Don't Be So Dark
In post-Columbine Hollywood, the horror genre is up for grabs.
      by Sarah Kendzior

Hey, look! It's James Marsters!

Actually, it's not all that unthinkable: Lisa, our Buffy critic, has chewed out several crapisodes this year such as "Beer Bad", "Where the Wild Things Are" and "Pangs", surprisingly inept entries in a usually stellar show. A lot of Buffy fans were taken aback by the early, pre-Initiative storylines, with their wussy Buffy, missing Xander, and all-around feel of wasted opportunity. And so everyone cheered when the show slowly started to build around Riley and his elusive cult of cute guys in army fatigues, and we all just went nuts when Faith showed up again for the best episodes of the season. And then there were "Hush" and "Restless", two utterly ass-kicking Joss Whedon episodes that remain among the best the series has ever had to offer.

So why do I feel like I'm missing something?

Actually, I didn't know what I was missing until I saw "Restless", when Willow was suddenly confronted with her old, nerdy self from season one. I have been watching the series since the pilot, but I was startled at the transformation, and then at the thought: Wow, there used to be geeky people on this series. There was such a vulnerability to that scene, and I realized that I hadn't seen anything that touching or honest all season. Buffy used to move me like no show did. "Where were you when Buffy pushed Angel into the portal of Hell?" is the modern-day genre geek's equivalent to the old Kennedy assassination question, and I'm glad to say I was weeping like a little girl, all caught up in the emotional ride of the characters -- sympathizing or relating to them, like I did whenever Buffy got in trouble at school, whenever Willow geeked it up on the computer, whenever Xander did pretty much anything. The most worked-up I ever got, however, was when Jonathan went up to the school tower and tried to kill himself in the late third season episode "Earshot", which I watched on my computer screen through blurry little pixels. Because I wasn't supposed to see that. Because it was post-Columbine, and Buffy, suddenly, was dangerous.

And Glenn Quinn! Okay, maybe this year wasn't so bad after all...

Needless to say, it's pretty tame now. While the show is still undoubtedly the best genre series on television, Buffy has lost much of the intimacy and risk-taking attitude of its early years. The series was at its most amusing and profound when taking familiar, realistic themes -- lost love, suicide, high school -- and expressing them through vampires, werewolves, and huge demonic snakes, among other incarnations. The Scooby Gang goes to college, and the episodes either fall flat in their utter unrealism (how in the world did they present that dorm room with a straight face?) or are completely, purposefully detached from reality, as in the entire Initiative storyline. There were exceptions, thankfully, like Faith's all-too-brief appearance, but it's an action series now, an adventure -- and don't get me wrong, a really good one. But I think we've seen the last of the "Earshot" days. Too dark, you know? Everyone saw what happened last time they tried to show something like that.

The same goes for Angel, which, when not outright awful ("She"), played like the best live-action Batman series never made. Angel had some high points, but gone was the soul-searching vampire of the old Buffy days, replaced instead by a crime-fighting, somewhat doleful, bad-ass. Occasionally Angel tried to regain its old flavor of I-killed-a-zillion-people-and-now-I-feel-really-bad mournfulness that lent Buffy some of its creepiest moments, but not often, and not all that well, either. A lot of this is due to the death of Doyle, which jarred the series severely, but part of it seems to be that anything remotely depressing just isn't in vogue. Death, it seems, and feeling bad about death, is very, very out. The Angel audience mourned for Doyle a hell of a lot longer than the actual characters in the series did. Which is rather frightening, in its own right. Maybe the genre's not dead after all.

Speaking of dead... does anyone still watch The X-Files? As any reader of this magazine well knows, the problems with that series extend far beyond a simple aversion to dark subject matter (and if you would like a full list of the series' problems, allow me to direct you to pisher's 17-page opus, "The Carter Conundrum", and I'll see you in a month or so.) However, it certainly fits the bill -- over the past two years, The X-Files has run nearly as many comedy episodes as it has straightforward ones (often with the so-called serious episodes proving funnier than the intentionally humorous ones), and the result is just the same. It's the stupidity, stupid. I'm not sure who decided that "comedy" equals "idiocy", but X-Files rarely makes the distinction, "X-Cops" and "The Unnatural" notwithstanding.

The X-Files, a show renowned for killing off just about everyone, used to the darkest series on television. Dramatic episodes like "Beyond the Sea", "Paper Hearts" and "One Breath" contained some of the saddest and scariest moments of the series, but it was the alleged comedy -- "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose", for example -- that got really depressing. Darin Morgan was The X-Files's greatest gift and curse; he brought the show its finest moments, and inadvertently gave the series its worst when everyone tried, and failed miserably, to imitate him. Where everyone went wrong with X-Files is where they're going wrong today -- the best comedy, in the horror genre at any rate, is pretty grim at times, and kind of sick, and often pretty twisted. I mean, "Soylent Green is people." Heh heh heh. Ew. Right?

Now, raise your hand if you ever thought that The X-Files's natural evolution would be into a spin-off comedy series starring The Lone Gunman. (Put your hand back down in your wallet, Chris Carter!) It's rather a leap from Carter's first endeavor outside The X-Files, anyway. Now, raise your hand again if you can see a series like Millennium getting picked up now, in the land of Britney Spears and booming economies and those fashionable little aliens on Roswell. Yeah. I thought so.

< Previous Page | Next Page >