On Vampires And Rites Of Passage

You know your series is a cult phenomenon when YouTube searches yield more poorly-cut fan vids than official promos or episode excerpts, and in the case of Buffy The Vampire Slayer it's worth exploring just why the franchise took off and hit home for so many TV-gawking tweens. Buffy has its roots as a silly teen action serial taking off from a teen film of the same name, and it finds its place in the mid-90s television landscape alongside similarly idiosyncratic smashes The X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation, although its demographic was notably younger and less, well, positively nerdy. TV IPs were overwhelmingly auteur-headed even within a system more strictly studio-controlled than Hollywood cinema, giving Buffy creator Joss Whedon more room to breathe creatively than he likely would have had in early periods of TV writing history. Whedon has a very singular vision and distinctive style, and it's easy to call him "uncompromising" despite a continued history of having to acquiese to the demands of whomever's funding his projects; Whedon's infamous loss of Firefly to Fox's cancel-happy whim was career-defining for the poor dude, but you've got to keep in mind that Whedon had similar issues from the start—Buffy the film was his personal project from the start, but the studio refused to allow him (at the time a total newcomer) to direct, which was the impetus for returning to the project—presumably to do it right, as he initially envisioned—via the longform TV medium.

In typical Joss Whedon fashion, Buffy takes archetypes and stereotypes and continually subverts them, in sometimes sophisticated and very often hilarious ways. Firefly grafted Western conventions onto the Space Opera genre in a way which (unexpectedly) magnified, rather than subordinated, the classic film genre's most conspicuous markers (meaning that not only was the narrative taking cues from The Searchers, but the characters actually rode on horseback and fought in some form of the Wild West); Dr.Horrible did similar things for the superhero genre, making the protagonist the villian (fairly shallow device, sure) but then denying us a satisfying ending in such a way which expanded the series' scope retrospectively; Buffy, too, takes obvious genre signifiers—here of both the teen film and the fantasy horror—and contorts them in a way which is less superficial than it initially appears. Unlike The Faculty, Buffy is less interested in faux-cleverly twisting our expectations of the genre's conventions than in playing around with them; in this way the series retains a sort of realist gravity that parody and satire necessarily lack—this isn't a mock-up of the vampire genre or the teen film, it's a rethinking of their existence and a deconstruction of their perceived independence from one another.

By the way, if you've missed either Firefly or Dr.Horrible, you'd do well to check them out. Great shows.