Buffy: Season 3

It's the one with the Mayor, Dad.

My girlfriend had never seen Buffy, so earlier this year (I'd already introduced her to Doctor Who in December) we started watching. Of late we hadn't watched much, but in the last few weeks we built up a good momentum and finished Season 3, and now we're powering through Buffy 4/Angel 1.

The thing about Buffy is that if you've never seen it, it can easily be mistaken for a silly teen drama (with monsters but whatever) for girls and silly people.
So of course, when it came on TV in 1997, 10-year-old me was not watching. Channel-surfing in London in 2000, I came across a Buffy episode ("Inca Mummy Girl"), which, even though I sat and watched the whole episode, I judged to be as silly as I thought it would be and why was she so strong anyway? I also stumbled across and enjoyed an episode of Angel ("Lonely Hearts"), which only later to my horror did I discover to be a spin-off of Buffy. Ugh! Two years later, "Lonely Hearts" was on Fox 8, as part of a marathon of Buffy 4 and Angel 1, correctly interspersed. I saw the big Buffy/Angel crossover! Willow turn gay! The stuff that happens with Oz! I think I was supposed to be wrapping presents or something but all of a sudden I CARED TOO DARN MUCH ABOUT THE CHARACTERS ARRGHH! And then my parents came home and I had to pretend I didn't care. Yes, even when I worked up the courage to actually rent the DVDs in the summer of 2002, it was very much a guilty pleasure. I started with Angel, because that was more respectably dark/urban/grown-up/male, and quickly added in Buffy 1, which let's be honest is a bit silly. By the time I got to "Becoming," I was a Buffy fan, and (almost) proud of it. A season or two later, so were my parents. That's my story.

As my housemate was so kind to point out the other morning, I am the only person in the entire world who likes Season 4 more than Season 3. And I'm okay with that, because I'm right and the rest of the world is wrong. I don't like Season 4/Angel Season 1 the best just because it was my first introduction to the series, and so obviously I'm going to view everything preceding it as leading up to B4/A1; I like it the best because it is the best, and everything preceding it is leading up to the greatness of B4/A1. More on that later. What Season 3 supremacists don't need to convince me is that Season 3 is the beginning of Buffy's golden age (which I see as Buffy 3-5 and Angel 1-2, though I know others have wildly different opinions). If Season 1 was Buffy's childhood, and Season 2 was the series' adolescence, Season 3 is where the show enters early adulthood and starts making its mark on the world. It has the best villain, everyone's hair improves, Joyce has discovered Buffy's the Slayer, Angel discovers deadpan humour, Wesley allows Giles to be badass. The series becomes a lot more comfortable with itself, and doesn't need to pretend to be a trivial teeny show anymore, so even important events in a teenager's life like the prom are made into great episodes. What else? Story arc!

Another housemate insight: in Season 3 they hit upon the winning structure for oscillating between individual stories for each episode and an overall story arc. At least I think that's what he was saying. In 1999 television was changing. Yes, home video and syndication had been around for a long time, so a TV series was no longer something you watched once and never saw again, but in terms of storytelling the medium hadn't come far from the days of Star Trek or The Prisoner, neither of which was transmitted in the order in which it was made and it didn't really matter. Television was something you watched on a TV, and if you missed it you had to wait months until it came out on video. Now, people deliberately wait until the DVD box set, and if they really want to watch on a weekly basis, it's online hours after transmission. A TV season was twelve (or whatever) 45 minute stories, not a twelve-part story. I don't believe the medium at that time could really support the latter kind of storytelling. Lost was years away, and Battlestar Galactica was still a crap show from the '70s in which camp space adventurers were menaced by action figures.

But change was afoot. In 1993 J. Michael Straczynski created Babylon 5, which aimed to "present individual stories against a much broader canvas." JMS created a master story that was told over five seasons, and it pretty much worked. All television today owes a debt to Babylon 5. Meanwhile, in 1999, Buffy was developing its own format of starting with individual stories and over the course of the season allowing the season-long storyline to take over. Season 1 was pretty textbook monster-of-the-week, with only occasional reminders that the Master still existed so that the finale felt momentous. The "big bad" (as each season's main villain would come to be known) of Season 2 wasn't even evil until half way through, but once he was, the writers found ways to make him a menacing presence in all subsequent stories in a way that didn't feel forced or like they were stalling. Looking back at Season 3 it seems like it was all planned from the beginning (even though apparently they were just cryptically mentioning the Mayor until they figured out what to do with him), from the arrival of Faith and hushed whisperings of the Mayor, through the introduction of perhaps the series' best villain, to the huge crescendo at the end.