16 Great TV Shows, Part 11: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons
Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Part 4: Seinfeld
Part 5: The John Larroquette Show
Part 6: ER
Part 7: Newsradio
Part 8: The X-Files
Part 9: Law & Order
Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

To discuss the next show on my list, I have to offer a few confessions.

It was the late 90s, and I was well on my way to becoming a TV snob. Having discovered "adult" dramas like ER, L&O and Homicide, I had little interest in ANY sort of teen soaps built around relationship dramas and the oh-so-intense problems of pretty privileged people. (Stop laughing. I'm being 100% sincere in my dismissal at the time.)

Try convincing THAT guy to watch a teen drama called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," based on a painfully bad movie that died at the box office years ago. It didn't help that this was a show on The WB, which to that point was the terrible low brow home of such TV VD as Unhappily Ever After and Kirk. I ran from it like the plague, even after seeing a blurb or two in Entertainment Weekly about how it was "The Best Show You're Not Watching."

This is how my mother came to be a Buffy viewer before I did. I got exposed secondhand... but that viewing of "Inca Mummy Girl" did little to change my mind. It wasn't until I heard the hype about how the season two finale ended that I made it a priority to check out the rerun of that two-parter just before season three started. Angelus running amok, a second Slayer killed, Buffy forced to send a suddenly-good Angel to hell? I was hooked.

And then somehow Season 3 got even better. By then I was a freshman in college and Buffy was THE hot show in the dorms. It was the perfect show in the perfect environment at the perfect time. The dialog was witty, the characters were fun, and we were all still at the age where the metaphors of "High school is hell" still resonated. I've written before about how Season 3 of Buffy is one of the perfect seasons of television and I still stand by it. It pulls off a number of clever twists, like a major villain switcharoo mid-season. It justifies WHY our heroes and villains find themselves in holding patterns during the last third of the season, and it has one of my favorite "fall from grace" stories as Faith goes from ally to enemy.

And somewhere in all this I realized, "Holy shit! This is a superhero show and a coming of age drama all in one!" You can draw a straight line from Buffy to Alias to the excellent Greg Berlanti-produced superhero shows of the present day. This is why you won't find favorites of mine like Supergirl and The Flash on the list later. Both shows do their own thing, but when it came time to make hard choices, I couldn't dispute they were walking a trail that Buffy had blazed. (That said, I give those shows a LOT of credit for daring to put their leads in actual superhero costumes.)

That was one of the big lessons from Buffy, that one COULD translate the fun of the comic books I read into a TV series and not have to treat it entirely campy. At the time Lois & Clark was the most recent superhero show on TV and BATMAN & ROBIN was our most recent major superhero tentpole - both of which took the approach of somewhat mocking the material. Buffy lived inside its genre, while still being able to poke fun at the conventions of such a show. It never showed contempt for its audience or its mythology. It took the rules of its world deadly seriously and the irreverence came from the characters' reactions to the absurdity they encountered.

It was a tonal high-wire act, managing to be laugh-out-loud funny without sacrificing intensity. The show could tell a story one week about Angelus stalking and psychologically torturing Buffy, even killing one of her close friends, and then next week tell a silly story about a spell gone wrong that makes everyone fall in love with Xander... and both felt wholly appropriate to the series. It was a big lesson in the elasticity of the genre. Sure, The X-Files sometimes abandoned its deadly-serious tone for a goofy episode like "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," but what Buffy pulled off was on another level and it varied its tone far more frequently.

Creator Joss Whedon knew how to use the fans' expectations of the genre against them. There's an episode called "The Wish," (written by Marti Noxon) where Cordellia wishes that Buffy never came to Sunnydale. Instantly she finds herself in an alternate timeline where the town has been overrun by vampires for years and she's the only one who knows how it's supposed to be. She spends the first half of the episode shocked by the changes and trying to get help from alternate timeline versions of Giles and her friends. And then the show breaks a major "rule." Cordillia - the person who seemingly has to put everything right - gets killed. It was one of those "I can't believe they just did that! How do they get out of this?" moments. It was the kind of thing Buffy regularly did - it took the step that other shows would walk up to and then sprint away from.

Another good trope subversion is in the spinoff Angel. We get what appears to be a standard exorcism episode, with Angel and his friends trying to expel a demon spirit from a little boy who has been setting fires and threatening his family's lives. For much of the episode, it appears the tension is drawn from the fact the boy's parents don't realize Angel's a vampire himself. Also, since Angel can't handle a cross without it burning him, he's forced to stay out of the exorcism... until inevitably he has to take the risk. With the demon forced out, the show hits us with an incredibly dark ending - the freed demon is relieved to be out of there. He was trying to feed on the boy's soul... but the kid was souless. The demon confirms he never manifested until Angel detected him... which means all of the ugly stuff the kid did was NOT because he was possessed. He's just a dangerous kid.

Like I said, DARK.

I considered giving Angel its own slot on the list, but when it came time for hard choices, I had to concede that Angel and Buffy were too similar to merit separate recognition. Angel's stories tended to be darker, and often were more complex. Indeed, there are stretches of the spinoff that I prefer to the parent show. Ultimately, Buffy was more versatile and it made the impact on me first.

I've written a bunch of Buffy posts already, so be sure to check them out for more writing tips:

Buffy The Vampire Slayer's "The Body" - how to write a crying scene, part I
Buffy The Vampire Slayer's "The Body" - how to write a crying scene, part II
Buffy The Vampire Slayer's "Pangs" - PC or not PC?
Show, don't tell
My KsiteTV post: "What serialized shows like The Vampire Diaries should learn from Buffy’s third season." 
Buffy the Vampire Slayer turns 20 today! (We are all so, so old)


Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

The Ten Best Series Finales

It's that time of year again, that time when several long-running and beloved series take their final bows. The TV blogosphere becomes littered with articles on greatest sign-offs, challenging this year's crop to match such luminaries as M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I've decided to take a slightly different approach with my list.

TV watching is a different experience than film-going. Over several seasons, the cast of a beloved TV show becomes like a group of friends we invite into our living rooms week-after-week. Thus, the pressure on that final visit is so much greater. It can't just be a good story - it has to be a fulfilling conclusion to that emotional bond. So for this reason, it's impossible for someone of my generation to have quite the same reaction to the final MTM episode as someone who spent several years of their lives living with those characters.

It's all about closure. Does the audience get the closure they deserve on these characters and stories. Does the finale honor what worked best about the series while providing a satisfying coda?

So when it came time to compile my list, I decided to limit the shows to those that concluded within my lifetime. You can complain that's arbitrary, but hey, it's MY list!

10) Mad About You: "The Final Frontier" - I'm sure I'll get flack that this is on the list while other sitcoms like Frasier and Friends aren't. For my money, this finale was simply better - a time-hopping trip that traces Paul and Jamie's future over the next thirty years. It's a well-constructed, bittersweet episode.

9) Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "What You Leave Behind" - The first Trek series to take a more serialized approach to story-telling had a lot to resolve by its final two hours. There are some flaws (namely that while both the resolution of the Dominion War and the conflict with the Bajoran deities are resolved, the two stories have little to do with each other.) There's a sense that this could have benefited from one more draft but the final fifteen minutes hit the right notes, with Captain Sisko's "death" and promise to one day return home, the departures of Odo, Worf and O'Brien, and most effectively, the final shot of the show. The series' final image begins with Jake Sisko staring at the wormhole, waiting for his father and then pulls back from the window into space until Deep Space Nine is just another light in the heavens.

8) Cheers: "One for the Road" - The return of Shelly Long's Diane Chambers is the perfect catalyst for Sam Malone to finally get serious about what he really wants out of life. In the end, he realizes his one true love is his bar. Every character gets their moment, and the series leaves with a sense that life will go on as normal, even though a few changes have happened.

7) The Wonder Years: "Summer/Independence Day" - Focusing almost exclusively on Kevin and Winnie during a summer where they both work at a resort, the episode takes their relationship to the next level before returning home. With the theme from The Natural playing in the background as the Arnold clan attends a Fourth of July parade, adult Kevin's narration provides a moving coda for all the characters' fates. Saddest of all, Kevin's dad Jack passes away two years after the parade.

6) Star Trek: The Next Generation: "All Good Things..." - Despite wallowing in some technobabble, this finale is one of the series best episodes. Quantum Leap-like time-travel is the conceit that has Captain Picard moving back and forth through time in three key periods: the first day he took command of the Enterprise, his present day, and 25 years in the future, when he must reunite his crew to help solve a time-spanning mystery with the fate of humanity in the balance. It's a nice reflection on how far the characters have come, and where they might end up.

5) Dawson's Creek: "All Good Things.../...Must Come to an End" - Kevin Williamson returned to pen this finale, which serves as its own reunion movie. Set five years in the future, Dawson and his friends come together for the first time in years to celebrate his mother's wedding. The Dawson/Joey/Pacey triangle is resolved in the only way it could have, but the two-hours really belongs to Michelle Williams' wrenching performance as the dying Jen Lindley. If the scene of her recording a message for her infant daughter to view one day doesn't get you, the quiet moment when Grams realizes Jen has passed will. Still fighting cancer, Grams whispers to her departed granddaughter, "I'll see you soon, child. Soon."

4) Arrested Development: "Development Arrested" - There's no way I can do this justice in even a capsule review, and this probably isn't the kind of episode that a casual viewer can appreciate because so much of it comes out of the callbacks and resolutions of long-running gags. If you're a fan, you get it. If not, go back and watch all three seasons. It's worth it. I promise.

3) Everwood: "Foreverwood" - If all had gone according to plan, this episode - which sees widower Andy Brown finally let go of the memory of his dead wife - would have launched several storylines for season five and sent the show in a new direction. Alas, 7th Heaven's finale ratings convinced the network that that withering corpse still had life in it, and this became Everwood's swan song. It works as a conclusion, though. The end of one chapter in Andy Brown's life, with the promise of more to follow.

2) ER: "And In The End..." - Like TNG's finale, this episode serves as a perfect bookend to the series' pilot episode. From the details like the opening scene - a direct homage to the opening of the pilot - to Dr. Carter taking Rachel Greene, the daughter of his late mentor, under his wing, this episode brings a lot of things full-circle. Old characters return for one last hurrah, but for me in particular, the greatest return is that of the opening credits music and the Benton kung-fu punch. This is how you end a long running series with class.

1) Angel: "Not Fade Away..." - Angel and his team make one desperate effort to derail their enemies plans. Knowing full well that they can't stop the apocalypse entirely, they instead aim to disrupt Wolfram & Hart's plans to bring it about themselves. Aware that they can't possibly walk away from this alive, the team spends one last day doing what they love, then executes their plan to awesome effect. The ending is a great non-cliffhanger, as Angel and his survivors meet in an alley, only to see thousands of demon soldiers and a dragon closing in on them. Though they're clearly as doomed as General Custer, Angel and his men draw up for one last fight, as Angel confidently tells his friends "Let's get to work!"