High Stakes for 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'

Much has been made of Whedon's sometimes elementary metaphors, the most pervasive being that the purity of youth is confirmed by contrast—as in the many adults in Buffy who turn out to be fatally distrustful or morally bankrupt. You could say that Whedon is pandering to his core audience, yet I know an awful lot of grown-ups utterly entranced and moved by this show. The reason is simple: Buffy is about adolescence whose form and content are never themselves adolescent—the exact opposite of Seinfeld and scores of lesser shows that idealize the notion of prolonging teen sensibilities well into adulthood. This series is, as Willow once said of Buffy, "16 going on 40."

Grant me, therefore, a brief moment to make the case for Buffy as anti-fluff. If there is one salient quality that distinguishes this show from all the teeming teen shows this fall, it is respect: respect for the series' young protagonists, but also, more broadly, for life—for its preciousness and its precariousness. Death, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is never treated lightly (except where vampires are concerned), and when it occurs, it brings down terrible consequences on its perpetrator. (Think back no further than this season's most shocking event, when the sadly unloved Slayer Faith killed a human she mistook for a vampire. This tragic act set in motion a series of disasters that landed her in a coma.)

Buffy also defies TV convention another way. Weekly series depend on their audiences knowing the parameters of the main characters' personalities. In Buffy, people change: They quake with fear in one episode and muster up demon-defying courage in the next. They can begin as allies and end as murderers (Faith, for instance) or begin as murderers and end as noble heroes (Angel—as Mick Jagger might sing it, Aaaayn-gel!). These youths don't stay stuck at one age for years, victims of the 90210 syndrome; they graduate high school, move on to college or spin-off series, and...who knows what?

We can speculate on the future, but we know what has passed: the steady evolution of schlock to shock to pure bliss.