Buffy Season One Episode Five

[koganbot]

Saw this three days ago. What I remember most is that Sarah Michelle Gellar came through as an actress. She was required to be all flustered when the handsome brooding boy asked her out for a date, and she was required to ache convincingly when demon fighting interfered with her love life. In fact, I thought the conflict was written rather clumsily

Comments

[dubdobdee]

my experience of the first series generally is that, when you went straight back to after seeing eps in much later series, it seemed clumsier and flimsier (it was after all this team's first ever TV show); but when you came to it fresh -- i mean after a gap of not watching the later shows either -- it seemed less clumsy and flimsy than you were anticipating

i think i would argue that the world being created is "life on a hellmouth", rather than california smalltown ordinaire, so that the gradual reveal of exceptional and bizarre dysfunctionality (masked by conventions ppl assume are there and sort of are and sort of aren't) is key* -- how like actual ordinary frontier life are towns in westerns? aren't they sequences of conventions also: settings as formalised as a proscenium arch? the very set-bound street scenes in buffy are like westerns this way: the quasi-adobe buildings and backs-streets are one step away from flats on wheels

*there are/were, after all, a ton of TV progs which take school life as their centre -- i think (for good or ill contentwise; but likely for good popularity-wise) one of buffy's early distinguishing marks may have been its "take this as read and move on" attitude to school-as-setting... speed-of-cultural-apperception is a value in buffy, which means it is constantly (in the backchat, in the individual stories) saying "look, we all know the lame conventions, that's our shared culture: the content is where we go from the lameness...)