Raising stakes

Sink your teeth into Buffy

by Charles Taylor

It's not much of a compliment to say that Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Mondays at 9 p.m. on the WB network) is the best of the supernatural shows that have debuted in the wake of The X-Files. (How hard is it to be better than Dark Skies or Profiler?) So let's say that Buffy, which has been renewed for the fall and has just started summer reruns, is going to be the next cult show that becomes a big hit -- and that it deserves to be.

Created by Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer bears only a superficial resemblance to his screenplay for the 1992 movie, an annoyingly broad teen comedy/horror spoof. Sixteen-year-old Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is the chosen one, the latest in a centuries-long lineage of young women, each of whom is the only human of her time with the strength and skill to slay vampires.

Kicked out of school for burning down the gymnasium (the bloodsuckers had invaded the prom) and hoping to put her slayer days behind her, Buffy, along with her mom, relocates to lovely Sunnydale, California. Only thing is, Sunnydale is the location of the Hell Mouth, the opening to the Underworld from which demons rise. And it's in Sunnydale that Buffy meets her Watcher -- the mentor who trains her as a slayer, mentally and physically -- in the person of the school librarian, Giles (Anthony Stewart Head, the male half of the ongoing Taster's Choice soap opera, who employs a British accent for his wonderfully dry delivery). One of the show's best gags is that the students and faculty are so caught up in the computer age, they never darken the library's door, leaving Giles -- resplendent in vests and tweeds that define bookworm chic -- free to pore over his trove of ancient demonology tomes.

The characters here are teen types (after all, high school is the place where stereotypes come to life), but the writers and the cast have taken care to put some quirky meat on their outlines. And they have the wit to make vampire slaying Buffy's cross to bear. Every teenager complains that life is unfair. But it really is when you're only 16 and saddled with the responsibility of saving mankind from demons. Driving stakes into the hearts of various toothy miscreants (they dissolve into pixilated dust), Buffy is a walking, breathing Contempo Casuals poster for revolution, slyrrr-style now!

Gellar's Buffy is cute as a button in her minidresses and knee-high boots (sigh), though she's no Miss Popularity (she wouldn't be so appealing if she were). That title belongs to Cordelia (the name is a lot less funny than that of the actress who plays her, Charisma Carpenter), who's so catty and self-involved, she's irresistible. Whedon has also given Buffy a pair of misfit sidekicks who act as her research assistants, cheerleaders, and often grossed-out Greek chorus: Xander (Nicholas Brendon), who's got a wicked crush on Buffy, and science nerd Willow (the red-headed charmer Alyson Hannigan, with her sideways smile), who's got a wicked crush on Xander. And since no teen saga is complete without unrequited love, Buffy has a romantic ideal: Angel (David Boreanaz). Unfortunately, he's a 350-year-old vampire (a good one -- he's given up feeding on humans). Fortunately, he's the hunkiest 350-year-old vampire you've ever seen.

Week after week, Buffy and company protect Sunnydale High from the Hell Mouth exchange students. So far, the choicest emissaries have been the evil mother who switches bodies with her daughter to relive her cheerleading glory days, and the girl who's such a wallflower, she literally becomes invisible, and thus is able to take her revenge. (Buffy realizes just how unpopular this girl is when she gets hold of her yearbook and sees everyone has inscribed exactly the same thing: "Have a nice summer.") The show's tone can waver; it's tough, at times, to tell where the comic deadpan ends and the straightface begins. But that's part of Buffy's sweet-spiritedness: it never becomes campy or superior by condescending to its material or its audience.

The nighttime scenes have the familiar-yet-uncertain blackness of your hometown at night. It's there that the sneaky connection between the show's teen adventurers and the vampires they face is strongest: everyone's a nocturnal creature. By day, at school, Buffy and Xander and Willow are weighed down by the usual teen complaints about their love lives (or lack thereof), school, their parents, boring suburban Sunnydale. ("A one-Starbucks town," Xander calls it.) At night, they're trawling the streets on the trail of some new ghoul.

The terrific season finale (the best of any prime-time show I saw this year) risked taking one of those encounters beyond the usual creep-show jolts by having Willow discover her techie pals slaughtered by vampires in the school's AV room. What followed was a modest, exceptionally intelligent scene about the emotional impact of violence that was anything but moralistic. It didn't put a damper on the show's visceral charge, either. Huddled in her bedroom, Willow explains to Buffy what she felt. "I've seen so much," Hannigan begins quietly, in a young girl's voice grown suddenly very tired, "I thought I could take anything . . . [But] I know those guys. I go to that room every day. And when I walked in there it wasn't our world anymore. They made it theirs. And they had fun."

Cool television shows are, by definition, more accessible than cool movies or bands or writers. Because they're right there on the TV dial, they're like a club anyone can join. For a show about high-school misfits coming out on top (or at least staying above ground) that's not only fitting -- I'd say it's awesome.