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

[katstevens]

Talking about this while trying not to spoiler you is v difficult Frank! I haven't watched the first series since it was first shown on telly here in c.1997 but I can still remember what happens thanks to subsequent references by the cast in later series (e.g. "haha Xander, you might be in a pickle now but at least you're not being seduced by a giant praying mantis"). But I do clearly remember how witty the script was (esp Cordelia's lines) and how much better it was than any of the other US high school drama settings I'd seen (My So-Called Life etc

[dubdobdee]

^^^yikes multiple spoilers ahoy!!

My So-Called Life hit the ground running in its first series -- did it even get a second series? Buffy ages seven years over seven series (realistically or not): I wonder if the degree of close attention to creating a realistic world (school isn't the backdrop in MSCL, it's the subject) is a trap, for long-arc projects... Whedon has repeatedly said he conceived the show in a seven-series arc, and wrote to that much longer narrative-development structure (an incredibly risky approach, given what happened to firefly, which was similarly sketched i believe, only to be cancelled halfway thru its first series)

I haven't seen any of Dollhouse yet: I've heard very good things about it (also what Martin said -- it is Joe 90 with a sexy girl...)

[thenipper]

Dollhouse was a disaster I thought :(

[koganbot]

"Realistic settings" isn't what I mean. Vampire comedies are inherently unrealistic. I'll accept what the show presents me if it does present it to me, but so far it hasn't created its own rules and its own world, and most crucially it hasn't created a strong sense of the relationships among the main characters. There's more telling than showing. But then again, it has a special set of difficult tasks. As you said, My So-Called Life is something different. But there are points of comparison. Buffy is new to the school, plus she's in a vampire comedy, whereas Angela was already at the school and was in a series of ongoing relationships. But actually what My So-Called Life did that was very canny was to start the series at a point where Angela is changing the relationships in her life, meanwhile loner Brian is tentatively creating new friendships, and Angela's restless dad doesn't know quite what he wants out of his job or marriage (or does he want out of the marriage?), and an English teacher quits and a couple other teachers try out

[dubdobdee]

since you've already gone there, the rocky and bullwinkle library dodge does emerge at some point, but it's an afterthought (a joke about the slightly silly plot conventions they're living in