An invitation to Buffy

It is hard for me to speak to what it may be like to come to Buffy The Vampire Slayer for the first time now. Both its themes and its craft were breakthroughs in its time, but may seem less inspired now that so many later works have learned from it. I recommend it anyway.

Thematically, Buffy successfully realizes immense ambitions: a meditation on adolescence and feminist understandings of culture, intentionally crafted to create a cultural phenomenon among teenagers. The feminism is awkward in places — it was addressing a different moment, could not learn from its own flaws and failings, and has some conceptual problems — but is legit. Even at its weakest, it is pretty darned good, and at its best it can be breathtaking.

The craft has several strengths, many of which were breakthroughs at the time which may be hard to see given so many later works which learned from its moves. It very directly draws from a broad range of genre sources — mostly horror and fantasy — to explore allegorical questions. To make that work without feeling forced, it artfully mixes tones of humor, horror, action, drama, and melodrama. And it was the first series on broadcast television to exercise the format to at once tell self-contained episodic stories and use the big canvas of the season arc to tell a more sophisticated story and use the huge canvas of the whole series to explore its big themes.

So when David Simon cheekily says that Buffy ranks above his masterpiece The Wire, I believe he is largely talking about its place in the history of TV. I am not sure that I can agree with him that it is the best TV series ever made, but I cannot think of another series which advanced the art so dramatically.

I have been through the whole series a few times — it is comfort viewing for me — and every time I watch an episode I see new things.

If you don’t mind mild spoilers and want to try before you buy, watch these episodes:

• S04E10 “Hush” — a nifty formal experiment (it is almost a silent movie) and one of the scariest things ever put on broadcast televison
• S03E06 “Band Candy” — a mostly-comedic personal favorite
• S02E07 “Lie To Me” — a perfect “basic” episode of the show, with a poignant ending which gives me an allergy attack every time
• S04E04 “Fear Itself” — a showcase for the show’s mix-of-tones trick