Like A Fine Wine

I purchased the complete 7 season Buffy the Vampire Slayer box set for Brazen Hussy last year for Christmas. We've been working steadily through them ever since (we just started Season 5), and I have a confession to make. That show was way, way better than I ever gave it credit for. Now I always liked it - I started watching it I think at the end of the first season or the beginning of the second. But because it was full of monsters and campy dialogue, I considered it a guilty pleasure.

Perhaps it's the distance since the show ended, or blooming nostalgia, or watching the episodes in a more compressed fashion, but I now think it was one of the greatest shows in the history of television. There's the clever allegories of angst actualizing as monsters, of course. There's the wonderfully believable three-dimensional characters, all of whom change in incremental and realistic ways during the series. There's the resistance to hackneyed plot - no end of season cliffhangers, no pregnancy scares, no deaths by main characters (there is that one resurrection by Angel, but I'll forgive it). But what I find truly striking is the sheer discipline of the show. It's amazing - they lay out a plot line and then leave it in the water for years, letting us get a nibble here, a nibble there, until they finally reel us in. The greatest temptation of writers is to rush to the good parts, but Joss Whedon is an expert in leaving us, not hanging, but savoring every twist and turn.

Only is it now, years after the show went off the air, that I really appreciate it for what it was. And now I'm going to have to go and buy that damned comic series Joss is writing to find out what happens next. Because with great characters, you are never ever finished.