This Year's Girl
Just a thought from 17 February 2005 about Joss Whedon, TV.

Into every generation, a pouty blond is born ...

Take Buffy the Vampire Slayer and remove the vampires, the witty dialogue, the compelling characters, and the genre-bending ideas. Add in more demons, more religion, a cast that all look like they just stepped off a runway, and give everyone utterly selfish motivations. Finally, take the girl, the pouty blond with the weight of the world on her shoulders, and remove her higher calling and replace it with a lower one. There you go: You have Point Pleasant.

If Buffy was a tale of female empowerment wrapped up in a vampire story and smothered in fantastic writing, then Point Pleasant is a female disempowerment story where the protagonist is simply buffeted from one teary moment to the next, utterly devoid of the genre aspects that allow a story to willfully diverge from reality, and smothered in people much too skinny to be real.

Which is really too bad, because the story could be a great one: The daughter of satan and a woman, with the power to do good and evil. It's much like the central tension that drove Buffy and Angel: Sometimes to do good in the world means looking at the evil in yourself. It had promise.

But while Buffy was on a quest to find her place in the world, and Angel was on a quest for redemption, Christina just seems to be on a quest to pout and make bad things happen to bad people. In fact, everyone in town seems to be so selfish and pointless, the only person I find myself rooting for is Lucas Boyd, who is, by all appearances, the villain.

Mostly, I just miss having a Joss Whedon show to look forward to. Hurry home, Serenity.

Vampires and Cowboys
Just a thought from 12 April 2004 about Joss Whedon, TV.

I never liked vampires. The whole vampire genre, it seemed to me, was made for sex-starved girls and self-obsessed high school goths. Then I met Buffy.

Buffy the Vampire slayer, by Joss Whedon, was great television, if you haven't heard. Smart, funny, dramatic, and very very real. Yaknow, as real as a girl dusting vamps can be.

I was a closeted Buffy fan for years. I even furtively followed Angel as he left Sunnydale for his own spinoff in LA. The noir style and male protagonist finally brought me out of hiding. I was a Buffy/Angel fan. Joss Whedon was my hero. And that was okay.

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Talking Buffy
Just a thought from 21 May 2003 about Joss Whedon, TV.

I was on Showtalkers web radio show last night, talking about the much-discussed Buffy finale and storytelling in the Jossverse. You can download the audio - I'm about 54 minutes in. Three word sum-up: Glad it's over. (Three more: Bring on Angel!)