Why “Buffy” Videos Are Still Popular Today

“Never trust a man who doesn’t have a vice.” — Mark Twain

JERUSALEM — I have a con­fes­sion, and I hope it does not cause my read­ers to take my thoughts on pol­i­tics, cul­ture, and the Mid­dle East any less seri­ously: I love “Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer” and “Angel.” And, no, I am not secretly a teenage girl who loves “Buffy” videos pre­tend­ing to be a 29-year-old man online.

When­ever I deal with a dif­fi­cult period in my life — such as a recent break-up and yet another lay­off from an Israeli com­pany in an unsta­ble econ­omy in a tumul­tuous coun­try — I retreat into the so-called “man­cave” of my bed­room, grab a six-pack of beer, make a pizza, and watch the DVDs of the two series start­ing from sea­son one.

Esther Kus­tanowitz notes, accu­rately, that the tele­vi­sion cre­ations of Joss Whe­don have still inspired such a rabid base of fans like me even though “Buffy” first appeared in 1997 and went off the air in 2003:

The name “Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer” inspires scorn from those out­side the cult, but fans wor­ship at the altar of Buffy. We’re almost a fam­ily. We dis­sect the rela­tion­ships and themes of mat­u­ra­tion and female empow­er­ment on the show. We talk about the evo­lu­tion from “Buffy” to “Angel” as a rite of pas­sage into adult dark­ness, and the hell­mouth as a metaphor for the unknown ele­ments that may destroy us. We love that even stiff-upper-lipped author­ity fig­ures have a dark side: “Rip­per” had his youth­ful exper­i­men­ta­tion with dark forces, while Wesley’s dark side is explored on “Angel.” We fell in love with new char­ac­ters in “Fire­fly,” only to have them ripped away, returned briefly for “Seren­ity,” and then ripped away again. “Doll­house,” now in its final episodes, will likely fol­low suit: we can rea­son­ably expect that there will be casualties.

Kus­tanowitz offers her rea­sons why the Whedon’s worlds are so pop­u­lar, but I will offer a few of my own. (I also loved “Fire­fly,” but I have never seen “Doll­house.”)

• The show pre­miered in 2007, and the char­ac­ters were sopho­mores in high school. I was a junior. They grad­u­ated high school in sea­son three when I had done so the prior year. (Thanks to some female friends upstairs in my dor­mi­tory, I had dis­cov­ered the show dur­ing my fresh­man year at Boston Uni­ver­sity.) So I could still empathize with the tran­si­tions dur­ing late high school and deal­ing with col­lege there­after. When­ever I go through a tough time, it makes me smile to remem­ber high school and col­lege (mainly the latter).

• The show is not really about a super­hero fight­ing the monster-of-the-episode and then the really-bad-monster-at-the-end-of-the-season. There were meta-themes that reached over sev­eral episodes, an entire sea­son, and the series as a whole includ­ing the con­flict between one’s desires and one’s duty; the impor­tance of friends and fam­ily; the need to bat­tle one’s inner demons as well as the evil out­side; the mat­u­ra­tion of peo­ple from high school to col­lege to the work­force; the sac­ri­fices peo­ple make for the greater good; the feel­ing that every­one has to devote his life to a cause; doing what is right against all odds; and the gray­ness of a world that every­one wants to make black-and-white. These fre­quent bat­tles against the evil-of-the-moment were just the present con­texts in which these themes pre­sented them­selves.  In the case of “Buffy,” the theme is that hell is not some place in the after­life — hell can be high school, col­lege, and the work world. This is sim­i­lar to the fact that in all great science-fiction — from “Star Trek” to “Bat­tlestar Gal­lac­tica” to “Baby­lon 5″ to “Doc­tor Who” — the point is not the science-fiction; it is the uni­ver­sal themes played out in that spe­cific, dra­matic context.

• The writ­ing is out­stand­ing. As a writer, I always loved the ver­bal joust­ing and obscure ref­er­ences that occurred in “Buffy.” I always smile when I hear lines like: “I think the sub­text is rapidly becom­ing the text.” I can­not even imag­ine the effort that must have gone into the screen­plays; you’ll just have to trust me.

• Yes, I must admit, it’s excit­ing to see cute girls kick­ing butt.

• The char­ac­ters are believ­able. Yes, it might be hard to imag­ine a so-called ditz turn­ing into a vam­pire slayer; a com­puter nerd turn­ing into a les­bian witch; and a high-school dork turn­ing into a con­fi­dent, blue-collar pro­fes­sional. But the char­ac­ters that Whe­don cre­ated — and that the actors embod­ied — in Buffy, Wil­low, and Xan­der, among oth­ers, were so com­plex, so full of nuance, and so devel­oped over time that view­ers could prob­a­bly sym­pa­thize with them more than some peo­ple they knew in real life. They were four-dimension char­ac­ters that were much more believ­able than the one-dimensional ones por­trayed in dri­vel like “Friends.” When one char­ac­ter dealt with pain or heartache, you really felt it.

Well, those are a few of the rea­sons that I like “Buffy.” The rea­sons why I like the spin-off — “Angel” — are both related and dif­fer­ent, but that is for another post. Right now, I have sea­son three of “Buffy” to start — it is senior year, and there is a new slayer in town.

Adden­dum: I later wrote a blog post for my com­pany on why “Buffy” is a good exam­ple of cre­at­ing brand ambas­sadors.