Post by burrunjor on Apr 28, 2024 18:51:16 GMT
Now don't get me wrong here I LOVE Buffy and Angel and ironically both inspired me and my work and overall both had an extremely positive influence on the genre for the most part. Both really made the supernatural genre on tv as big as sci fi for one thing.
Still you could argue that they began a few notable bad trends in the genre, which again doesn't necessarily reflect badly on Buffy itself. It's more people trying to copy something and doing it poorly. (Same way Bruce Lee one of the greatest action stars of all time led to a wave of poor imitators.)
Still I think Buffy can be blamed for popularizing the following things. It didn't necessarily invent them per say, but it certainly brought them to the forefront.
1/ Celebrity showrunners. Again we had a few before Joss, including JNT himself. However I don't think any reached quite the same level of godhood as it were among fans, and even fame among the general public he did. At least not for genre tv shows prior to Buffy. Granted that may be because it was a different world. Terry Nation and Gene Roddenberry for instance didn't have the internet and even organized fandom wasn't quite as fanatical either. Still regardless Joss Whedon really pushed that idea and built a cult of personality around himself. It didn't even become he's just a great writer, but he's a fabulous man. He'd make these obnoxious statements about feminism and womanhood etc, all of which his fans would treat as profound gospel when they weren't and we'd get T-Shirts like "Joss Whedon is my master now" as well as books calling him the geek king of the universe. That to me paved the way for future egomaniacs like RTD, Zack Snyder, JJ Abrams, George R Martin, and Moffat (although less so in his case) to do the same, turning a lot of fandoms from just being fun things where people got together to creepy cults. It also led to the quality of a lot of shows failing. As Terry Nation himself said, tv is group art. Everybody needs to do their bit (granted he wasn''t always eager to share that credit LOL, but at least when making it he had that attitude.) However again a lot of these modern showrunners like RTD think of themselves as geniuses and insist on everything going their way, which is why they are so much more self indulgent than before. Sadly even Buffy itself in its later years suffered from Joss's ego this way, with many of his actors from James Marsters to Sarah Michelle Gellar to Charisma Carpenter having arguments with him over things that he still insisted on doing.
2/ Sci fi and fantasy is not real tv and has to be about relationships and issues to be proper tv. Yes sadly Buffy helped push this, with Joss constantly going on about how the vampires aren't as important as the relationship drama. The episode The Body always being hailed by fans as the best episode of the series because it features no fantasy elements and is about real life, further cemented this attitude. This not only led to Buffy becoming a soap opera in its 6th season, but lots of shows following suit like New Who, the Arrowverse, etc. Again The Body and season 6 aside, Buffy for the most part got the balance of soap opera and fantasy right, always putting a lot of thought into its monsters and creatures in terms of design and character and horror. However much like the Bruce Lee imitators, a lot of the people who have tried to copy this have done it poorly and often just featured bland, boring villains and sci fi concepts in series that are otherwise just soaps.
3/ Musical episodes. Buffy wasn't the first genre show to do a musical episode. That dubious honor falls upon Xena, that I think had two musical episodes before Buffy's, though it certainly had one before Buffy. (Both of Xena's were pretty awful by the way. I did enjoy the gab drag LOL from the first musical, but other than that, yeah too cheesy even by Xena standards. Only other thing that was funny was how dubbed Gabrielle was. She suddenly sounded like Aretha Franklin when she sang. Where did that voice come from haha.) However Buffy's musical episode was obviously a lot more popular and is the one that most genre shows would try and copy. The ghastly Star Trek musical episode, Once Upon A Time, The Flash's awful musical episode and now New Who itself all directly inspired by Buffy's ridiculously overrated musical episode.
f*ck me those are cringe personified! How did it become almost mandatory for genre shows to do a musical episode? People had a f*cking cheek saying the old shows like Classic Who had cringe inducing moments because of bad special effects, when these were the trendy new shows that apparently DW has to copy to stay relevant?
4/ The zany pop culture referencing, dorky character: I f*cking HATE this type of character who is designed to be a relatable figure for us nerds. It gets so tedious after a while and sadly has popped up in almost every f*cking genre show from Connor in Primeval, to too many to mention in the Arrowverse, to Osgood in DW. Yeah I can understand people hating that aspect of Osgood's persona, it's entirely Ingrid that I love LOL. These characters aren't always annoying it must be said, like Connor was fine, but still it's a really annoying cliche that I just wish would die.
5/ Introducing too many main characters. This was always Joss Whedon's biggest failing as a writer was introducing far too many characters to the point where he didn't know what to do with them, and again it's something that we see in lots of shows since like The Flash, Once Upon A Time, even New Who fell into this the way companions couldn't just leave, but had to keep coming back as recurring characters, with Journeys End being the nadir of this approach, as RTD brings back so many characters he has no f*cking idea how to use them, so they just stand about watching Catherine Tate spout moronic technobabble in the most obnoxious way possible.
Again please believe me in spite of all this I do think Buffy was a game changer in a more positive way LOL, but to me these cliches and examples of its influence need to die, or at least not become so predominant in modern genre fiction. I don't mind the odd bit of fantasy or sci fi soap opera myself, but stop crowbarring it into every f*cking show.
Still you could argue that they began a few notable bad trends in the genre, which again doesn't necessarily reflect badly on Buffy itself. It's more people trying to copy something and doing it poorly. (Same way Bruce Lee one of the greatest action stars of all time led to a wave of poor imitators.)
Still I think Buffy can be blamed for popularizing the following things. It didn't necessarily invent them per say, but it certainly brought them to the forefront.
1/ Celebrity showrunners. Again we had a few before Joss, including JNT himself. However I don't think any reached quite the same level of godhood as it were among fans, and even fame among the general public he did. At least not for genre tv shows prior to Buffy. Granted that may be because it was a different world. Terry Nation and Gene Roddenberry for instance didn't have the internet and even organized fandom wasn't quite as fanatical either. Still regardless Joss Whedon really pushed that idea and built a cult of personality around himself. It didn't even become he's just a great writer, but he's a fabulous man. He'd make these obnoxious statements about feminism and womanhood etc, all of which his fans would treat as profound gospel when they weren't and we'd get T-Shirts like "Joss Whedon is my master now" as well as books calling him the geek king of the universe. That to me paved the way for future egomaniacs like RTD, Zack Snyder, JJ Abrams, George R Martin, and Moffat (although less so in his case) to do the same, turning a lot of fandoms from just being fun things where people got together to creepy cults. It also led to the quality of a lot of shows failing. As Terry Nation himself said, tv is group art. Everybody needs to do their bit (granted he wasn''t always eager to share that credit LOL, but at least when making it he had that attitude.) However again a lot of these modern showrunners like RTD think of themselves as geniuses and insist on everything going their way, which is why they are so much more self indulgent than before. Sadly even Buffy itself in its later years suffered from Joss's ego this way, with many of his actors from James Marsters to Sarah Michelle Gellar to Charisma Carpenter having arguments with him over things that he still insisted on doing.
2/ Sci fi and fantasy is not real tv and has to be about relationships and issues to be proper tv. Yes sadly Buffy helped push this, with Joss constantly going on about how the vampires aren't as important as the relationship drama. The episode The Body always being hailed by fans as the best episode of the series because it features no fantasy elements and is about real life, further cemented this attitude. This not only led to Buffy becoming a soap opera in its 6th season, but lots of shows following suit like New Who, the Arrowverse, etc. Again The Body and season 6 aside, Buffy for the most part got the balance of soap opera and fantasy right, always putting a lot of thought into its monsters and creatures in terms of design and character and horror. However much like the Bruce Lee imitators, a lot of the people who have tried to copy this have done it poorly and often just featured bland, boring villains and sci fi concepts in series that are otherwise just soaps.
3/ Musical episodes. Buffy wasn't the first genre show to do a musical episode. That dubious honor falls upon Xena, that I think had two musical episodes before Buffy's, though it certainly had one before Buffy. (Both of Xena's were pretty awful by the way. I did enjoy the gab drag LOL from the first musical, but other than that, yeah too cheesy even by Xena standards. Only other thing that was funny was how dubbed Gabrielle was. She suddenly sounded like Aretha Franklin when she sang. Where did that voice come from haha.) However Buffy's musical episode was obviously a lot more popular and is the one that most genre shows would try and copy. The ghastly Star Trek musical episode, Once Upon A Time, The Flash's awful musical episode and now New Who itself all directly inspired by Buffy's ridiculously overrated musical episode.
f*ck me those are cringe personified! How did it become almost mandatory for genre shows to do a musical episode? People had a f*cking cheek saying the old shows like Classic Who had cringe inducing moments because of bad special effects, when these were the trendy new shows that apparently DW has to copy to stay relevant?
4/ The zany pop culture referencing, dorky character: I f*cking HATE this type of character who is designed to be a relatable figure for us nerds. It gets so tedious after a while and sadly has popped up in almost every f*cking genre show from Connor in Primeval, to too many to mention in the Arrowverse, to Osgood in DW. Yeah I can understand people hating that aspect of Osgood's persona, it's entirely Ingrid that I love LOL. These characters aren't always annoying it must be said, like Connor was fine, but still it's a really annoying cliche that I just wish would die.
5/ Introducing too many main characters. This was always Joss Whedon's biggest failing as a writer was introducing far too many characters to the point where he didn't know what to do with them, and again it's something that we see in lots of shows since like The Flash, Once Upon A Time, even New Who fell into this the way companions couldn't just leave, but had to keep coming back as recurring characters, with Journeys End being the nadir of this approach, as RTD brings back so many characters he has no f*cking idea how to use them, so they just stand about watching Catherine Tate spout moronic technobabble in the most obnoxious way possible.
Again please believe me in spite of all this I do think Buffy was a game changer in a more positive way LOL, but to me these cliches and examples of its influence need to die, or at least not become so predominant in modern genre fiction. I don't mind the odd bit of fantasy or sci fi soap opera myself, but stop crowbarring it into every f*cking show.
