January 2003 posts
Another Tale of Two Series -- Darby, 11:26:42 01/27/03 Mon
This is almost pure speculation, and concerns the behind-the-scenes of the shows, which I know some people would prefer not to discuss - just letting you know...
My hypothesis is that BtVS is a decaying totalitarian state, while AtS is a healthy collective with a longer life expectancy.
I think, from limited knowledge of the creators and observations of the shows over the past two two seasons, that Joss prefers a staff of writers capable of pounding out individual episodes but not very good at preserving the integrity of the Buffyverse, which is his job. David Greenwalt seems to have put together a staff where everyone is more equally invested in the nature of the Angelverse, which makes each writer able to handle autonomy without losing the various threads. This seems to be reflected in how the staffs over time discuss their execs - Joss is continually referred to as the auteur, the final arbiter, while there's almost never even that sort of structure discussed by the AtS writers. The staff is more deferential about Joss, more playful about Greenwalt's peccadillos.
And, perhaps most importantly, when released from close supervision - Joss going off to develop Firefly and Greenwalt leaving for Miracles (premiering tonight, by the way) - Buffy has floundered and gotten majorly inconsistent, while Angel has prospered and stayed on track.
I suspsct this may be why Buffy promoted from within to replace Joss and Angel imported a new exec - there was already an heirarchy at one, but no chiefs in an all-indian environment at the other - but it didn't work for Angel (an outside exec may not have been able to adapt without alienating everyone), and now they're working with a somewhat rearranged staff.
I'm not really sure what sort of point I'm trying to make, but does this make sense?
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series (spoliers fo recent eps) -- Cactus Watcher, 13:10:36 01/27/03 Mon
I don't really see the states you do in the two series. I agree that Buffy is, as it always has been, more structured, and the Angel is more a free form amalgam of ideas. But, though Marti Noxon is not the same sort of leader as Joss I would not call the Buffy series in decay. Rather I think its goals are not as sharply defined in every episode as Joss once demanded, though the goals are still there. I suspect that everyone at ME has been aware that this truly might be the last season of Buffy since late last season. Therefore there have been fewer new ideas and challenges to be introduced. To be true to the series as a whole, the story of Buffy needs to be tied up. but this no less a part of the story than its early seasons, which were richer in mystery.
Angel on the other hand seems out of control to me. Characters behave simply to create emotional situations, and neither to further their own interests or the interests of the story. Cordelia's behavior since the middle of last season has bordered on schizophrenia. Wesley has turned into an 'un-undead' version of Angel, almost putting in as much brooding time as the vampire himself. Connor seems to serve no purpose other than to aggrivate Angel (Too much like a real child in that). Angel has been running in place since Darla died. Now I understand from others' posts that the writers have decided to give up and bring Angelus back to put some life back in the character. The stories have slipped far beyond the realm of shadowy believable fantasy/near reality, into comic book hyperbole. None of this is necessarily as bad as I'm making it sound. With some kind of vision and plan in mind it can work out fine. But, I personally don't see it heading that way.
Collective is a dirty word to someone like me who studied the USSR and it's flaws. Politicians too often use the word to mask the authoritarian rule by a few with the trappings of a mass concensus. Artists too often use the word to mask anarchy with the trappings of concensus. Frankly I think Angel could used a bit more 'authoritarian' direction or it may just as surely die at the end of this season as Buffy, without the graceful ending.
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series -- Dochawk, 15:21:17 01/27/03 Mon
Ummmm Darb, I disagree with your entire thesis.
"My hypothesis is that BtVS is a decaying totalitarian state, while AtS is a healthy collective with a longer life expectancy.
...
And, perhaps most importantly, when released from close supervision - Joss going off to develop Firefly and Greenwalt leaving for Miracles (premiering tonight, by the way) - Buffy has floundered and gotten majorly inconsistent, while Angel has prospered and stayed on track."
I find that Buffy has been fantastically consistent with only one poor episode (Him) and many excellent episodes. I know you and SK argue otherwise, but the numbers tell a diffent story. Angel is a much easier story to tell, because it rids itself of any sense of epic or mythology. In essence there is no consistent backstory for which the writers need to stay true (they need Fred to have an evil physics professor that sent her to a hell dimension, they can easily do it, because neither Fred nor portals have to have an internal consistency with a mythology). And I like alot of viewers just don't like the Angel characters. And Angel is on death watch, with many observers feeling that the WB will not renew. After reaching a peak with the Vegas episode, Angel's viewers have dwindled so that most recently they had an audience of 60% of the Vegas episode. (This holds true for the last Sunday episode, so its not the move to Wednesday - which I think was a move from a network that has already decided to cancel the show). Simply put 30% more people watch Buffy on a station with much less penetration than watch Angel. And I think Manwitch's excellent discussion below explains why. Angel just doesnt touch most of us in the way that Buffy does.
(BTW Buffy's ratings have improved slightly over the start of the season, while as I said above Angel has really suffered, so if the general audience is any measure, Buffy is having the superior season).
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series -- Darby, 15:56:53 01/27/03 Mon
I would never define artistic success by ratings numbers.
Most of my premise is based upon internal consistency, or lack of it. Buffy's depiction of the First, and the twisting of firmly established character traits (Buffy the superior strategist, or the team-based problem solver), or the floundering with Willow and Giles, even things such as a barful of demons essentially ignoring a cadre of Slayers because it was necessary to the plot, all are part of the decay. I'll grant that Angels' internal mythos is not as strong - and, as you say, is growing - but they seem, from show to show and writer to writer, to be able to retain the essential voices of the characters (well, maybe except for Cordy) while allowing them to grow in reasonable and trackable ways or revealing new aspects without seeming self-serving.
In one case, there seems a lack of guidance, while in the other, the thread seems strong. It is an opinion, so we've got a hypothesis explaining an opinion, not the strongest position I'll grant, but I thought it might be interesting to speculate.
If I can respond here to Cactus Watcher, although I couched my terms in state-level political systems, it was always about small groups, which act (especially collectives) pretty differently. Think Monty Python collective rather than Stalinist.
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Ratings Numbers -- Dochawk, 16:20:18 01/27/03 Mon
I thought I was careful to say that I wouldn't judge a show on its numbers eithers, but you need viewers to survive. Just ask Firefly. And also it has to worry you when things you are doing drive viewers away (though it doesn't seem to bother ME I agree given what they did to Buffy last year)
As to your individual examples, I think they have made Cordy just damn unlikable (but it has been inconsistant), but I could probably come up with a similar list, if I could conjur enough passion about it to do it. And its funny, my reaction to the bar scene was Spike. last we heard Spike was despised by other demons. Maybe they changed their opinion when he was on the First induced killing spree? But, Buffy has gone to other demons bars (was this Willy's?) without alot of disdain from the patrons. Though I do admit, if I was a demon in a demon bar and the slayer walked in with a bunch of kids I'd figure nothing good could come from me staying and I would scaddaddle. There are some other inconsistancies (I agree Giles, but he is being written as a feint that he is controlled by the First, so we are supposed to think something is wrong with him). One thing about Buffy, is that frequently actions that bother us at the time get explanations later in the series.
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series -- Sophist, 16:30:33 01/27/03 Mon
I would never define artistic success by ratings numbers
In the broad sense, I take you to mean that the majority can't (or shouldn't) define "art".
In one sense, I agree. What is art to you, is art regardless of what anyone else thinks. The very subjectivity of this forces us to see matters very differently over the long haul.
From a cultural standpoint, it's hard to deny that majority rules. In the long run, what gets preserved and valued and taught is the art that speaks to the most people. Perhaps we can say that it's the art which has the most universal message, i.e., the one many can relate to. Without that appeal, "art" does not survive.
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series -- manwitch, 03:11:40 01/28/03 Tue
"what gets preserved and valued and taught is the art
that speaks to the most people. Perhaps we can say that it's the art which has the most universal message,"
And I think without question, of the two series, this is Buffy. Angel is a television show that is usually decent. Buffy is a cultural icon and my opinion is that it ranks as one of the great works of spiritual literature that American Pop Culture has produced.
I don't see the lack of consistency on Buffy. I see it everywhere on Angel. I readily admit that maybe I don't "get" Angel. But for me, that makes the point as well. Buffy speaks to my heart, and I know that it is doing so even when I don't know what its saying. I confess Angel frequently just bewilders me.
Just my opinion. I watch Angel. I don't mean to be bashing it. If we were comparing it to West Wing, I'd sound much more favorable about Angel. But Angel has the misfortune that it will forever be compared with one of the few pieces of true art to ever grace television. American television anyway.
As to what goes on behind the scenes, I don't know. But I'd rather be hanging around backstage with Sara and li'l Michele than with David.
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series -- lunasea, 08:40:32 01/28/03 Tue
But I'd rather be hanging around backstage with Sara and li'l Michele than with David.
Seeing as SMG didn't even invite anyone from BtVS to her wedding, not sure I would want to hang around her. Her maid of honor was Shannon Dougherty, not known for being a people person. Whenever anyone talks about her, it is always about how professional and talented she is.
David on the other hand hangs out with the cast of his show. Whenever anyone talks about him, it is about how nice he is. Joss even says it is funny that he plays Angelus so well because he is about the nicest person you can meet.
They seem to be flip sides of the same coin. SMG plays Buffy so well, because she is not Buffy, so it is acting someone she is not. David plays Angelus so well, because it isn't remotely who he is.
Give me Alexis and David over SMG any day. If only they can get Aly over there it would be perfect.
On the BtVS vs AtS topic, I couldn't find a hook to analyze AtS on. They I realized, BtVS is the what and AtS is the why. It is a lot easier to develop symbols and mythos around what. Buffy is the journey through the various chakras (or whatever metaphor you want to use), Angel is what propels that journey.
While Buffy is going through her Dark Night S6, Angel's present is being seriously screwed with by his past. Buffy's Dark Night is ended by climbing out of the Grave. She goes from Unconscious to conscious. The way Angel stops being screwed with is to send him to a watery (read unconscious) grave. There he spends the summer getting clarity and can come back to the conscious world.
But he doesn't make it back by himself. Wesley has to find him. Buffy comes to her own realizations and climbs out herself. Dawn is a catalyst, but things take place inside of Buffy. We see what it takes more played out on Angel.
It really depends what you want to see. If you are into the journey itself, you can't beat BtVS. If you want to see what propels that journey, you can't beat AtS.
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series -- Dochawk, 09:40:37 01/28/03 Tue
About personalities. Not really appropriate for us to be talking about them without knowing, but since I am going to say only positives (well except for one little thing about respective weddings).
From the people I know who have worked on the set, Sarah is well respected and liked and she treats subordinates (hair, makeup etc) well. She does not socialize with teh cast, but one of the directors of the show actually conducted her wedding (and several actors were invited, but they were shooting). And I remember her first SNL appearance where several cast members came on the show to support her and she closed teh show with a sign saying hello and love to Aly.
Aly is supposed to be just alot of fun and a truly wonderful person. She went to the Darkness Falls premiere to support Emma (I think she was the only one who did).
David also didn't have any cast members at his wedding (from my recollection) but we saw him at the Christian Kane concert being very supportive. he is supposed to be gregarious and friendly.
I would rather hang out with SMG and the Buffy gang just because they seem more interesting and fun.
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series -- Tamara, 00:56:19 01/30/03 Thu
From what I've heard the buffy cast were not even aware that Sarah was getting married when they were asked why they weren't invited. As for tensions on set Joss has said there are. In an interview I read he stated he loves to work on Firefly because all the cast get along and help each other out. He then said the Buffy and Angel casts were very good to and "some of them get along and its great" but there were tensions with the leads and that's why he prefers Firefly as it is an ensemble show.
As for Buffys ratings it has just received its second lowest ratings for 6 years. No matter how Joss tries to spin it that is not got. Season 7 started out strong but it has gone downhill with the younger girls and all the padding. Focus on the regulars again. Give Anya more of an arc, give Xander an arc, focus on Willows problems and the show will improve.
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Re: Making Assumptions about people we don't know -- curious, 11:14:11 01/28/03 Tue
I really should not be drawn into this, but can't help it.
I have a friend who is a significant member of Charmed who also happens to be a very friendly and giving kind of chap. I was lucky enough to visit the set one day during the last days of Shannon Doherty. I didn't get to see the main cast that day, but my friend tells me that out the cast, Doherty is the one he finds the most friendly and hangs out with more than the others. Who would'av thought?
As for SMG, I understand from a mutual acquaintance who occassionally works with her on a non hollywood project that she is a funny and kind person. We can't always assume.
But given the the chance, I've loved to hang out for a day with little O' "hilarious minnie mouse on speed". (According to DB Woodside on Sarah)
So you see, we can't always assume.
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Does it really matter? -- Rufus, 11:38:12 01/28/03 Tue
manwitch made a simple statement about who he would prefer hanging out with.....you took it to a personal level that is mean. I'm here to talk about a show I like...two shows I like..but as of late I feel a definate backlash against BTVS that will do nothing but chase away people who love the show as they become sick of listening to stuff about an actor's private life I don't want to know, and you don't seem to either.
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Re: Does it really matter? hey Rufus -- curious, 12:22:50 01/28/03 Tue
I couldn't agree more. And I'm really sorry for my post above, Rufus.
---"but as of late I feel a definate backlash against BTVS that will do nothing but chase away people who love the show"--
I have to admit that this is true on my part, and unless I'm just really good at picking negative BtVS threads, there does seem to be numerous biting post criticizing BtVs to the nth degree. I've been avoiding the board more and more. But I'm very glad I came today and found that amazing "Manwitch" post.
Keeping the Buffy love here :)
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I was too........ -- Rufus, 14:43:13 01/28/03 Tue
The manwitch post is great and I found a quote that made me think of it .....
The snakes symbolize the spinal cord and immortality, the opening of the seven chakras and entrance into the divine world. There she sees the archetypal Great Mother, and she is given a place. In her resurrection she has a halo of light. This modern woman has given us one of the best recountings of the mystical symbolism of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Whether they came from experiences in previous incarnations or by sensitivity to certain vibrations on the inner plane of consciousness is mere speculation.
Eleusinian Mysteries
Manwitch's post reminded me of this....plus even the pig had a place after all.
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I agree. (Also comments on ABC Monday night line-up post Football) -- Deb, 12:23:51 01/28/03 Tue
I don't come to this board very much at all anymore. When I do, I don't even scan the entire page of threads. This caught my eye.
"...but as of late I feel a definate backlash against BTVS that will do nothing but chase away people who love the show. . ."
Rufus you pretty much summed up my feelings and reasons. I enjoy watching Buffy again, which I had come to be wary of because of all the spoiler wailing and whining. The mystery of Buffy is still there, but when one believes that they already know everything that is to be known how can they see the mystery? All they can see is what they think is the "truth." The wildfeeds I've read are hilarious in their total lack of critical viewing.
One other small point: I also grew very dim on the board because of certain people, nice people, who post to a thread that they wish they could say something but they are so spoiled. That simply halts my thinking and caring process, and tells me I'm wasting my time making any posts, because I will just be told I'm wrong. I'm wrong because I'm not spoilt (spoiled? humm.. People get spoiled. Milk gets spoilt.) spoiled.
BTH: I like ABC's new Monday night shows. They are really taking a huge gamble to follow the trend set by shows like The X-Files, Buffy and Angel on a major network (I can certainly see why they would though: Last ditch effort. It works for me!) They could have stuck us with "reality" TV. Now, maybe the Buffy spinoff could replace "The Practice" and ABC Monday night would have my full attention as "must see" TV.
Do I feel the presense of Shiva at work in Christian society today? We are certainly passing out of the "maintenance at all costs" stage in our views of God (Vishnu). Kinda like recognizing God's Shadow as not being a separate entity, but part of the Trinity that exists in all major religions: The three aspects of God. I still think someone had a sense of humour when the word "evil" was "created." Some sort of word game. Evil spelled backwards is "live."
Sorry about the OT.
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Re: I agree. (Also comments on ABC Monday night line-up post Football) -- Rufus, 14:33:28 01/28/03 Tue
One other small point: I also grew very dim on the board because of certain people, nice people, who post to a thread that they wish they could say something but they are so spoiled. That simply halts my thinking and caring process, and tells me I'm wasting my time making any posts, because I will just be told I'm wrong. I'm wrong because I'm not spoilt (spoiled? humm.. People get spoiled. Milk gets spoilt.) spoiled.
Frequently I post about being spoiled because someone has come so close to something and gets what is happening more than they think they do. Then there were times I wanted to say something because people had grown dissatisfied with the shows. And sometimes adding to certain threads would be to spoil them. I'm sorry if I made you feel bad even when I joked around about being spoiled. It was not my intention to hurt you.
Rufus you pretty much summed up my feelings and reasons. I enjoy watching Buffy again, which I had come to be wary of because of all the spoiler wailing and whining. The mystery of Buffy is still there, but when one believes that they already know everything that is to be known how can they see the mystery? All they can see is what they think is the "truth." The wildfeeds I've read are hilarious in their total lack of critical viewing.
You have brought up wildfeeds and I agree with you about them, some are a bit biased and some not. I read them all because even the most biased Wildfeed has a truth in them that another person will miss in their feed. This time of year is when I find people most quarrelsome about either show....like with the Cordy/Connor thing, what a time to take a break, when we are left with Angel on the outside looking in on what his concept of eventual family could be but was blowing up in his face.
You mentioned trinities.....two are Cordy/Angel/Connor, and Buffy/Spike/Dawn. With Cordy/Angel/Connor we see this longing for family, the very thing Angel destroyed before and has trust issues with. His relationship with Connor is facinating as it reminds me a bit the ship he had with Lindsay, the one where I expected either man to say "Mom liked you better"....with Connor and the Cordy situation, we again see that Angel never lost the ability to have a snit, but Connor serves the function of helping Angel to grow up. Maybe you could say something about the function of the Buffy/Spike/Dawn trinity.
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No apologies Rufus -- Deb, 16:43:53 01/28/03 Tue
I wasn't even thinking about you when I posted that "spoiled" people part. : ) And Wildfeeds are fun to read, but where they get some of their stuff.....
As for the Buffy/Spike/Dawn trinity: I think the way you listed them is certainly their appropriate roles of creator, maintainer and destroyer.
Buffy's blood created Dawn, and Buffy's role is that of "mother" to Dawn. Buffy "created" a family of sorts via her friends, and "created" a new way of Slayers doing things. Per character creates a new mythology for women in the Hero's role in the journey. Buffy is creating an army of SITs. The Slayer created the "problem." Buffy will have to turn her back on something or someone and release her power. It is already past her time.
Spike maintained "truth" via his astute observations of flawed thinking in season 3 and 4, and his attempt to destroy Buffy and her friends only bound them tighter together. In season 5 he maintained the role of parent of Dawn (The Gift -- did anyone else notice that the knife that was used to cut Dawn was first used to stab Spike?, and also began taking Giles' role as the "knower" of obscure occult information, all without books.) He helped maintain Buffy's sanity in Season 6, and went to get his soul, because Buffy deserved it. Interestinly enough, as maintainer, Spike has had to personally change the most and function as a Trickster. It takes a lot of energy to keep things on an even keel, and this is what he wants and admits to it at the end of season 2 when he says he likes the world as it is, and is not into apocolypses. The thing is, he had to change, and make an agreement with the Slayer to keep things even (Dru probably saw it as an agreement with the Devil in a way, and in a way it was.) In the end, Spike will need to change again to counterbalance what is spiritually wrong. He will need to make a sacrifice. Things like returning souls, or giving up a relationship to keep the soul (or perhaps gain humanity?)
Dawn is the destroyer (Shiva). She has the epheral elements of creation, as all destruction carries, but her main function in the physical world is to destroy. In season 5, her blood was the key to opening the Hellmouth and destroyed boundaries between dimensions. Dawn destroys her family's "history" with "fake" memories. Dawn "destroys" Buffy's adolescense completely when Buffy must take the role of "mother" after Joyce's death. In the end, Dawn will have a role in the "destruction" of whatever is brought to an end, but she will also carry the seeds for a new beginning.
I'd get more detailed, but Buffy is coming on in a few.
Thanks Rufus.
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Re: Does it really matter? -- Random, 14:55:57 01/28/03 Tue
No, it really, really doesn't matter. Lord knows, it would be great if the fictional characters we know and love on TV or in the movies were real...because we'd all like to think that there is a real Buffy and a real Angel out there trying to make the world a better place. But modern society and media are schizophrenic -- on the one hand, we are faced with the undeniable reality of celebrity and the exposition of the private lives of actors in the tabloids. On the other, we live in a world driven by image-based entertainment. Thus, we tend to identify real people more closely with the characters they play, and tend to feel a greater -- if false -- sense of connection to them. Don't get me wrong: a good old-fashioned book stokes my fire in ways that no movie or TV show could...but it is unavoidable that, with the immediacy of a particular person being associated with a favorite character and storyline, people tend to grow immersed in the visuals, at least nowdays. We watch LoTR and Elijah Wood becomes Frodo in some small way, no matter how often we read or how much we loved the books before the movie ever came out.
This is why I almost never read interviews by or pieces on BtVS or AtS actors. I care not a whit for what kinds of people they are...they offer me great entertainment and that's all the justification they need from my perspective. Anything more -- "SMG is a bitch" or "SMG is really nice" or "DB's pecadillos would make the Marquis de Sade cringe" -- ruin the suspension of disbelief. Ironically, manwitch echoes my own sentiments. I'd far rather hang with the BtVS crowd. Why? Because the characters are nearer and dearer to me than the AtS gang. And if they turned out to be totally dislikable people, well...c'est la vie. At least I'd thank them for the way they portrayed the characters, because that's the only thing I care to judge them on.
I would like to hang with Joss, though. Somehow, the fact that his celebrity is based on ideas, on literary foundations, makes the idea of meeting him more palatable. Hypocrisy? Maybe...
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I feel the same way. -- Sophist, 16:11:06 01/28/03 Tue
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Random, I couldn't agree more (echoing Sophist). -- Ixchel, 17:57:01 01/28/03 Tue
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Notes on the demon bar scene -- OnM, 07:56:43 01/28/03 Tue
*** ...even things such as a barful of demons essentially ignoring a cadre of Slayers because it was necessary to the plot, all are part of the decay. ***
Haven't had a chance to read this entire thread, so apologize in advance if someone already posted these thoughts:
1. Buffy has been around SD for quite a while, as presumably have many of the demons in the bar.
2. Most of these 'regular' demons know that Buffy will not attack them or slay them if they don't start trouble or attack a human.
3. These demons also know by now that in a fight, it is a virtual certainty that Buffy will win. I don't think that demon necessarily = stupid.
4. Whether they would admit it publically or not, many of the less-malevolent demons likely have a degree of respect for Buffy because she doesn't just automatically kill them on sight. I doubt previous Slayers were so discriminating.
5. Buffy has had a love affair with one demon (Angel) and a sexual fling with another (Spike). This is additional proof to other demons that Buffy is hardly a conventional Slayer.
6. Then there's Clem, whom Buffy seems to accept as a genuine friend, kitten-eating habits and all.
Consider all of the above, and it would be insane of the demons to attack Buffy (or the protos) without provocation, which of course she did not give. I feel that 'necessary to the plot' has no bearing at all in this instance, sorry Darb!
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Ouch! Sorry, archivists-- dropped tag alert! Mea culpa. -- OnM, 08:04:04 01/28/03 Tue
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Re: Notes on the demon bar scene -- Darby, 11:13:12 01/28/03 Tue
It wasn't an attack so much as a reaction to her presence I expected - a growl, a sneer, a slinking toward the exits. A barful of demons, and no one has something they want to avoid the Slayer over? They just kept on as if nothing had happened. You're right, they know Buffy - that alone should garner some reactions from someone other than Clem, who didn't even notice them right away. If a sheriff walked into a biker bar, everyone would be aware of their presence within a few seconds - and that's kind of the reaction I was looking for, established in previous bar visits. But to give the Protos something to react to, to delay the Clem huggage, they sidestepped the rational. They do a lot of that lately...
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Re: Notes on the demon bar scene -- WickedBuffy, 11:25:15 01/28/03 Tue
I dunno about the Sheriff metaphor - like said before, Buffy has let demons go and doesn't go after inactive demons (Faith, on the other hand, WOULD, just for fun - go in there and destroy the place.) I don't recall anyone getting KILLED *in* the bar by Buffy, do you?
They just go there to relax, like we would. The times they've sensed BIG trouble, they HAVE run out just to avoid getting caught anonymously in the fighting. Most are "regulars", they understand that the bar is used at times to get information from someone specific. They know Buffy needs the bar for info. Buffy does too.
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series -- Just George, 19:09:20 01/27/03 Mon
Now I hate to compare two series when I enjoy them both, but...
Hell, what am I saying. I LOVE to compare them. I live to compare them...
OK, I had to say that.
The series are different. They have different goals and they come from different places. They can be compared on many levels. But, both shows are fine horror / action /soap operas, in the best sense of each of those genres.
ACTION
The fight scenes on Angel are normally better than on Buffy, possibly because there are more physically capable characters on Angel (I don't think they were better when it was just Doyle, Cordy, and/or wimpy Wes. They are definitely better with Angel, Gunn, and dark Wes). Angel is a more visually imposing hero than Buffy is. The film makers take more chances on Angel (ex: the Matrix rip when Conner first fired on Angel).
HORROR
Angel does horror better than Buffy. The noir LA is a better setting for horror than the bright sunlight of Sunnydale. The zombies in HC were great. The Beast is cooler than the UberVamp. Holtz was creepier than Warren. In general, the horror on Buffy is a bit more sanitized than on Angle.
SOAP OPERA
Now don't get your undies in a bunch. Soap operas have good points. They practically invented the long form episodic serial drama for radio and television. Without them, we would never have had Hills Street Blues, or LA Law, or West Wing, or Buffy. Everything on TV would be episodic and look like old Star Trek or TJ Hooker . So come down from your high horse.
On the other hand, I'm talking about the 'ship part of soap operas, so maybe you can get right back up on your high horse after all.
Historically, Buffy has done soap opera better than Angel. A central element of the show was based on the Buffy, Xander, Willow triangle and the Angle, Buffy, Xander triangle. Add the Xander, Willow, Cordy triangle, the Oz, Willow, Tara triangle, the Willow, Xander, Anya triangle, the Buffy, Angle, Faith triangle, the Buffy/Riley problems, the Buffy/Spike problems, the Willow/Tara problems, and the Xander/Anya problems and you have a boat load of relationship triangles and problems. And the thing is, I have rooted for most of these 'ships to work out at one time or another. Some people (me included) may have thought twice about Buffy/Riley or Buffy/Spike, but all the triangles are tragedies. Any pairing that comes out of them would make the couple happy while leaving the 3rd party an undeserving loser. This is the stuff of great drama and great soap opera.
Angle has tried to catch up in the last couple of seasons. They have added the Gunn, Fred, Wes, Lila quadrangle and the Angel, Cordy, Conner triangle. But while Gunn/Fred is cute, Lila/Wes is hot, and Fred/Wes could be soul mates, the others make me want to gag. And you could make it all OK, if Gunn and Fred stayed together, Wes brought Lila over to the side of light, and Angel, Cordy, and Conner would become daddy, platonic best friend/mom, and son. It's never going to happen, but it could without leaving anyone uncoupled, alone, or outside of their character. If there is a simple solution that makes everyone happy then the 'ships are not the stuff of great drama.
There are also other ways to compare the shows. A few are:
THE CENTRAL METAPHOR
I believe that Buffy has a stronger, more consistent central metaphor than Angel. Continuing elements include:
Growing up. The modern over traditional (listen to Joss talk about the theme music). The individual over authority (Buffy vs. the council, the principal, The initiative, even Giles). High school is hell (now life is hell). Turning the tables on the cliché (the seeming victim is the kick ass heroine). Heroism is about paying prices, not winning battles. Responsibility is a bitch, but it is what becoming an adult is all about.
Angel's central metaphor has waffled around a bit. Some have run through the show. Some seem to have been abandon as the seasons change. It was about redemption (when did we last hear about that?). It was about 20 somethings growing up (not for a while now). It was about everyone feeling outcast in the big city (Conner is, so OK). It was about outsiders creating artificial families (yup, still there, But Buffy does that too, as did Firefly, it's an ME staple). It was about noir storytelling (is that a metaphor? Nope) I'm not sure what Angel is about now.
EPIC
The story lines on Buffy are more epic than on Angel. Most seasons have been about saving the whole town, or the whole world. The current Beast arc not withstanding, most Angel story lines have been about saving the characters, often from their own darkness or the consequences of their own actions. This does not make one show better than the other. It makes them different.
PRODUCTION VALUES
Angel has better production values now than Buffy does. The noir settings lend themselves to cool spooky situations. LA is a more interesting visual canvas than Sunnydale. For example, the hotel is cooler than the Magic Box or the Summers home.
RATINGS
A linear regression trend line based on the overnight ratings of this year's new BTVS and ATS episodes demonstrate deterioration in both show's ratings. Following the trend lines shows that Angel is in BIG trouble. Buffy is in trouble as well, but not as much.
Angle's ratings trend line for this season projects that the final episode will have an overnight rating of only 1.8. Angel's last episode had an overnight rating of 2.9, which is less than the overnight rating for the final episode of the already canceled Bird's of Prey (3.0) in the same Wednesday 9:00 PM time slot. This deterioration isn't just because of the shift to Wednesdays it was already underway.
Buffy's ratings have also suffered, but its trend line projects a season finale rating of about 3.0. This is bad, but not Firefly bad. It's would put Buffy below the highest rated UPN comedies, but still about the middle of the pack for the entire network. Not a good place to be for a show that costs $2+ mil per episode, but way above Angel.
LIKEABILITY
This is completely subjective. I like Buffy. Willow, Xander, Dawn, Giles, Anya, and Spike as a group better than Angel, Cordy, Wes, Gunn, Fred, Lorne, and Conner. I care more about what happens to them. I hurt more when they hurt. I like the Fang Gang, I just like the Scoobies better.
CONSISTENCY
Buffy has a harder time with consistency than Angle because its mythology is more complex. However, I think Buffy has done a better job than Angel has in being consistent.
Angel tends to bend consistency to fit the needs of the current story. Angel was trying to redeem himself and become human. But when he became human he threw it away. Vampires can't have kids, but Angel impregnates Darla and she has Conner. The senior partners are other-worldly. But when Angel goes to hell to confront them he ends up here. The vampire with a soul will become human, or maybe he won't, or won't care. Angel wants to love Cordy (and she he), but they seem to ignore his pesky curse.
Some people think that Buffy has been sloppy with the mythology lately. I think they need to wait for a few episodes. ME knows the slayer line goes through Faith. Buffy is just too close to the problem to see it. I'll bet ME wants to reveal that bit on screen. I think many of the other "inconsistencies" will be revealed to be plot points as well. I trust them.
CONCLUSION
I guess by this time you might see that I disagree with Darby. I don't think either show is coming off the rails. I like them both. I just like Buffy better. And I'll be sad when either or both is gone.
-Just George
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Nice assessment! Pretty much agree. -- Doriander, 21:25:41 01/27/03 Mon
Some comments.
HORROR
Angel does horror better than Buffy. The noir LA is a better setting for horror than the bright sunlight of Sunnydale. The zombies in HC were great. The Beast is cooler than the UberVamp. Holtz was creepier than Warren. In general, the horror on Buffy is a bit more sanitized than on Angle.
On the whole, I agree. But when BtVS puts its mind to it, it beats Angel in that there's a whole emotional element tied to the horror. Like 'Joyce' in 'Forever' and CwDP.
SOAP OPERA
Now don't get your undies in a bunch. Soap operas have good points. They practically invented the long form episodic serial drama for radio and television. Without them, we would never have had Hills Street Blues, or LA Law, or West Wing, or Buffy. Everything on TV would be episodic and look like old Star Trek or TJ Hooker . So come down from your high horse.
Heh.
Angle has tried to catch up in the last couple of seasons. They have added the Gunn, Fred, Wes, Lila quadrangle and the Angel, Cordy, Conner triangle. But while Gunn/Fred is cute, Lila/Wes is hot, and Fred/Wes could be soul mates, the others make me want to gag. And you could make it all OK, if Gunn and Fred stayed together, Wes brought Lila over to the side of light, and Angel, Cordy, and Conner would become daddy, platonic best friend/mom, and son. It's never going to happen, but it could without leaving anyone uncoupled, alone, or outside of their character. If there is a simple solution that makes everyone happy then the 'ships are not the stuff of great drama.
Thank you.
Angel's central metaphor has waffled around a bit. Some have run through the show. Some seem to have been abandon as the seasons change. It was about redemption (when did we last hear about that?). It was about 20 somethings growing up (not for a while now). It was about everyone feeling outcast in the big city (Conner is, so OK). It was about outsiders creating artificial families (yup, still there, But Buffy does that too, as did Firefly, it's an ME staple). It was about noir storytelling (is that a metaphor? Nope) I'm not sure what Angel is about now.
I actually think it's a composite of all the things you've listed above and it was consistent in the first two seasons. S3 was when it got shifty, thus one developes detachment to the characters. With the exception of Wes, who's virtually taken on the noir mantle, there wasn't much I could latch onto with the others, so I got a little disenchanted. In any case, WtP supposedly said S3 and S4 comprise a two-season arc, so we'll see.
EPIC
The story lines on Buffy are more epic than on Angel. Most seasons have been about saving the whole town, or the whole world. The current Beast arc not withstanding, most Angel story lines have been about saving the characters, often from their own darkness or the consequences of their own actions. This does not make one show better than the other. It makes them different.
Nicely put. BtVS also forayed into Angel's brand of storyline in S6. Only you know, with the apocalypse.
PRODUCTION VALUES
Angel has better production values now than Buffy does. The noir settings lend themselves to cool spooky situations. LA is a more interesting visual canvas than Sunnydale. For example, the hotel is cooler than the Magic Box or the Summers home.
No contest.
LIKEABILITY
This is completely subjective. I like Buffy. Willow, Xander, Dawn, Giles, Anya, and Spike as a group better than Angel, Cordy, Wes, Gunn, Fred, Lorne, and Conner. I care more about what happens to them. I hurt more when they hurt. I like the Fang Gang, I just like the Scoobies better.
Totally with you on this one.
CONSISTENCY
Buffy has a harder time with consistency than Angle because its mythology is more complex. However, I think Buffy has done a better job than Angel has in being consistent.
Angel tends to bend consistency to fit the needs of the current story. Angel was trying to redeem himself and become human. But when he became human he threw it away. Vampires can't have kids, but Angel impregnates Darla and she has Conner. The senior partners are other-worldly. But when Angel goes to hell to confront them he ends up here. The vampire with a soul will become human, or maybe he won't, or won't care. Angel wants to love Cordy (and she he), but they seem to ignore his pesky curse.
Some people think that Buffy has been sloppy with the mythology lately. I think they need to wait for a few episodes. ME knows the slayer line goes through Faith. Buffy is just too close to the problem to see it. I'll bet ME wants to reveal that bit on screen. I think many of the other "inconsistencies" will be revealed to be plot points as well. I trust them.
This is enlightening. I wonder too if gliding up walls (Deep Down), bullet speed moves (Somnambulist), or god help me sharp hearing (Smashed vs. Slouching and Offspring) are peculiar to LA vamps *g* I hope you're right about the slayer line.
CONCLUSION
I guess by this time you might see that I disagree with Darby. I don't think either show is coming off the rails. I like them both. I just like Buffy better. And I'll be sad when either or both is gone.
Same here. Nice work!
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fabulous job -- Dochawk, 22:44:01 01/27/03 Mon
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Okay...a defense of Ats, a minor rant on ratings, & quotes from Whedon/Greenwalt -- shadowkat, 22:04:03 01/27/03 Mon
First off a confession - I'm obsessed with Buffy The Vampire Slayer - I've watched every episode at least five times now. I have them all on tape, some on more than one tape. And I have tapes of DVD commentaries on them, kindly provided by a friend. I've written essays on every regular character and when it airs - I am nervous for an hour before worried something will happen to prevent me from watching. I'm going out Tuesday with a friend - who does not like or watch Buffy - but only because it's a re-run. Now I live in fear they'll trick me and show the actual episode, so I'll probably tape the dang re-run, which is a re-run of my least favorite Buffy episode this year. I think I'm the only person on the Board who prefers HIM to Help. (sigh) Angel on the other hand - is a show I've only recently started to tape or post on and I don't fret an hour ahead of time, although that's starting to change, nor do I re-watch the tapes. It's not an obsession.
Which is one of the reasons why I Can't believe I'm doing this ...really can't because up until Loyalty last year I'd written Ats off as a slightly entertaining serious, nothing to analyze or tape. But Loyalty blew me away. Don't get me wrong - the whole Darla staking herself for the baby in Lullaby moved me, but Loyalty was a tight episode with interesting twists that I hadn't predicted.
What also changed my mind last year about Angel The Series was two board posters: Aresthua and Masquerade. Aresthua challenged my view that Ats wasn't existential and Masquerade suggested I check out her essays on it - I did, and when I received the tapes from the past seasons - I realized the series was in some ways more ambitious than Buffy, it was going for a broader mythos and broader themes and it was discussing ideas like existentialism, living in a world without a road map or a purpose or a sense that everything will turn out okay, the idea of an evil person being redeemed, why are we punished, racism, community, legality, human rights...the list is endless.
Of course to get there - I had to get past my own knee-jerk reactions to the characters - Cordelia was never a favorite of mine and Angel - I'd grown bored of. Wes seemed like embarrassing comic relief (I don't tend to like physical slapstick humor much - makes me cringe). Doyle actually was the only one I really liked and they killed him off. But the writing started to pull me in and then in three brillant episodes I began to see layers: A Room With A View (Cordy's layers), I've Got You Under My Skin (Wes' layers) and the Somnabulist (Angel's layers).
Now to the informative non-personal stuff:
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The difficulty that Angel The Series has had is best described by Joss Whedon in an interview in SFX The Vampire Special:
Apparent there was shut-down after the first episode, WB and Fox complained they weren't getting what they thought they would get.
"They (WB) were very into the idea of the mythos of twentysomethings. One of the things that we had pitched them was the idea of creating a mythos of the twentysomethings, because there is none. You know, adolescence is very charged. [probably why Btvs' mythos is more obvious to Dochawk and Just George and Darby, while Ats doesn't appear to have one]Middleage is very charged in American mythos. Twentysomethings? Nobody Cares. So we thought it would be interesting to investigate the fears and things that happen in that decade in human life, but doesn't really exist, mythically speaking, in American fiction. [actually there's something of it in urban legend lore] We had sort of gone away from that. We were very interested in the addiction metaphor and our stories were extremely gritty, and we didn't really have that youth thing that the WB cares about."
"They said, 'We want to get that metaphor; we want the Buffy thing where everything is a metaphor for some adolescent experience.' It's not quite that specific on Angel, but they want to hit that. We basically said. 'Well, they're kind of right.'"
"What is twentysomething mythology? It's just that there is this passage in your life where you create the person that you're going to be. When you're in your teens, you're in a structured environment, where they're telling you what to do. When you're in your 30s, you're dealing with the choices that you made. It's when you're in your 20s that you made a lot of really important life decisions. It's when you first learned how to be a grown up. And even if that's not the most torturous thing that's ever happened to you, there's a lot of interesting stories there and a lot of opportunities for fear and things to explore. The way you look at Buffy and her boyfriend dumps her, only he turns into an evil vampire and you go, 'Oh yeah, that happened to me.' On Angel, it's someone getting married early on, or looking for their first apartment and things like that that we blow all out of proportion..."
[] are mine.
That my friends was their original mission statement. They'd planned the series to be an anthology series exploring the fears of twentysomethings but they discovered fairly quickly around about the time of the Somnabulist that this wasn't working for the fans or ratings and they needed to go the serial route. So they changed it back into a serial.
Here's more of what he says about Angel: "...personal demons as actual demons with horns kind of thing. But it's not high school humilation, alienation kind of thing. It's more of an adult, ' I'm walking in a grown up world' twentysomething or thirtysomething setting. We deal with addiction as a metaphor, because that's Angel. He's sort of a reformed drunk, so he's sort of fighting his way back to something resembling humanity and helping others to do the same. [guess the 12 steps and the Boddhistva journey are here after all ;-)] We refer to the show as Touched by An Equalizer. It will be a little darker, but it won't be one of those reletnlessly all blue-collared, agnst, 'I track a serial killer every week' kind of shows. It will have some good quirky humor. Every episode can really be different. We can go anywhere, be more like an anthology with standalone stories than Buffy does, and less of a soap-opera." (This was Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt's original plan - one Greenwalt appears to have realized with Miracles btw...the Touched by An Equalizer anthology series)
Here's what happened. They found themselves moving more and more away from the anthology format and to serial, it helped ratings, fans wanted it, and really it worked better.
Here's what David Greenwalt says: " When we started the show we thought, Well this will be an anthology show. We'll solve a case every week. And then we fell in love with our characters and we've actually become more interested in what happens with the people. We know what's going on with their lives. So we sort of reverted to a little bit more of a saga tale, I think."
So you see we have a show that started in one direction and evolved into something else entirely.
Does it have a mythos? According to the creators it does. Actually if you sat down with Joss Whedon and told him that Btvs was a more complex mythos and greater, he'd probably laugh at you and say that's because it's all so obvious - the whole adolescent agnst thing that is written about in every mythos - the young woman/young man on his her vision quest - in sort of says it here. But the adult mythos isn't so clear. The journey doesn't have easy metaphors - which maybe why Season6 and Season 7 Buffy didn't hit certain fans as well. If you prefer the adolescent journey and mythos which is in many ways represented by the slayer slaying her personal demons, lust, fear of sex, etc - then you aren't going to like the adult journey where the demons we slay aren't internalized but occassionally external.
It's not lust, so much as fear of commitment. But the mythos is in both series - just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. Lunasea wrote a post pointing it out in Angel just below. And Masq has analyzed it in her reviews.
Mythic themes in Angel the Series include - the anti-heroes journey to redemption as symbolized by Heracles (not the sanitized version - the version who killed his wife and kids) or the journey of Odysess. We also have the legends of Prometheus and Sissyphisu - the guy who kept pushing that rock up the hill (and I can't spell worth beans so forgive me). If you don't see myth in Angel - you haven't studied any myths or you have an odd definition of it.
Here's the definition that the American HEritage Dictionary gives me because I'm halfway through this post and it will screw me up to google:
Myth: "A traditional story dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a primordial type in the world view of a people."
Well I think Angel works there as well as Buffy does.
As for complicated? Well we got the whole PTB, Champions, the mythos of the vampire and the vampire with a soul and now the orgin of the vampire. Not to mention the whole Ra-ta-tet. And the whole thing on the Beast. How is this less complex or mythological than the whole thing about the First Slayer?
As for philosophical coolness? Well Aerustha posted on the existential goodness of Angel a while back and there's the whole soul metaphor thing I did on both series and lunasea's views about Buddhism. You may disagree with them but clearly several people saw it there.
So I'd say from the mouths of the writers and from posts I've seen on this board and elsewhere - Angel has a mythology, and has as much in it as Buffy.
Now onto ratings WARNING - a hopefully brief mindless somewhat explosive opinionated rant follows on the topic. Read only at your own risk:
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I HATE them. Everything time i hear the word Neilsen ratings - I feel an overwhelming urg to convince people to join with me in a campaign to convisicate all the Neilsen Boxes - put them in a warehouse somewhere. I've had way way too many favorite shows cancelled because some pot-bellied coach potato with a Neilsen box would rather watch Monday Night Football, ESPN or Seventh HEaven. I am a victim of Brillant But Cancelled. I HATE THE NEILSENS - they are the reason I've considered more than once to stop watching tv all together. Or just boycott all the advertisers. What pray tell have they done for us? Except cause reruns to appear over half the year because of SWEEPS? Except cause brillant artistic and challenging shows to be cancelled before their time? Except cause mindless brain candy like Bachelor, reality tv, and a host of situation comedies to live forever? I have no problems with these shows being on the air - I do have a problem when they cancell all the shows I like and replace them with copies of shows that have done well in the Neilsens. It's as frustrating as having your President chosen by a faulty election process in some state you don't even live in. ugh! By popular majority...right.
More like select majority. So stop bringing up ratings.
I agree with Darby - they mean zip except to the uncreative nits who run these things. Okay...mindless rant over. whew.
sorry....maybe I should delete that ;-)
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See bracketed it off so you knew when to ignore it.
Hope I didn't offend any football, Seventh Heaven fans.
While I am a charactershipper for Btvs, I'm becoming a writershipper for Ats. The production is getting better all the time - why no clue. Maybe it's just the story.
Buffy is claustrophobic because it's story dictates it. It shoots inside small sets and tight rooms. Angel can go on location shoots around LA. Angel is filmed mostly at night -so has cool night visuals. And location shoots and bigger less claustrophic sets do tend to lend themselves to better visuals come to think of it. Also the characters on Angel are older than Buffy - so can have a different older wardrobe.
The creepiness is higher in Angel because it is more film noir and less soap - although right now it seems to be more soap, but whatever. They can do more horror wise with larger sets. So there's that.
Consistency? Buffy tends to have it more. Angel, I agree, is all over the place at times. But the individual episodes are written tighter. The dialogue is actually funnier in places. There's less metanarration on films all the time.
The plot moves a little faster. There's less superfluous characters standing around. What I would give for the Beast to come to Sunnydale and take out the potential slayers as it did W&H. I still have yet to see a convincing arguement on why the potential slayers and Wood have more personality and are more developed than Manny and Gwen and Lilah and Gavin and the little evil girl and Justine and Holtz. Lots of long paragraphs on why they are nicer characters and more likable which uhm makes them Mary Sue characters according to the definition I read. Give me some reason why I should care if these superfluous guys live or die? I actually care about Andrew - just not sure which I want at the moment, it changes on a daily basis. Wood? sorry nope.
Kennedy? nope. Rona? nope....Amanda? sort of, was convinced she wouldn't make it through the last episode actually.
What are the others names again? I forget. Manny I cared about. I couldn't wait to see Gwen again. Why?
Manny wore loud shirts, was obnoxious, mentioned a desire to go to the south seas and reminds me of that bookie down the street or the rotten uncle you just wish would go away.
And he used some of the same lingo as Danny Devito in LA Confidential which made me smile.
Gwen - half x-men comic book hero, half lonely girl, can't touch a soul. My heart broke for her when she killed that boy at the orphanage, the only person nice to her, and her little red coat reminded me of the little girl in the red coat in Schindler's List. Also she had style - knew her stuff. Didn't need anyone to protect her. Took no shit.
Loved how she dealt with the client - played by Tim Irwin one of my favorite character actors, played Dad in My So Called Life. And did such a slimey role.
Justine - another villain who breaks my heart. Darla light.
The anti-slayer. Geeze what a nice sarcastic riff on Buffy.
Have to love a show that can make fun of it's sister show and show the dark edge of Buffy/Giles without blinking.
Also the literary references to the Marquis de Sade's Julie and Justine were remarkably risky. She also had enough chutzpah to talk back to Wes, but not enough to get out of the situation - one she clearly wished would continue.
You definitely felt something for her whether it was love or hate.
okay this is running fairly long...at any rate, I've developed a love for both these shows. I tape both. I post on both. They offer me different things. If you aren't watching both? What can I tell you except you're missing out on a fantastic show. And as long as you don't happen to own one of those pesky Neilsen ratings boxes, I don't really care if you're watching one or the other or why. You own one of them? Please please watch them both! OR donate your box to someone who does...or maybe I'll find a way to disable them all yet. ;-)
SK
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I'm not sure I disagree with you on much -- Dochawk, 22:58:22 01/27/03 Mon
If the "mythos" of Angel is looking at 20/30 somethings compared to Buffy looking at the mythos of high school adolesence/early adulthood (developing our identity), I can buy that Angel has an underlying mythos (well at least an attempt at one), but the teenage years/identity development are so much more universal and so much a part of the American (and more recently, western) soul that Buffy reaches a place in us that Angel doesn't. Post-adolescence is such a bewildering place and experienced so differently by so many people, that it is hard to have a unifying theme (the horror of high school, everyone experienced, but the dizzying array of experiences after that just don't come together in one metaphor) And maybe that's why Angel can't touch me, why I don't mind if I see an episode late (i mean I have two TiVo's and a VCR for Buffy, one TiVo for Angel). So I can agree with much of what your saying (I really don't agree that the writing is any better on Angel) and still think that Buffy is the superior show and the much more important.
As for ratings, yes the system now is even more evil than when it was designed. But someone has to pay for tv shows, so either we do, like we do for HBO directly, or indirectly by buying the products of the sponsors. There are many better systems, but this is the one we have to live with. But, don't blame ratings or the Neilsen people, blame the totally unimaginative and risk averse network nitwits who make these decisions.
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Re: I'm not sure I disagree with you on much -- shadowkat, 07:10:42 01/28/03 Tue
But someone has to pay for tv shows, so either we do, like we do for HBO directly, or indirectly by buying the products of the sponsors.
Actually I am paying to see them. In my area you can't see them without cable or even clearly without DTV. If it were still free, I wouldn't care so much.
I don't blame the Nielsen people, I blame the idiots who pay them to do it.
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Re: I'm not sure I disagree with you on much -- Dochawk, 09:21:50 01/28/03 Tue
DTV andf cable companies pay OTA stations a pittance. You are paying to see them, but not to the people who make them.
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Why adolescence is overvalued or at least overused -- luna, 17:39:08 01/28/03 Tue
If we look at Buffy as the myth of adolescence and Angel as the myth of adulthood, and then we look at classic studies of the mythological pattern, of course the adolescent pattern is the archetype. But consider that the reason might be that life has changed. In the past, life was short. Energy was even shorter. Babies and death were commonplace.
Now we live a LONG, LONG time. Babies and death are so rare that the death of a pet is traumatic (for me, at least). Life and its adventures aren't over at 30 (as I expected at 18), or even at 60, maybe not even at 90, who knows? But the pattern is clearly different. We have to resolve issues with our children, not our parents. Reinvention and renewal take the place of self-definition. We have to face the slow downward slide, not the uphill climb. So now is the time for the formulation of the adult myths.
But I'm a case of arrested development--Buffy hits my buttons, Angel doesn't. Go figure.
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Re: Why adolescence is overvalued or at least overused -- Darby, 05:45:11 01/29/03 Wed
I think that to some extent adolescence is more universal, too - the imagery and situations of Buffy will resonate with a bigger fraction of us. Adulthood runs along a lot more different courses, and so what hits one person's button might leave another cold - an example from Buffy might be Doublemeat Palace, which seemed to have been very well received by people with fast-food experience but not so much with those who would prefer the curtains stay drawn on that stuff (with, as always, a broad middle ground). And Angel Investigations is not your typical exployment / coworker situation, less so than Buffy had a somewhat typical high school environment.
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Trying to do twentysomething and thirty-something -- shadowkat, 08:59:37 01/29/03 Wed
I think that to some extent adolescence is more universal, too - the imagery and situations of Buffy will resonate with a bigger fraction of us. Adulthood runs along a lot more different courses, and so what hits one person's button might leave another cold - an example from Buffy might be Doublemeat Palace, which seemed to have been very well received by people with fast-food experience but not so much with those who would prefer the curtains stay drawn on that stuff (with, as always, a broad middle ground). And Angel Investigations is not your typical exployment / coworker situation, less so than Buffy had a somewhat typical high school environment.
I think this is to some extent very true. Although there was one poster on the board a while back who suggested that Btvs didn't resemble his current high school experience at all - so who knows.
But generally speaking? I see an odd trend. Every show that starts in high school then moves to the college years and twenty-somethings - struggles. Every show starting in college years or discussing twenty-somethings/thirty-somethings struggles.
Here's some of the better more sucessful ones:
Paper Chase - was on Network TV for about two years, jumped to PBS to finish it's run. Never high in the ratings. Not enough could identify - it was obviously about law school and based on a book.
Thirty-Something - actually did pretty well in the ratings, but was coaxed along and nutured. And there were threats of being cancelled throughout it's run.
Once and Again - same problems as Thirty-Something, only lasted two years.
Felicity - now being re-runned on oxygen. Made it three years I think. Was marginally successful. About a girl at NYU, very 20 something.
Shows that jumped into that decade after three years in high school:
1. Dawson's Creek - looks like it's on its last legs, it made it about 5 years I think. Followed the kids to college, wisely split them up into different schools, not in same home town...only occassionally see it - b/c it comes on before Angel and Wed is a dead zone for me.
2. Beverly Hills 90210 - it followed kids all to same college, kept the same soap opera structure, wasn't that big a change, since it was never really about high school so much as the inner relationships of the characters so didn't really matter where they were. Made it almost 7?
Never really watched so don't know.
3. Happy Days - couldn't do it. It jumped the shark literally when it left high school. Fonzie did it with skis and a leather jacket. HEnce the source of the term.
I can't think of a single show that was really sucessful after the transition. If anything it's ratings dropped afterwards. OR a twenty-something show that seems to work or can make it any length of time.
Whedon is right - there is no mythos for twenty-thirty something - but the reason is that we don't have a shared
common experience on it. Mythos - tends to come from shared common experience - it is a story that hits everyone in some way. High School is pretty shared - we all have to do it. But as is demonstrated on Btvs - not everyone goes to or finishes college, most people don't stay in the same home town, not everyone does fast food, not everyone considers marriage or stays home or etc. It would be impossible to do a show that fits everyone's basic fears and experiences.
I remember when I watched the miniseries of Stephen King's IT - and thinking, gee the kid's fears were scarier and more interesting then the adult's. I liked the kid section better - I identified with the kids. i couldn't identify with the kids. That part wasn't as scary. Why?
It's not that I don't prefer adult shows - I actually do. And in many ways - Btvs has always struck me as more adult actually. And Hill Street Blues, Star Trek, DS9, West Wing, ER, Alias...etc are all adult themed shows without a teen in sight, but none of them focus on "growing up" or "reality of life" as the central focus or item to be metaphorical about. PErhaps that's the difference?
Not sure. Just find it interesting to contemplate.
Course for myself - I watched Paper Chase and Thirty-Something because the characters intrigued me and the writing was quite good. The other shows which in some ways were more popular didn't engage me at all. Btvs and Ats - I'll watch and tape as long as they are on - the characters and stories engage me, I love watching, critiquing and analyzing them. So maybe it is just personal preference?
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And also just changing the premise, whatever it is -- luna, 11:52:22 01/29/03 Wed
It seems that shark-jumping often results from ANY big change in the premise of the show--for example, letting the fighting romancers actually tumble into bed (Moonlighting, the Nanny), having a baby/child (Mad About You, Ally MCBEal), etc. Friends seems to be able to make the move into marriage and parenthood--but it's a rare one. And I don't really think it's so much the fans as the writers, actors, etc.--they can't sustain the magic once things are different. (Not true of spin-offs, of course-- a whole new thing starts up).
"but the reason is that we don't have a shared common experience on it. Mythos - tends to come from shared common experience - it is a story that hits everyone in some way"
What I was suspecting in my earlier post is that we don't YET have a mythos for our new extended lives, but that over time some universals will appear. Until Jung and Campbell took an extended look, there didn't appear to be much shared in the lives of Jesus, Hercules, and Jack the Giant Killer. Perhaps people like Erikson are beginning to see the later patterns, and perhaps as more people live longer, we'll see art result from it.
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Great point -- shadowkat, 13:24:45 01/29/03 Wed
What I was suspecting in my earlier post is that we don't YET have a mythos for our new extended lives, but that over time some universals will appear. Until Jung and Campbell took an extended look, there didn't appear to be much shared in the lives of Jesus, Hercules, and Jack the Giant Killer. Perhaps people like Erikson are beginning to see the later patterns, and perhaps as more people live longer, we'll see art result from it.
Very good point. I think you're right. As is often the case in literature, art, history - it doesn't appear to register with us as meaningful until someone goes about analyzing it and hunting meaning in it. Someone with a lot of degrees and titles usually ;-) (Somehow I doubt if I did it any one would much care LOL!) Ulysses by James Joyce took on extra meaning when serious scholars started publishing literary critiques of it - before that point, you either liked, hated it or could care less. Same with most forms of art and expression. So I wonder is the mythos created by the storytellers about a certain age group or is it created by the analysis of the storyteller's expression or by the interaction of all three?
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Re: A longish response to: Okay...a defense of Ats... -- Just George, 02:07:01 01/28/03 Tue
I too am a BTVS fanatic. I have every ep on tape or DVD and watch them way too much. But I'm a big ATS fan as well. I bought a multi-region DVD player and both English Angel full season DVD sets just so I could catch up on all the episodes.
Now to the informative non-personal stuff:
*******************************************
Shadowcat, quoting Joss: "They (WB) were very into the idea of the mythos of twentysomethings. One of the things that we had pitched them was the idea of creating a mythos of the twentysomethings, because there is none. You know, adolescence is very charged. [probably why Btvs' mythos is more obvious to Dochawk and Just George and Darby, while Ats doesn't appear to have one]"
...
Shadowcat: "Does it have a mythos? According to the creators it does. Actually if you sat down with Joss Whedon and told him that Btvs was a more complex mythos and greater, he'd probably laugh at you and say that's because it's all so obvious - the whole adolescent agnst thing that is written about in every mythos - the young woman/young man on his her vision quest - in sort of says it here."
Hmmm. I don't remember saying that ATS didn't have a mythos. It obviously does. And I never said which was "greater" (unless you mean greater in volume). I said the Buffy mythology is more complex and that Buffy is better at being consistent with their mythology. In terms of size, the Buffy mythos has been built over 6 1/2 seasons, the Angel mythos over only 3 1/2. Angel inherited some of the Buffy mythos (but not all). The part they inherited I mentally credit to Buffy and not to Angel. That may be part of the reason I find the Buffy myth more complex. In any event, arguing greater complexity is like counting angels on the head of a pin (pun intended). I'm willing to agree that both shows have semi-connected, complex mythologies.
The section where I brought up mythology was entitled Consistency. I proposed that "...Buffy has done a better job than Angel has in being consistent." And I think I am on pretty solid ground there. As you said yourself:
Shadowcat: "That my friends was their original mission statement. They'd planned the series to be an anthology series exploring the fears of twentysomethings but they discovered fairly quickly around about the time of the Somnabulist that this wasn't working for the fans or ratings and they needed to go the serial route. So they changed it back into a serial.
...
Shadowcat: " Here's what happened. They found themselves moving more and more away from the anthology format and to serial, it helped ratings, fans wanted it, and really it worked better."
...
Shadowcat: " Consistency? Buffy tends to have it more. Angel, I agree, is all over the place at times."
They turned the show on a dime. And dramatically it worked. The show got a lot more fun to watch. However, part of that turn included what seemed to have been some fumbling around as the writers found their feet. As I said:
JG: "Angel tends to bend consistency to fit the needs of the current story. Angel was trying to redeem himself and become human. But when he became human he threw it away. Vampires can't have kids, but Angel impregnates Darla and she has Conner. The senior partners are other-worldly. But when Angel goes to hell to confront them he ends up here and they are nowhere to be seen. The vampire with a soul will become human, or maybe he won't, or won't care. Angel wants to love Cordy (and she he), but they seem to ignore his pesky curse."
Your own quote shows this clearly:
Shadowcat quoting Joss [and interjecting]: "We deal with addiction as a metaphor, because that's Angel. He's sort of a reformed drunk, so he's sort of fighting his way back to something resembling humanity and helping others to do the same. [guess the 12 steps and the Boddhistva journey are here after all ;-)]"
When was the last time Angel acted like a reformed drunk or helped someone with their humanity? I suppose you could say that Angel had a bit of a moral relapse when he tortured Lilah's boss late in Season 3. But that was almost a year ago.
The idea of Angel reforming, making up for past evils, and ultimately becoming human, while central in the early run of the show has pretty much been abandoned. Angel is a Champion now (I hate that word!), so he can do what he pleases and doesn't need to reform. His friends (esp. Loran) are the ones that try to keep Angel from going off the deep end. Angel himself seldom struggles with his conscience anymore.
BTW, I understand why you hate ratings. Some of my favorite series have been canceled too. I loved Sports Night, but not enough other people did. Now I can only see reruns on Comedy Central.
I only bring them up now for two reasons. One, Darby's original hypothesis was:
Darby: "My hypothesis is that BtVS is a decaying totalitarian state, while AtS is a healthy collective with a longer life expectancy.
A long life expectancy requires the series to survive. And survival requires ratings. Second, I have to differ with you about one thing. Angel's ratings didn't improve when they went serial. Checkout my graph of Buffy and Angel ratings which include trend lines for both. Angel's downward trend is distressingly consistent.
Graph
As to some of the rest of your post, I agree with a bunch of it. Angel's productions are getting better all the time. It has cooler visuals and a higher general creepyness factor. Buffy is more consistent, but Angel has been written tighter and moves faster. Angel writers and directors seems to remember the wonderful "show not tell" that Buffy used to be justifiably famous for. I find them both funny and don't mind the meta-narration on BTVS.
Major plot arcs on both shows have occasional problems. Too many faceless Potentials on BTVS. Cordy's character becoming unrecognizable and unfathomable on ATS. Both shows have some great strengths. Wes' wonderful growth arc on ATS. The general like-ability of the main Scoobys on BTVS. Better defined secondary characters on ATS. More epic story lines on BTVS.
Shadowcat: "okay this is running fairly long...at any rate, I've developed a love for both these shows. I tape both. I post on both. They offer me different things. If you aren't watching both? What can I tell you except you're missing out on a fantastic show."
I too love both shows. I watch both. Tape both. I post mostly on BTVS, but can post on ATS as well. I also understand that they are different shows with different focuses. And that it is OK for me to like one over the other.
-JG
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Re: A longish response to: Okay...a defense of Ats... -- shadowkat, 07:45:14 01/28/03 Tue
Voy ate my response so will try again.
I actually agreed with most of your points, which you reiterated again above. Sorry - should have posted this under another one of the posts - not the one I actually agreed with. Heh. ;-)
My response was more to point out to people that were saying Ats has no mythos - that it did. Clearly they didn't mean to imply that, but it was what I was interpreting. My bad. Glad I pointed it out though - b/c several have clarified what they meant which I think helps the lurker who may be deciding whether or not to invest in Angel.
Your criticisms of Buffy and Angel I do agree with. That was the reason I did the quotage - to explain to you, Darby and the others why Angel has the problems it does. The creators were struggling to do something no one else had ever done. Difficult to do. I give them kudos for attempting it and pulling it off half as well as they have.
While some may want to see the adolescent journey over and over and over and over again - I agree with Whedon, would prefer to see something different. Buffy did the adolescent journey amazingly well - to copy it in Angel would have been a mistake. (Not saying you said this! Just mentioning it generally). I think I'm beginning to realize the error of trying to do this...we are comparing two products made by the same company - one product is say a box of chocolates and one a box of nuts. Or one is a box of rare vintage and one a box of rare ale - they aren't really comparable and to attempt to do so may be doing both an injustice. Since I started this on other posts of mine, my heartfelt apologies for continuing to do so. I will stop now.
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Mmmm how about same Canadian Chocolate company, same chocolates, different shapes.....;) -- Rufus, 08:57:39 01/28/03 Tue
Bringing the conversation around to what counts...:):):):):)
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Comparing chocolate....moving to safe territory or maybe not ;-) -- shadowkat, 19:49:10 01/28/03 Tue
You know...methinks that I should have deleted that above post before I sent it off...and just ate some chocolate instead.
Chocolat - good compulsion
Posting thoughts and rants on the internet about television ratings and tv shows- very bad compulsive behavior, must never do.
So let's discuss chocolate.
Which brand is better? US's HErshey's? Nestle? Or say the English chocolats - Cadbury, and that CRUNCH bar I adore and only sometimes can find here? Or Lindt? Godiva?
The Swiss?
You know methinks comparing chocolats is a lot like comparing tv shows. You either like dark chocolate, white chocolat, milk chocolat, or chocolat with nuts or you are like me and want all three in abundance. Not fond of cocanut though - don't know what that says about me?
Now kitty cats - prefer siamese personally - but I know folks who hate them, can't figure out why. They have such wonderful personalities - they sound like little babies too, not quite a meow, more a human voice and those blue eyes...sucker for blue eyes. Yep I'm an eye girl.
Chocolate, kitty cats, blue eyes...and rare vintage merlot.
Although a really good British Ale is not a bad substitute.
Yep...thinking I'll go find a nice safe board that discusses chocolat on the internet...know any? ;-)
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One of the mysteries of Voy -- Tchaikovsky, 02:26:24 01/29/03 Wed
OK, so we have a board discussing these silly little shows, and two spoiler boards, but the really big question is, why is there not a Voy chocolate board?
We could discuss the literary merits of chocolate, (the board could be sponsored by Joanne Harris), the philosophy of chocolate, (as considered by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aqunias, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, in that order of developing choclate awareness), give subjective opinions on why white chocolate is too sweet, masquerading as fact, (while I would be discussing chocolates from years ago) and, of course, ship in new brands of chocolates from abroad, with Rufus subsequently doing her coy smile and telling us: 'I can't tell you how excited I am about the chocolate bars coming soon'.
And preferrably, there would be long and thematic essays on chocolate and cats, and chocolate and Canadians.
TCH
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Re: Comparing chocolate....moving to safe territory or maybe not ;-) -- Rufus, 02:51:31 01/29/03 Wed
Which brand is better? US's HErshey's? Nestle? Or say the English chocolats - Cadbury, and that CRUNCH bar I adore and only sometimes can find here? Or Lindt? Godiva?
The Swiss?
You know methinks comparing chocolats is a lot like comparing tv shows. You either like dark chocolate, white chocolat, milk chocolat, or chocolat with nuts or you are like me and want all three in abundance. Not fond of cocanut though - don't know what that says about me?
Now kitty cats - prefer siamese personally - but I know folks who hate them, can't figure out why. They have such wonderful personalities - they sound like little babies too, not quite a meow, more a human voice and those blue eyes...sucker for blue eyes. Yep I'm an eye girl.
For someone who loves chocolate you'd think I'd know more about it....or maybe it's like the private lives the celebrities who play the characters in our fav shows...there is such a thing as too much information...;)
But my favorite chocolate ship(s)..are with Cadbury (the Caramilk folks, oh and Crunchie), Toblerone, Lindt...and a few others....I find for my palate that Hershey's has a slightly bitter, chalky aftertaste (hmmmmm maybe it's evil) that I'm not fond of. Nestle isn't bad........but as you can tell I like milk chocolate....can't stand dark.
And kitties....well I like em all....big little fluffy, bald, blue/green/orange/yellow eyed....of course I have to love em all cause I get any of my kitties from the pound...even Rufus was an abandoned kitty. No offence to the dog folks, I love dogs too but I've been given a limit of how many animals I can have in our tiny place.
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actors lives, chocolat and kitty cats -- shadowkat, 07:19:00 01/29/03 Wed
For someone who loves chocolate you'd think I'd know more about it....or maybe it's like the private lives the celebrities who play the characters in our fav shows...there is such a thing as too much information...;)
But my favorite chocolate ship(s)..are with Cadbury (the Caramilk folks, oh and Crunchie), Toblerone, Lindt...and a few others....I find for my palate that Hershey's has a slightly bitter, chalky aftertaste (hmmmmm maybe it's evil) that I'm not fond of. Nestle isn't bad........but as you can tell I like milk chocolate....can't stand dark.
And kitties....well I like em all....big little fluffy, bald, blue/green/orange/yellow eyed....of course I have to love em all cause I get any of my kitties from the pound...even Rufus was an abandoned kitty. No offence to the dog folks, I love dogs too but I've been given a limit of how many animals I can have in our tiny place.
Ahhh...I share your tastes, although lately I've re-found a taste for Hershey's with Almonds, very odd. Used to think Hershey's had too mild or plasticy a taste. Have seen the Hershey's process though - when I was a little kid and we went to Hershey amusement park in Pennsylvania - it had the best wooden rollercoaster. (Not into rollercoasters any more though). Also agree - don't know overly much about it except that well...it's made from coco beans which have caffein in them but are not the same beans that make coffee so don't appear to have as much caffein so I can have chocolat but not coffee (addiction/allergy to it). I know about as much about chocolat, possibly less than the private lives of the actors who play my fav characters.
Have a policy regarding the separation of actors playing roles on stage and screen. Came up with it ages ago, when I went to see the "Batman and Robin" characters at a car dealership opening when I was 7. They were supposed to be Adam West and his sidekick on that tv show. They weren't, it was so obvious - Robin had an perm. Decided after that - I liked my characters on the TV or stage with the fourth wall invisibly in place. When I've met the actors behind the roles - same thing - it's not the character, and the actor seems smaller, less interesting somehow. I could care less what these folks do in their personal lives - they are "actors" after all - and the very act of "acting" is to play a role different from yourself. Obviously the person James MArsters, SMG, Aly, ASH are in real life is nothing like the character on the screen - what would be the fun in playing yourself? They may have attributes of themselves in the role - but as Marsters has put it - the role isn't just him, it's the writing, the set design, the costume, the makeup, etc. And in Marsters case - he has so many things dividing him from the role he plays, including but not limited to accent, makeup, being a vampire not human, bleached hair...The point for him and others is partly to become someone else, yet at the same time expose yourself because there are aspects of all humanity in every role, and if you're really good, you can convince us that you are really that role, that your character is real, it exists, if only in the story. Really good actors - can make roles feel so real, that it is hard to imagine the actor as being different from it. Reminds me of a play that Christopher Walken did ages ago for American Playhouse on PBS - "Who Am I This Time" - it's about an actor who is a "cipher" - he has no personality himself - he becomes whatever is in the script, he becomes the role. The main character, an actress, who is playing the role of Stella opposite his Stanely in the play - falls for him, only to realize after the play has concluded that she fell for Stanley not the actor.
Crunchi and Caramilk's are my favorites. Love all cats but apartment is far to small to own any. So must wait. Have been craving one though - those cat chow commercials are murder.
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Re: actors lives, chocolat and kitty cats -- Arethusa, 07:56:48 01/29/03 Wed
That was a fun show-I have a copy of it. It was written by Kurt Vonnegut, and his then-teen daughter is one of the town girls who has a crush on Walken. Walken's character grew up in an orphanage (IIRC) and he was so unsure of how to behave around people that he only came to life as a fictional character. Susan Sarandon played the girl, who had moved around constantly as a child and also had trouble relating to others. It was directed by Johnathan Demme, and had one or more of his stock characters in it. It was great to see early Demmme, Sarandon and Walken work, and Walken has never been more charming. A lovely tribute to regional theater, and the power of make-believe.
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My Life as a House: Metaphor in Angel -- Arethusa, 08:54:15 01/28/03 Tue
I'm loving all these AtS posts, and agree with most, but this little bit I disagree with.
The idea of Angel reforming, making up for past evils, and ultimately becoming human, while central in the early run of the show has pretty much been abandoned. Angel is a Champion now (I hate that word!), so he can do what he pleases and doesn't need to reform. His friends (esp. Loran) are the ones that try to keep Angel from going off the deep end. Angel himself seldom struggles with his conscience anymore.
The mission hasn't changed; the way Angel sees the mission has changed. AtS, after its initial twist from anthology to arc, has had quite a bit of consistancy. It's just Angel who keeps jumping around. At first he was all about redemption by saving troubled people and running away to brood. But Doyle reminded him that through a connection to humanity, he would be able to better understand how to help people. Later, he thought by saving Darla he would earn merit and save himself, but failed. In a BBC interview David Greenwalt said, "He did all of that stuff and then he came out of that darkness and realised, "Oh my gosh, the people I most need to make amends to are these very people who are in my life, who I work with". So he went back and he made up with the group and he tried his best to be among them." Angel went from trying to redeem the world to redeeming the people around him. But he finally realized, after his failure with Darla, that there is nothing he can do to make up for what he's done, no glorious reward to work for. There's just here, and now, and the people around us, and the little and big choices we make every day. "If there is no great glorious end to all this, if - nothing we do matters, - then all that matters is what we do. 'cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today," Angel said in Epiphany. So what does a vampire do, when he must face the fact every day that he's a mean son-of-a-bitch who wiped out his entire village after killing everyone in his family? He builds a new home, and creates a new family.
Angel has spent much of the past 250 (350) years haunted by one pivotal act, the killing of his entire family and community, committed in a rage of hate, resentment and bloodlust. It is a nightmare that no amount of penance can erase. After his epiphany, Angel tries to do what he can to help those around him, but being Angel, self-obsessed and relentless, he tends to neglect the world at large while concentrating on his obsessions. He made the Hyperion Hotel, once a neglected shell harboring a demon (like Angel himself), into his new home, and the coworkers who shared his mission into his family. When the family suffers, so does the hotel-"hence the weekly scrubbing of the lobby floor," as Lorne says after Connor is kidnapped. Like his own father, Angel sets the rules and reserves the right to cast out anyone who displeases him. But he desperately longs for the closeness of family. The framing device brilliantly pointed out by others usually emphesizes Angel's more emotional moments, when he is trying to preserve his family. "I want to freeze this moment," he tells everyone in AI during the first delusion in "Deep Down." The frames preserve moments in AtS like frames set off family pictures, freezing their moments as a family, or demonstrating Angel's longing for one. Cordy and Angel both look at photographs to remind themselves of who their family is-the only time we've seen Cordy's family is in a photograph. Angel is framed in the doorway for his Champion speech, but the emphesis is on his attempt to make Connor part of the family, part of his mission. Angel is still trying to redeem himself, but his idea of how to do that has greatly changed over time.
Wish I had time to develop this more-there's Bethany's comments about how Angel chose to live in a hotel filled with empty room, and lots more about the house as a metaphor. Where's a search function when you need one?! Any comments, additions or criticism will be appreciated. I'm still developing this idea.
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Re: My Life as a House: Metaphor in Angel -- JustGeorge, 13:24:42 01/28/03 Tue
Ok. I'm confused. Since Angel sets the tone for the series, as you say here:
Arethusa: "Like his own father, Angel sets the rules and reserves the right to cast out anyone who displeases him."
Then how can the focus of the show be consistent they way you say here:
Arethusa: "The mission hasn't changed; the way Angel sees the mission has changed. AtS, after its initial twist from anthology to arc, has had quite a bit of consistancy. It's just Angel who keeps jumping around."
And what exactly is Angel's mission? Is it to do the right thing each day and build a new family?
Arethusa: "But he finally realized, after his failure with Darla, that there is nothing he can do to make up for what he's done, no glorious reward to work for. There's just here, and now, and the people around us, and the little and big choices we make every day. "If there is no great glorious end to all this, if - nothing we do matters, - then all that matters is what we do. 'cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today," Angel said in Epiphany. So what does a vampire do, when he must face the fact every day that he's a mean son-of-a-bitch who wiped out his entire village after killing everyone in his family? He builds a new home, and creates a new family.
I can accept that as a mission. I just don't see Angel working very hard at it. He doesn't seem to support his artificial family much. Does he even know that Gunn and Fred are having problems? He treats Loran pretty poorly. He didn't exactly reach out to Wes after being saved.
Have I misread the mission? Or have I missed important things Angel has done to build the family?
-JG
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Re: My Life as a House: Metaphor in Angel -- Arethusa, 14:25:27 01/28/03 Tue
Well, Angel's chased off Lorne, banished Cordelia and Connor, rejected and nearly strangled Wes, and ungratefully ignored Gunn and Fred. In other words, a typical family dynamic. ;) I think Angel is just beginning to learn what having a family means, and he's doing a lousy job of bringing them together. But Angel/Angelus is obsessed with family issues. His youth was rebellion against his father. When he was vamped he and Darla created a family-like dynamic with the Fanged Four. And when Darla became pregnant, he quickly became obsessed with his son. Everything he's done recently has been an attempt to gain back what he lost when Connor was stolen-a family life.
Angel's mission-to help the helpless and be a player in the coming apocalypse(s) hasn't changed. And when he remembers, he does help others. But Angel's due for another epiphany, so he can realize that once again he's letting his flaws undermine what he has set out to do. Lunasea said it better when she pointed out the importance of Angel's failures as part of his personal growth.
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Re: My Life as a House: Metaphor in Angel -- Tamara, 04:05:08 01/30/03 Thu
Sorry but ever since Provider I havent been able to take it seriously when it is said Angel helps the helpless. What about that guy who was being attacked by vampires and Angel started moaning about not getting enough money.He only owns a huge hotel! He hardly helps anyone any more from what I can see.
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Interesting Graph -- Dochawk, 10:00:36 01/28/03 Tue
UPN uses the national overnights to sell Buffy because the regular nationals have a tilt towardsolder rural audiences and Buffy is sold by demographic. I don't know if their slide has been as bad using those numbers. Looking at this, I would say Angel is in trouble.
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Re: Okay...a defense of Ats, a minor rant on ratings, & quotes from Whedon/Greenwalt -- manwitch, 03:18:09 01/28/03 Tue
"I think I'm the only person on the Board who prefers HIM to Help. (sigh"
Him is a great episode. I am truly bewildered by people's objections to it. Its just plain hilarious, while at the same time being a sort of character tone poem. I loved it. But then, I love all Buffy episodes.
Cuz Buffy's in them.
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Haven't seen Him yet... -- Helen, 04:44:01 01/28/03 Tue
But from what I have read of it here it seems that it has a similar froth/fun factor to Triangle, in which case, I think I'm gonna love it.
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DEFINITELY 'Him' over 'Help' -- Finn Mac Cool, 06:52:28 01/28/03 Tue
I found "Him" to be hilarious, inventive (not so much in the overall plot, but how individual scenes played out was very unique), as well as not totally disregarding character. The numerous continuity references and the side-splitting split screen scene are what I loved the most.
As for "Help". . . It's my least favorite episode of the year. I found Cassie to be entertaining and well acted, until they had her give that speech about wanting to live. Opening up like that and saying all that to relative strangers just didn't seem right coming out of her mouth. Plus, while some of the counseling scenes were funny, I found the one where the guy's brother was in the army to be a little cliche and sappy. Then there's the painfully awkward scene between Buffy and the drunk dad. Also, the sheer fact that no one even considered that Cassie's death might be supernaturally related (while it wasn't, death by monster is more likely to happen at Sunnydale High than death by father). And, of course, there's the whole demon raising thing which just really felt tacked on. It felt as though Rebecca Rand Krischner had intended to just have Cassie die of a heart attack without any of the supernatural involved in any way, but shied away from being too much like Season Six and so put in a sub-plot about the demon raising that just seemed lame.
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Re: DEFINITELY 'Him' over 'Help' -- ponygirl, 08:49:35 01/28/03 Tue
Oh yeah! Totally agree, though actually Him saw my most dramatic about-face on an episode ever. First time I watched it, hated it. Watched it again the next night and thought it was hilarious... and far more significant to the season's themes than I'd thought. Help on the other hand, I like less and less. Nothing actually happens for most of the episode, and we get two, count 'em two recitations of Cassie's poetry. That along with her big speech seems so designed to make us care about that it actually does the opposite for me.
Don't want to get all ranty, I liked Cassie and enjoyed her turn as the FE, but Help's never going to be one of my faves.
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Biting my tongue. Biting my tongue. ;o) -- Rob, 10:51:36 01/28/03 Tue
...although I will admit that I did enjoy "Him" the second time also, after vehemently hating it the first time. Weird, isn't it?
Actually I'm not sure which is more weird...that I liked it the second time, or that I love "Buffy" so much that even an episode I didn't like I will rewatch.
Can't say I agree about it being better than "Help," though. And for what it's worth, I think Cassie was the most well-written and acted peripheral character on Buffy OR Angel this year.
Rob
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I won't deny the well acted part. . . -- Finn Mac Cool, 14:05:57 01/28/03 Tue
In my opinion, Azura Skye has truly amazing acting skills (I think part of it is her voice, which has a quality I can't quite pinpoint). As for well written . . . I think she was well written for the most part, but her little speech about wanting to live just rang false. I don't mean it rang false in that I think Cassie wanted to die; I mean that it just felt like it was something the writer really wanted to say, but she had trouble finding some way to fit it in. The way it was presented just seemed really off.
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I disagree... -- Rob, 18:22:35 01/28/03 Tue
...but since this is just a matter of subjective taste, I don't think either of us will be able to convince the other either way. But I will say that I think the thing that made the scene work for me is that Cassie has the heart of a poet, and more than that is actually a pretty good poet. So with these heightened emotions, I could see her expressing herself like this, more than just any random person. Cassie in particular is creative and artistic, and although it may seem a tad unlikely that such a speech would actually occur in real life, in the context of the scene I think it was perfect.
Rob
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It's not what she said. . . -- Finn Mac Cool, 20:18:47 01/28/03 Tue
Considering her "if it happens, it happens" attitude towards her impending death, it seemed rather jarring that she'd suddenly start talking like that. Also, if she was expressing this to someone she knew, or at least if she and Buffy had interacted a little more, I wouldn't have such a big problem with the speech. But it seemed to come out very suddenly, and I had a hard time buying that she'd shift her tone so quickly and open up so much to Buffy. Maybe if the two of them had been talking for a little while more before that happened, I wouldn't be bothered by that.
Though, don't go thinking that was my only problem with "Help".
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Agree with ponygirl -- shadowkat, 22:15:03 01/28/03 Tue
So - I can now make that 5 people...feeling less lonely all the time. Been enjoying your posts ponygirl.
Although I liked HIM when I first saw it and whenever I need to laugh really hard? I go to HIM and fast-forward to the scene with Buffy trying to shoot the Principal. It's the best Principal Wood scene all year. The actor playing Wood made it hilarous. Every time I watch Him it grows on me.
Help? I only caught the second part of tonight and did not care. Second part is the best part any way.
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Thunderous applause -- matching mole, 08:17:56 01/28/03 Tue
Finally 'Him' is getting the credit it deserves! An all time Buffy classic IMO - one of the four best episodes in a generally great season (along with Selfless, Conversations with Dead People, and the 'Willow episode with the skin-eating demon' whose name escapes me).
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That would be the ep:'Same Time, Same Place' and the Gnarl demon. -- Rufus, 08:52:42 01/28/03 Tue
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Re: MANWITCH...you're not alone--and a standing ovation for a previous post! -- curious, 12:10:24 01/28/03 Tue
Sorry about shouting out your name, but I really wanted to get your attention. The post you made "Something else entirely" gets my vote to being the greatest post of all time that I've come across. I've been watching BtVS since its inception and I too have seen Buffy's journey as a spirtual transformation, though I could never in a million years have come up with such a wonderfully written and insightful essay. Bravo!
I have to admit that I see as much traditional Christian teachings as I see Eastern Philosophy in Buffy's journey, and it confuses me too as I don't actually see much spirituality to the writers themselves from what I can make of their interviews. The show's creators seem far more intellectual and post modernist than spiritual. But I could be getting an entirely wrong impression. Anyway no matter that, your essay really fits the journey and I for one have always seen (or more appropriately, wished) for our Hero's journey to end in some messiah form. There was another poster here a long while back who response I would love to see as I believed he actually became a Buddist and was practically an expert on Eastern Philosophies.
Another thing about the journey that really interests me, its the relevance of "The Bhagavad Gita". Personally, I usually have this in the back of my mind when thinking of Buffy's journey. Perhaps this is not a good thing as I may be too prone to misleading myself. I can't help be see a point in the near future where our warrior is "awakened" to "The Cosmic Vision" as Krishna stresses to the young prince Arjuna "The Path of Right Action" while following "The Way of Love", practicing yoga and being mindful. And I babble.
As for "Him". You're not alone, as in all honesty, I really laughed alot during this episode. Are we the only ones to notice those very subtle expressions of Buffy's that I just find priceless. I just loved Dawn's troubled misery of her actions and come on, Xander and Spike was just plain fun to watch. And could there be a funnier line that Willow's, "I can work around that".
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Eh, well, a couple problems... (spoilers for Him and TR) -- Random, 15:34:28 01/28/03 Tue
First of all, I didn't particularly care for either episode -- they weren't bad, but, from my perspective, didn't come close to either of their subsequent episodes -- "Helpless" and "CWDP." But "Him," like last season's "Tabula Rasa," left me feeling very conflicted. Both were hilarious -- I cracked up at virtually all of Spike's lines in TR, especially his monologue about being a noble vampire, and few images in the entire run of the BtVS series make me laugh just thinking about it than the rocket launcher-snatch scene with Spike and Buffy. And, of course, the rest of "Him" was equally hilarious. My problem (no, I haven't forgotten that I have one) lay in what I percieved to be sloppy burlesque in the writing. "Him" was a study in exaggeration and hit-you-over-the-head comic relief. (TR did much the same, plus pounding home its points, like the essential character of each Scooby, with an iron mallet of exposition. TR was a good episode, but methinks the way it was developed strained credibility...I rarely found the dialogue believable or natural.) At no point in "Him" did I manage to suspend my disbelief -- I never bought the way the plot unfolded. BBB (Him's spiritual and thematic predecessor) was far superior IMHO because it relied less on forced slapstick and more on the innate humor of the situation. Willow's "I can work around it!" line was hilarious, but Xander's little exchange with Willow in his bedroom (X: "I don't want to use force" W:(wickedly seductive) "Hmm, force is okay..." X: (majorly creeped out)"Okay, no more!") remains a favorite scene because the writers went with the flow of the narrative (whatever the hell that means!) rather than picking out lines and shoving them into the dialogue because they're funny. I would say I preferred "Help," not because I particularly loved the episode -- it was okay -- but because I felt that "Him" lacked the naturalness and subtlety of ME's normal comedic output. (Example: "Something Blue" was out-and-out hilarious, and even slapstick...but it never seemed forced.)
Am I making any sense?
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Sorry, I meant... -- Random, 15:42:40 01/28/03 Tue
"Selfless" as the episode following "Help." Only wrong by four seasons!
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Thank you...at least I now know -- shadowkat, 22:03:46 01/28/03 Tue
That I no longer need be embarrassed for loving HIM, apparently i'm not as alone in this as I thought.
Note to self - stop making assumptions.
It seems that at least 4 people agree with me.
"We few, we happy few...we band of..."
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Re: Thank you...at least I now know -- Rufus, 02:54:36 01/29/03 Wed
I just loved Him......made me want a bazooka...;) The ep also is an example of how BTVS and ATS can swing from slapstick, to tragic very quickly...just like in real life.
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I'm with you guys. All for HIM! -- Shiraz, 06:53:26 01/29/03 Wed
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So being obnoxious is a character's way to your heart? -- Finn Mac Cool, 06:41:36 01/28/03 Tue
Because that's pretty much exactly what Manny was.
As for the proto-Slayers, I find that it sometimes helps to not look at them as a bunch of characters, but rather as a group that, for the most part, interacts with the Scoobies as though they WERE one character. With the exceptions of Kennedy and Amanda, the proto-Slayers are always together, and seem to take turns talking to Buffy in a conversation. Their talking among themselves is a little like the internal dialouge you might find in a character's head. Given this, I prefer looking at the Proto-Slayer Character rather than trying to look at each one individually (except for Kennedy and Amanda, who have been shown apart from the group, and look to be developing their own personalities).
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Heck you would hardly have seen Manny...... -- Rufus, 08:54:57 01/28/03 Tue
See the stack of papers he took into the loo with him......he was into serious research mode...;)
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If a myth falls in a forest..... -- Sophist, 09:17:50 01/28/03 Tue
It's a great week indeed when the Board has 2 such great threads at the same time as this and manwitch's below. Lots of great points here. It will not surprise you that I agree with Doc, Just George, and manwitch in this one. They've said everything so well, I have only one comment to add:
But the mythos is in both series - just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
I would add 2 words to your sentence at the very end: "for others". If I can't see it, it's not there for me, even if it's there for others.
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Re: rant on ratings -- Robert, 10:52:28 01/28/03 Tue
>>> I HATE them. Everything time i hear the word Neilsen ratings - I feel an overwhelming urg to convince people to join with me in a campaign to convisicate all the Neilsen Boxes - put them in a warehouse somewhere.
You are hating the wrong thing and the wrong poeple. The Neilsen ratings are merely a measure of the audience of a tv show. Neilsen did not cause your (and my) favorite shows to be cancelled. I never blamed Neilsen for the loss of Firefly. I blamed FOX for sabotaging it.
Your rant does strike a nerve, because I have seen variations on this theme. For 20 years I worked in the high-tech industry; some good companies and some bad. A mark of a bad company is to have a "quality assurance" department, that is responsible for the quality of product. This is total nonsense, because the quality assurance department never has any influence on the design or manufacturing process. They can only measure the quality of product, not fix it. Good companies have no quality assurance departments. Rather, they make their design and manufacturing department personally responsible for the quality of their own work.
Similarly, the Neilsen ratings are not responsible for bad shows. The production companies, broadcast companies, and viewing public are responsible for bad shows. The Neilsen ratings are just a measure of this problem.
Now having said this, the Neilsen ratings may or may not be a accurate measure of the viewing audience. If the Neilsen households are truly a random sampling of the viewing population, then I am willing to believe that the numbers are accurate. I am personally skeptical about how random the selected household really are. I looked on their website (http://www.netratings.com/) and didn't find any information about their methodology, and I am not willing to waste my time trying to call them.
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Excellent! OT rant -- Deb, 13:00:40 01/28/03 Tue
Just one true measure of how you can tell a well run company from a poorly run company. Personally, coming from media/marketing background, I find that companies with lofty and altruistic mission statements to be another sign of a poorly run company. One other sign: Tall hierarchial structure. Another sign? Companies that don't cross-train.
Final Sign for today: The environment the company places its employees, and how they treat them. I could have told anyone that MCI would fail, actually I did tell many people. They were just buying time with British Com. All you had to do was observe one of their call centers, and the way they turned their employees into machines. I don't care how high-tech the business world becomes, it's still about people and how they are treated. You can train a person to use a computer, but you can't train a person with lousy people skills how to understand, to care, to empathize with others. Too many people don't play well with the other puppies.
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More OT rant -- CW, 13:57:58 01/28/03 Tue
Agreeing with both Deb and Robert here. Another sign is a company that physically isolates its headquarters from the rest of the operation. Too often upper management doesn't want to know what's going on within its business, and has no meaningful contact with its customers on the level of day-to-day business issues. So why should they be suprised when things go terribly wrong?
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Re: rant on ratings -- Rattletrap, 14:50:54 01/28/03 Tue
Very good points.
I suspect the Neilsen's are not a terribly accurate sample as, from what I can see, they tend to neglect some groups almost completely. For example, in ten years at various colleges, I've never known anyone in a dorm room with a Nielsen box hooked to their TV. I hope they exist, but I doubt they accurately reflect the number of college students in the country that watch TV regularly. For a show like Buffy in particular, people in that age bracket represent a pretty substantial chunk of the audience, and most of the first-run episodes air during the school year.
Advertisers seem to be slightly sharper than TV execs. They seem to, on occasion, differentiate between a large audience and a loyal audience. Buffy's audience isn't large by TV standards, but it is extremely loyal which has some value to the advertisers.
Just my $.02
'trap
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More than 2 cents worth. -- Deb, 16:53:13 01/28/03 Tue
The Nielsen's have had a tendancy to stick their boxes in traditional homes (out of the 1950's.) and advertisers do want a stable target market. Half the US population does not live in a "traditional" family home anymore. I wonder how many CDs have sold because of Buffy's intextualality? Or "hip-hugger" jeans? Geez, even hair color.
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in my case, definitely hair colourant :-) -- Helen, 01:27:29 01/29/03 Wed
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Re: rant on ratings -- Dochawk, 22:56:07 01/28/03 Tue
Trap - they definitely have boxes in dorm rooms and in frats and in slums. Their statistical sample is definitely a breakdown of Americans who own television.
I was once chosen to be a sweeps sampler (during sweeps Neilsens measure about 10 times the number of people, but at the time you had to fill in books). Well at the time, my friend was working for a show called "blind Date". Amazingly for a single man, I had five tvs which had blind date on every night. Later she told me that I was only one person and it would only count once anyway. Wasn't a Buffy fan then, so I could help.
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I'm pleasantly surprised to hear that. It restores some of my faith in the Nielsens. -- trap, 14:38:03 01/29/03 Wed
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Re: rant on ratings -- shadowkat, 22:07:36 01/28/03 Tue
Sorry to push your buttons but I did post a warning and it did say "mindless opinionated rant"...guess no one believed me. (sigh)Perhaps I should have put it in bold and in capitals? Or better yet - deleted the mindless rant.
Do however agree on your rant about corporate stuff, know that all too well. Just left a company with those problems.
Although I fail to see how it has much to do with Neilsen ratings? But that may just be me.
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Re: rant on ratings -- Robert, 08:37:04 01/29/03 Wed
>>> Although I fail to see how it has much to do with Neilsen ratings?
My corporate example was meant to illustrate the contradiction of equating the measure with the cause. I am stating that neither Neilsen or the Neilsen ratings caused us to have many bad shows and view good ones. The ratings merely served as a measure of the viewing audience.
To give another example; imagine cursing the thermometer hanging in your living room for the cold winter temperatures. It can only show you the temperature, not influence it. As absurd as this example is, it does illustrate a real problem. People do not always differentiate between a correlation and a cause-and-effect.
>>> Sorry to push your buttons but I did post a warning and it did say "mindless opinionated rant"
True. One the other hand, each time I have posted something mindlessly, I've paid for it.
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Re: rant on ratings -- shadowkat, 09:18:26 01/29/03 Wed
I think we're talking at cross purposes here. My fault. Mea Culpa.
I don't blame bad television on ratings. Nor do I believe that ratings are an accurate measure of the number of viewers since no one I know is counted in that sampling, for a saner response see the one I posted to Dochawk.
I blame the fact that so many good tv shows get cancelled based on decisions made on a ratings. It would be like deciding whether or not to go outside based on what the weather channel says as opposed to your own thermonator.
The actual temp outside your house is different.
I wasn't very clear in my rant. I got blasted for it. I think I might be clearer in the post to Doc below, who knows. It always happens. Humans react to stimulous in this manner. I do, you do. My buttons got pushed by the posts above - so I reacted emotionally, bad bad move. Note to self - next time you feel emotional, turn off the computer. Don't post. ;-)
Again my apologies for any misunderstanding or buttons.
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Re: rant on ratings -- Dochawk, 22:50:35 01/28/03 Tue
Well I do have some inside information on this. A very good friend of mine used to be vice president of Nielsen's (she is now showrunner for a reality tv show, reality tv pays REALLY well). And their statistical methods are complex and accurate. I am not enough of a statistician to give you more than that, but their company is only as good as the accuracy can provide. Of course, these are the same methods that called Florida for Gore.
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a saner response, I promise...after reading the posts -- s'kat, 08:19:24 01/29/03 Wed
First an apology: It was very late at night when I wrote that rant and I was feeling a little emotional at the time -sorry if it offended anyone.
Here's a saner and a little more balanced view.
I think my difficulty with the Neilsen ratings is the same difficulty I have with statistics in general and always have had - whether they are opinion polls or tv ratings.
It's judging something that does not take my opinion or those of the people I know into account that annoys me.
Granted - there is a very obvious response to that comment.
Which I'm surprised no one screamed at me.
How in the heck are they supposed to figure out what everyone is viewing then?? Good question. Do they put some sort of micro-chip in all the DTV and cable boxes and tabulate that - and isn't that a violation of people's privacy and do we really want someone tabulating what we watch? Yet - they have to have some way of knowing what works and is watched and what isn't - there is simply not enough room to put everything on the air. And yes - these shows cost money to produce, distribute, etc. The higher the production value, the longer on air, the higher the cost.
Even HBO and SHowtime - hire companies to determine how many viewers watch their programs and which ones are watched. Their determination is somewhat easier to make than networks like Abc, Fox, Nbc, Cbs - because they are premium channels. While I do pay Time Warner for Dtv, I no longer pay for premium channels which cost an additional 12 -15 dollars a month in my area. These channels don't have commericials except for their own shows - b/c the viewer pays for them. When cable first showed up - channels like AMC and Bravo also didn't have commercials...but that was when we only had 32 channels and you automatically were paying for one premium at the time. Also I think, I could be really really wrong here - cable was run by one or two companys which were associated with the premiums and paid the channels that were part of it a portion. Things are a little different now. As evidenced by the huge battle between Time Warner and Disney over the contract to include more Disney channels in their service and how everyone should be paid.(I remember it- because it almost drove me to get satellite tv - I was watching mostly ABC at the time, life has changed - now I wouldn't care that much, we are a fickle species or at least I am.) Time Warner is an interesting one - it owns Aol, WB, HBO, TNT, TBS, among others. So when I pay for cable - I am paying the folks at WB, yet then again I'm not. At any rate - all HBO and Showtime have to do is figure out how many of their pay cable customers are tuning in - so in a way - their system is the most accurate, the numbers the Sopranos shows is far more accurate sampling of their whole audience than anything else on TV - because they can sample everyone who buys the program - you stop paying - you clearly don't watch, the Sopranos doesn't work. OTOH - they can't really tell how many people are just watching the Sopranos and not say Sex in The City - those numbers are still more or less the same sampling as the Neilsen's. It's just that they know how many watch their station. (Not sure that made sense)
Here's a little info I found out over the summer about network television, which is part of the reason I occassionally get really disillusioned with the media world. These people make most of their money in their year-end bonus - each employee gets a bonus or no bonus- depending on how their whole unit is doing. If for instance WB's ratings are up on all their shows - then everyone at WB who works on the shows and is involved in them from the mail room guy on up - will probably get a bonus based on that success. If those shows are all in the pits - they all get less then their salary or no raise at all that year. This crosses over to other divisions - book deals on the shows, movie spin-offs, etc.
So it is incredibly important to the WB that their shows do well enough - but this is NOT just based on ratings - it's actually based on advertising space. Now as much as I complain about commercial time and wonder why the heck UPN takes up so much time with commericals for their own shows - I need to remember something - regardless of how many advertisers they sell - UPN will always have approximately 20 minutes of ad space. If they don't sell that space - it's blank air time that they need to fill with something else. Buffy and other hour block shows - take up approx. 43 minutes no matter what - even if UPN got 0 ad space sold - it would still be 43 minutes. It's like a magazine or newspaper - the article is one or two columes - the rest ad space. Or this board - there will always be an ad at the top of the page - it pays for the board. Boards without ads - require us to pay. What is sooo annoying about cable is that now the viewer is paying to watch tv - it's no longer free - and has to put up with more ad space than they had to when tv was free with less channels. In the good old days - we had sponsors - who sponsored a show and just one or two - the show was broken up once in the center and had ads at the beginning and end - or so it seemed, from what my parents tell me, they could be remembering it wrong. Past always looks better in retrospect. If a network threatened to cancel a show because it lost it's sponsor - the viewers could write the sponsors and the bulk of mail may convince a new sponsor to take over. Same deal if you hated a tv show. Father Knows Best - survived due to a writing campaign, one sponsor left, another joined based on mail. After the Quiz show scandles in the 1950s, this changed. CBS - was the first network to decide to take responsibility for its shows - and cut the sponsor out of the decision-making process. The other networks followed.
It is far more difficult to convince a network to save a show than a sponsor - the reason? The network doesn't really have much to gain by pleasing a bunch of letter-writing fans. The network has other problems - one: it only has so much air space, two: it is in competition with other networks and wants to be number 1, like it or not we live in a fiercly competitive society where being number 1 means a great deal (annoying yes, true as well - hurts and aids the creative endeavor oddly enough), three:it is expensive to commission and distribute tv shows and it is just getting more expensive as we go along. (My info for this comes from numerous sources btw - 1) Trio networks great documentary Brillant But Cancelled, 2) an interview with a tv network, 3)remembered articles on the topic and PBS documentaries. Also past posts on the board by people who seem to know, 4. a family member who has worked off and on with people in it.)
Charelton Heston once said - when you get down to it - this is a business. Too true. It is. And like all business - it can be frustrating as hell.
Statistics are often not very reliable - but we've found no better way of tabulating stuff like this. So people who do this for a living, spend a lot of time figuring out the percentage of error in the sampling. I don't like our current rating system any more than I like how we test kids in this country to see if they can make it in college. (Want to see another mindless emotional rant - get me started on the SAT's and ACT's and standardized tests...ugh. I despise them. But there isn't a better way right now.) Both systems seem to have problems in the sense that they exclude people (I won't go into SAT's that's a topic for another board)- not everyone is counted by the Neilsen's - so how can it be a majority? Isn't that an oxymoron or something? I mean we have say a billion people with tv sets and the Neilsen's sample say a random 50% of that number - so how is the majority? It's only really the majority of people who watch tv with a Neilsen box attached to it. And the Neilsen box is a headache. A friend of mine, a not really into tv watching friend had one - she's single, has two cats, lives in an apartment in NYC, had one for about two years. It screwed up her TV. So they replaced the TV. They came in once every two or three months to collect the data. She discontinued it finally, because the invasion of privacy got to her, she found the box annoying and she wasn't sure she liked having to be around for them to pick up the data. That's the only person outside Doc that I've ever met with a Neilsen box. That bugs me.
It's like they are taking this information from an invisible sampling out there - whose interests and tastes effect what I see, but i don't know them, i can't discuss it with them...so whether I watch Buffy or Angel or anything does not matter. Nor does it matter whether my friends watch it. It only matters if the people with the boxes do...and which demographic they fit into. That's the annoyance. We look at JG's graph and we (unless you guys all have Neilsen boxs) aren't on it - we aren't counted.
That's what disturbs me, I think. Yet paradoxically, I'm not sure I want the invasion of privacy that having a box would entail.
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Statistics -- Sophist, 09:10:59 01/29/03 Wed
SK, statistics really are useful and reliable. If used carefully, they can be much more so than our instincts. The problem is, statistics don't speak for themselves -- they must be interpreted. It's the interpretation that can cause confusion.
Have you ever heard the famous story about the election poll of 1936? A magazine which marketed itself to upper income households asked its readers who they preferred for President. The Republican candidate (Alf Landon) won the poll easily. Based on this, the magazine predicted a Republican victory. Instead, Roosevelt won perhaps the biggest landslide in history.
There was nothing phony or false about the magazine's numbers. The editors just didn't know how to interpret them. It's that process of interpretation that is both absolutely essential to understanding statistics and the source of confusion.
FWIW, I don't care much for standardized tests either, and I think they're overused by people who don't understand them (similar to how some people misuse statistics).
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Re: Statistics -- Darby, 12:25:49 01/29/03 Wed
To skim the surface, for any group a fraction can be surveyed, and at some point making the fraction bigger won't significantly change the results - that's how surveys are done. It's what's called statistical significance, and there are way fewer Neilsen boxes needed than you would probably suspect to reach it.
The problem is that there is an inherent assumption that the fraction shares all pertinent characteristics with the group, which often isn't the case - are people willing to let Neilsen track them representative of all viewers? Does having a box alter their viewing habits?
This is why, if I'm approached for an opinion poll on some area that interests me, I'll put up with the inconvenience of it (the more inconvenient, the better - it reduces the usable fraction by driving potential participants away). As one of several million voters, my vote has little impact, but as one of a couple of hundred "voters" in a poll, I "represent" a sizable piece of the "population." But just the fact that I'll answer questions on the telephone for 20 minutes has made me non-representative of the group I'm supposed to be representing - but is it non-representative in any significant way?
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Darby you just made my brain hurt -- Helen, 04:02:31 01/30/03 Thu
"The problem is that there is an inherent assumption that the fraction shares all pertinent characteristics with the group, which often isn't the case - are people willing to let Neilsen track them representative of all viewers? Does having a box alter their viewing habits?"
This is the problem with any kind of observation of behaviour - if people know themselves to be observed, they will consciously or unconsciously alter their behaviour.
I'm not suggesting the answering is covert surveillance (hello, invasion of privacy - not that there is such a thing in the UK). In fact I don't know what the answer is. But I just wanted to say, great post. The former philosphy student in me loves this stuff.
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Re: rant on ratings -- Sophist, 08:55:28 01/29/03 Wed
Of course, these are the same methods that called Florida for Gore.
Well, since Gore actually won FL, maybe the methods are more reliable than the Supreme Court.
Do I need to add a disclaimer here that this is intended to be humorous?
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LOL! no disclaimer needed. -- shadowkat, 09:09:38 01/29/03 Wed
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series -- lunasea, 08:54:38 01/28/03 Tue
ACTION: they are geared towards different audiences. I have to admit that the gore of this season has taken me aback. I am not a male age 17-24, the target audience for AtS.
HORROR: There is more to horror than dark. BtVS does suspense, as well, if not better than AtS. Suspense is the key to horror. We have had many more nods to the great horror movies of the past on BtVS. They used up a lot of the good stuff before AtS was even thought of.
SOAP OPERA: More to it than ships. It is drama that rules the day time soaps. Ships are but one way to do this. The grand master of drama at ME is Marti. That is where Joss wanted BtVS to go, so she helms that ship. Not sure that the target audience of AtS wants drama to rule. They want fights.
CONSISTENCY: In listing AtS's inconsistency you have listed the consistency of the show. It is learning that everything you thought you wanted, everything you thought would save you, doesn't. It is learning that what you believe is wrong. It is learning not to take things for granted.
The supposed "flaws" of both shows actually are carefully constructed to tell the story they want. Without those flaws it would be a different story.
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series -- Just George, 14:13:20 01/28/03 Tue
Lunasea: "ACTION: they are geared towards different audiences. I have to admit that the gore of this season has taken me aback. I am not a male age 17-24, the target audience for AtS."
I have mixed feelings about gore. It can be effective in its place, but is a failure when it is distracting or gratuitous. I thought Gnarl vs. Willow was too visual. It would have been better (and more scary) to show less and suggest more.
In terms of action I was talking about visual presentation and stunt work. I think Angel has choreographed some very good fight scenes. Brutal, but well presented and effective in moving the story forward.
Lunasea: "HORROR: There is more to horror than dark. BtVS does suspense, as well, if not better than AtS. Suspense is the key to horror. We have had many more nods to the great horror movies of the past on BtVS. They used up a lot of the good stuff before AtS was even thought of."
BTVS has a history of doing wonderful suspense. I thought the High School and Crypt were both well used in Potentials.
However, Angel has been more consistent recently in using the idea that the path to suspense is to show the audience that a train wreck is coming, let them see that nothing can stop the train, then show them the train wreck. For example, ATS did that well with the zombies in HC. A counter example, BTVS didn't do that well with the first Potential that got killed. It just happened. It should have been foreshadowed.
Lunasea: "SOAP OPERA: More to it than ships. It is drama that rules the day time soaps. Ships are but one way to do this. The grand master of drama at ME is Marti. That is where Joss wanted BtVS to go, so she helms that ship. Not sure that the target audience of AtS wants drama to rule. They want fights."
I see plenty of drama in both shows. I just think the drama in ATS has historically been less focused on 'ships. And when ATS does focus on it, they don't do as good as job setting up the dynamic tension as BTVS does.
BTW, I like good fights, ones that are well presented and that are meaningful to the story. But I'm not sure I would generalize about the tastes of the writers or audience of either show.
Lunasea: "CONSISTENCY: In listing AtS's inconsistency you have listed the consistency of the show. It is learning that everything you thought you wanted, everything you thought would save you, doesn't. It is learning that what you believe is wrong. It is learning not to take things for granted."
Hmmm. Inconsistency is really consistency? Could you expand on that?
Lunasea: "The supposed "flaws" of both shows actually are carefully constructed to tell the story they want. Without those flaws it would be a different story."
I assume some "flaws" are mistakes that the writers wish they hadn't made. Some of the story confusion in the last 1/3 of BTVS Season 4 is probably seen as a "flaw" in hindsight. The initial episodic focus on Angel is probably seen as a "flaw" in hindsight. But hindsight is 20/20.
I assume other "flaws" are important parts of the way the stories are constructed. Some of the seeming inconsistencies in the Slayer Myth shown so far in BTVS Season 7 will probably be revealed as plot elements. The exact mechanism of Conner's birth will probably be central to a future plot. Many other seeming "flaws" are likely stylistic choices.
In other words, I agree with you.
-JG
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Re: Another Tale of Two Series -- lunasea, 15:19:35 01/28/03 Tue
Some of the story confusion in the last 1/3 of BTVS Season 4 is probably seen as a "flaw" in hindsight.
No probably about it. I can get you Marti's statement about it if you want.
Hmmm. Inconsistency is really consistency? Could you expand on that?
On BtVS we have a world is hard, bright, violent background, but that world is pretty consistent. On AtS, it is harsh and cruel, but more about chaos. That chaos is reflected in that inconsistency. In that chaos Angel learns what is really important. Buffy knows this from S1 and doesn't need the chaos to teach her.
Buffy's world is fairly ordered. She has to learn how to cope with the world. She can learn to cope with that world. Angel's world is more chaotic. He cannot learn how to cope with this world, since it is always changing. Nothing is secure. Angel wants order. He cannot have it. What is he to do?
That is his story.
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Re: Cool. Thanks for expanding your take. -- Just George, 17:00:17 01/28/03 Tue
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Buffy is winding down though, -- Captain Pugwash, 05:26:08 01/29/03 Wed
so it is bound to be less whatever (does anyone really think an 8th Season is plausible?)
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Re: Buffy is winding down though, -- Tamara, 04:34:47 01/30/03 Thu
Joss has pretty much stated he is bored with Buffy and wanted to focus on his new baby Firefly. E.g when asked if he thought Buffy would be renewed he said "god I hope not". Its the final season all right.
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This argument might be moot. -- Arethusa, 09:36:15 01/28/03 Tue
I just checked out the WB websight, and "Angel" isn't there anymore. Does this mean anything? Losing BtVS, Angel and Firefly in one year would be dreadful.
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Yes it is... -- yabyumpan, 11:47:43 01/28/03 Tue
check out http://www.thewb.com/Shows/Show/0,7353,||139,00.html it's all there including a fabulous promo for this weeks episode.
I keep going back and forth about whether I want to join in this thread. To be perfectly honest, it all seems a bit silly and a rehash of arguments which have come up time and again. (no offence meant to anyone who's posted).
What's better BtVS or AtS ? Surely it's just a matter of our own personal opinion and choice. Even with discussions of mythos, spiritual meaning, production values etc; at the end of the day it's about which show moves you more, which characters you relate to, which/whose story you're most interested in.
It's no secret that BtVS pretty much leaves me cold but AtS I absolutly love, it moves me and speaks to me in a very personal way. I really don't think that which one is better or worse can be quantified as they are two very different shows. One is a metaphor for growing up and a hero's journey, the other, from my perspective, is about the journey of an outsider, learning what it means to be human, wading through the murky, many shades of grey that is every day life, redemption, forgiveness, the 'two steps forward, one step back' dance that most of us do on our personal journeys.
I think why BtVS is more popular is that it's more easily accessible from which ever level you watch it. The 'Hero' is definately a 'Hero', she's good, no question. The good guys inveriably win, the bad guys are just 'bad' and are always defeated. (of course, it does veer away from that pattern at times but not very often).
On AtS the 'hero' isn't very heroic some of the time. The main character on the show isn't a lovable school girl, he's a reformed mass murderer who's liable to go back to his old ways at any time (coming to a small screen near you very soon). He's not always likable or good or heroic. He screws up badly, he hurts those closest to him, his past deeds have a habit of comming back and biting him on the bum. But he also keeps on trying to get it right, as do those around him. It's not always easy to watch a show where the main character is not always likable and at time, down right evil. It's not always easy to watch, period, but it's the only show that I respond to on such a deep level.
I'm not interested in 'heros' or defeating the 'big bad' or 'growing pains', I'm interested in the struggle to be good and looking at what that actually means, I'm interested in the many shades of grey and the reality that sometimes the 'big bad' (see W&H) just can't be defeated and how do you deal with that. That's my perspective, that's what I get out of the show, other people will find other things which draw them in.
Many other people will be draw to BtVS for their own reasons (I realise I've condensed BtVS to a few short sentences and I'm aware that there's a lot more to it than that, but others who have a greater investment in the show can and do fill in the gaps)
As I said at the start, comparing the shows and trying to quantify which one is better seems a bit daft. They're two very different shows telling two very different stories and will have a different appeal to different people,(way to go with over use of a word), so arguing about which one is better seems pointless. (but please don't let me stop you :o) )
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Re: Yes it is... -- Just George, 14:32:55 01/28/03 Tue
Yabyumpan: "I keep going back and forth about whether I want to join in this thread. To be perfectly honest, it all seems a bit silly and a rehash of arguments which have come up time and again. (no offence meant to anyone who's posted).
"What's better BtVS or AtS ? Surely it's just a matter of our own personal opinion and choice. Even with discussions of mythos, spiritual meaning, production values etc; at the end of the day it's about which show moves you more, which characters you relate to, which/whose story you're most interested in.
...
"As I said at the start, comparing the shows and trying to quantify which one is better seems a bit daft. They're two very different shows telling two very different stories and will have a different appeal to different people,(way to go with over use of a word), so arguing about which one is better seems pointless. (but please don't let me stop you :o) )"
Thank you for your post. At one level I agree wholeheartedly. The choice of which show is better is purely a personal one. And your criteria, "... it's about which show moves you more, which characters you relate to, which/whose story you're most interested in." nicely condenses the things I find most important in evaluating any story.
So why compare? First, I enjoy it. I like breaking things down and looking at them. It is a way to more fully appreciate each show.
Second, BTVS and ATS are a rare pair. There have been few times when a pair of shows come from the same production company, spring from a common core mythos, and are on the air at the same time. It is like comparing STNG and DS9, except that both BTVS and ATS are much richer and more emotionally complex. They invite comparison. And in some ways, it is only by comparing them do I fully appreciate some of the elements that make each show so good.
In the end, I hope to learn something by doing comparisons. For example, by examining the soap opera aspects of both shows, I learned something about creating dynamic tension in a story. My personal insight is that a successful romantic triangle is inherently a tragedy. For the tension to be real, you have to feel that someone who doesn't deserve it will be hurt no matter how the triangle is resolved. I hadn't thought of things that way before. I hope the insight will be useful when I examine stories in the future and in my own creative endeavors.
Also, the people on this board are so respectful in the way they discuss things that we can compare the shows without denigrating the creative staff or fans of either show. I would only want to engage in this kind of conversation in an atmosphere of trust.
-JG
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Why Compare -- lunasea, 15:49:23 01/28/03 Tue
The shows arcs are both written by the same man. They basically run parallel to each other. This year it is hard to see that, since the shows schedules are so off.
The shows have always been written with common themes. The approach to those themes is where they differ. If you only watch one, you don't get as much out of either, even after BtVS switched networks. They can stand alone, but together they are that much more powerful.
Those who didn't see "Sanctuary" are going to be in for a surprise when Faith shows up on BtVS. Those who missed all of Buffy's lame speeches didn't get the humor of Angel's.
One thing that screams in comparing the two is where things happen. Faith's redemption is part of AtS, not BtVS, but Buffy had to witness it. Spike is the first crossover character to show up on AtS. Little things like that causes me to compare the shows.
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Casting spoiler for Buffy in above post. -- Tamara, 04:38:04 01/30/03 Thu
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Re: Yes it is... -- yabyumpan, 18:41:12 01/28/03 Tue
I've got no problem with comparisons between the shows, I agree with what you say about it. For me it becomes an issue when the comparisons turn to judgements that one show is better than the other. Saying you (not you personally)'prefer' one show to the other is one thing but to say that one is better than the other goes to far towards being absolutist for me to feel comftable.
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Thanks. And...Wow....Spoilers- Angel Promo and spec. Plus tidbit about CC everyone knows. -- Arethusa, 15:00:14 01/28/03 Tue
Good post, and I really agree. But enough about us.
Good god, are they going to "use" Cordy to get to Angelus? What about the friend of Giles', or a happy drug? (Wes knows about both, right?) That would have to be the most melancholy lovemaking ever shown on screen. And if they use the pregnancy-whose baby? I don't know if I can take all this torture. Although I'll read the episode descriptions and see the promos when they come out the week the episode airs, I'm otherwise completely unspoiled. It's agony.
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The Pleasure principal -- Helen, 07:02:38 01/29/03 Wed
Connection crashed when I tried to post, will try again.
2 problems with using Giles' friend (if you mean the Shaman guy from Enemies (think it was that ep - one where they found out Faith was double dealing anyway):
1) he was faking to entrap Faith. Not sure he really could do what he claimed.
2) he told the scoobies that he and Giles wee quits. Did not want to be bothered again. Can you imagine the phone call "hi we're some ex friends of Rupert Giles, could you do us a little spell?". Don't think he's be too pleased.
Melancholoy love making isn't the word for it! Knowing what could happen, wouldn Angel even be able to perform? (Don't want to be too graphic, this is a family thread :-)
And Darla tried it and it didn't work.
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Good points -- Arethusa, 07:16:56 01/29/03 Wed
The more I think about it, the less I think it would work. The circumstances wouldn't exactly be conducive to perfect happiness. Fortunately, I never correctly guess what's going to happen.
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Re: Good points -- lunasea, 12:10:54 01/29/03 Wed
What would it take for Angel to achieve perfect happiness?
What a delicious question.
This is a more developed Angel than we had on "Innocence." He isn't some horny kid that wants to really be with one girl more than anything. What could cause him to completely loose himself, with all the chaos going on around him?
Having Connor wasn't enough to achieve perfect happiness.
What will do it? Inquiring minds want to know.
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Re: Good points -- Arethusa, 13:23:38 01/29/03 Wed
The Powers That Be: Angel, since you managed to avert those last apocalypses--despite yourself--you have earned your shanshu, and will be able have everything you ever wanted.
Angel: Great! I've never been so...
Angelus: ...happy.
Grrr. Arghh.
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I'll not get to watch it for a long time yet (spoiler Angel 4.10) -- Helen, 00:59:15 01/30/03 Thu
but i think our musings on this subject are about to become obselete after last night's ep.
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