looming vampire menace in the middle of the day in the school library, even though the whole reason that Xander got involved is because he overheard Buffy and Giles talking in the library.
And, really, the less said about the villains the better. The actors playing the evil vampires make the stilted readings of some of the heroes look like the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the special effects are just this side of Doctor Who.
Were I watching this on tv, as the premiere of a new show, I would say “OK, thanks, I don’t need to re-arrange my schedule for this.” Knowing as I do that the show ran for seven seasons, and is loved by some really smart people, I’m somewhat inclined to cut it some slack, and guess that they hit their stride sometime later in the run. Accordingly, I’ll watch at least a few episodes from the Season Five DVD’s, since I have them here, and see if that makes me think it’s worth wading through the rest of Season One. This isn’t a terribly promising beginning, though.