A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

I had the best start at Uni that any mid-’90s geek could have wished for: on my first day as a university student, I was introduced to another student who’d already been studying for a couple of years and who was a fellow geek, so before I’d even started signing up for seminars and lectures, I found that the place where I would be spending much of the next ten years or so (yes, I did hang around at Uni for a fairly long time), there was a bunch of likeminded people who were just as much into the geeky fare of the time as me. Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and especially the still relatively new hotness that was The X-Files: differently from school or from home, where I was pretty much the only one who was into these series, people here were just as excited as I was about Captain Picard, Data, Commander Sisko, Major Kira, Odo, Agents Mulder and Scully, Assistant Director Skinner, The Cigarette Smoking Man, and all the other heroes, villains, monsters and freaks.

And it wasn’t just the interest we shared that was a perfect in for me: at the time I was still living at home, and my parents had not only a satellite dish but a subscription to Sky and its various channels, which meant: I was able to record the latest seasons of these shows, long before they were shown on the terrestrial channels people had access to in Switzerland, and we could watch them not in the German dub, but in the original language.

Soon, a routine developed: I’d record the latest episodes of Deep Space Nine and The X-Files, we’d meet up in the English Department’s printer room, armed with mugs of reasonably fresh coffee, and we’d watch the latest adventures of Sisko and gang, or the newest investigation into all things extraterrestrial and supernatural. We’d talk about where the stories were going, what they were doing with the characters, whether we were happy with the direction in which the showrunners were taking the series. We had our (mostly implicit, but not always) crushes on Patrick Stewart and his Shakespearean tones, Kira Nerys and her nose ridges, David Duchovny in his FBI suit, Gillian Anderson in her glorious Gillian Andersonness. It was a glorious time – which lasted, at least in this format, until I moved out from home and no longer had a regular supply of new episodes on VHS tapes. Sadly, this was way before either DS9 or The X-Files came to an end. And while we soon started semi-regular movie afternoons, especially after the advent of DVD, I did miss the to-be-continued routine of those weekly catch-up sessions with our favourite Starfleet crew and those two FBI misfits.

Oddly, though, there were a few series that this friend I’d made on my first day at Uni recommended which I didn’t get into, at least at the time. She was a big fan of Xena: Warrior Princess, which to me always looked like the worst, most trashy kind of cheese. I had zero affinity for the self-aware camp of that series, nor for its not-so-hidden subtexts. Similarly, she sang the praises of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – and, again, I thought: No. Not that one. I mean, really? A high school cheerleader that kills vampires in her spare time.?This one, too, looked trashy, and that was enough for me to dismiss it. Chances are that it looked even worse because I would have zapped into it on one of the German-language channels, and German dubs for TV series at the time weren’t of very high quality, which went doubly for genre fare, in particular genres such as sci-fi, fantasy and horror. It was quite clear that the German programmers and dubbers didn’t have much of a feel, nor indeed much respect, for these, and accordingly, the inept dubbing would make them look even more trashy.

So, while I trusted that friend when it came to Star Trek and The X-Files, my snobbery kept me from giving these other series a chance – perhaps also because I saw them as more female-coded? I don’t think that this was anything I was conscious of, but I suspect it may have been an aspect of my instant, premature dismissal of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Still, I remembered that it had been recommended to me. In the end, I gave it a chance once I’d discovered, alongside so many other geeks, Firefly, Joss Whedon’s sci-fi neo-western. Only once I’d fallen for this, and had my heart broken by the series’ premature cancellation, did I go: Hmm. Hadn’t this guy done something before, something with high school students, vampires and the like?

One of the benefits of coming to Buffy late was that, by this time, the series had been released in its entirety on DVD – so off I went to Sunnydale, SoCal, a small city located on a Hellmouth, where of course you’d need a vampire-slaying cheerleader, wouldn’t you? By that time, I was also less predisposed to looking at a series and dismissing it immediately as the kind of cheese that was beneath me. There certainly was more than just a whiff of dairy product especially to the first season of Buffy – but I found that the world Whedon and his collaborators had created was more clever than just cheerleaders, cute teenagers, evil vampires, grr, argh. I remembered what that friend had told me on that first day: that, sure, the series was about a cute cheerleader dusting evil vampires, but it worked on more than one level: the monsters and supernatural goings-on also spoke to the anxieties and dangers of being a teenager, of growing up emotional and confused and horny, and trying to find one’s way in all this mess.

These days, while I have fond memories of The X-Files and Star Wars, the series we watched as a weekly communal event, it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I’d count among my all-time TV series greats. That’s not to say that every single episode of the series was brilliant: as with any series that has 20+ episodes per season, there’s a lot there that is mediocre or even bad. The talents of the regular cast were also not distributed quite evenly. (No one say anything bad about my boy Anthony Head (RIP), though!) And yes, a lot of Buffy is certainly prime cheese. But even taking all of this into consideration, the series works. Accept it for what it is first and foremost: a teen-led superhero show set in a version of our world in which the supernatural exists and evil is best fought with stakes and axes and a witty quip. Once you do, you’ll find that, yes, Buffy is all of this – but it’s more besides. It is about growing up and found family, responsibility, life and death. It is funny, thrilling, sometimes tragic, often hilarious. It uses serialised storytelling to fantastic effect. It’s entirely different from the early classics of prestige TV, from The Sopranos and Six Feet Under via Deadwood to The Wire, instead being much more of a piece with the episodic TV we were used to in the 1980s and 1990s. It won’t be for everyone, and sometimes, at its cringiest, it isn’t for me. But when it works? In the sublimely creepy “Hush”, the best-ever musical episode “Once More, With Feeling” or “The Body”, which made death feel so real, and that in a series that on the surface is all about murderous supernatural beasties and has a body count to match? It’s perfection.

I wish I had given it a chance earlier, because I would have loved watching Buffy with the printer room gang.