Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Buffy and the Serialization of Series
Originally published in Metro 137, 2003.
Buffy has come a long way since she first rocked into sleepy Sunnydale as a naughty schoolgirl with a history of burning things down. She’s been everything from feminist crusader to robotic sex slave to fast food server; she’s fought off countless vampires and demons and slayers and mayors; and she’s done it all in boots and coats and hairstyles that put the rest of us to shame. But, alas, Buffy is coming to an end. Creator Joss Whedon has announced that this, the seventh season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, will be the show’s last. Rumours abound as to what will happen for the finale but creator Joss Whedon is, as always, feeding us more disinformation than actual fact. One thing is for sure, fans will be hooked until the very end, and this is partly due to Buffy’s tendency towards the structure of soap; an increasing trend in contemporary television drama.
On the surface, Buffy acts like a series. It shows the hallmarks of the form: recurring thematic ideas played out by a core cast of characters in episodic, self-contained narratives. Like contemporaries Six Feet Under, The Sopranos and The West Wing, Buffy demonstrates these characteristics; but unlike the others, has cleverly resisted the pull towards atrophy by creating a diegetic world where variation on characters, scenarios, and generic techniques is not only tolerated, but encouraged and celebrated by fans. For example, in ‘This Year’s Girl’, a spell switches the bodies of Buffy and Faith, the evil slayer. Viewers have to deal with the Buffyverse turned upside down. We are forced to rethink what signifies Buffy, as she no longer looks like Buffy or talks like Buffy. Similarly, in ‘Hush’, Sunnydale’s voices are stolen by the malevolent ‘Gentlemen’, creating a narrative opportunity for twenty-eight minutes without dialogue.
However, the hybrid-style of Buffy means that even though it behaves like a highly-developed series, it incorporates dramatic devices usually associated with soap. Though it is broken into discrete and self-contained episodes, there is a clear story arc in each series and these constitute turning-points in the seven-season journey of the characters. The continuing narrative is crucial to soap. Mary Ellen Brown identifies the excess of character genealogies evident in established soap, and argues that familiarity with them is crucial to the enjoyment of soap fans.
Buffy has character excess covered: she has died twice, swapped bodies with an evil slayer, developed a sister, been in love with a vampire, had violent sex with another, flipped burgers, and is now a high school counsellor. These narratives span multiple series, and, in the experience of Buffy’s fans and characters alike, continue to inform how Buffy is read. And as Brown notes, familiarising oneself with these stories is a crucial step for any newcomer on the road to comprehension.
But Buffy fans and critics have long identified the show’s generic hybridity; there are far more important questions to be tackled. Will Holly Valance ever play Buffy? (Sources speculate that it was her press agent who started the rumour in the first place). Is Giles dead? Or evil? And has the slayer inadvertently brought about Armageddon? Who knows? But I’ll be watching.