Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (29 page)

¹²
“Gingerbread” (3-11). Willow’s mother helps Joyce with the MOO campaign and later helps Joyce capture the girls so they can burn them at the stake for being witches.

¹³
When Willow was trying to keep Sunnydale safe while Buffy was away, she tried to imitate Buffy by writing and saying puns. They usually fell flat (“Dead Man’s Party,” 3-2). Even years later, Willow still didn’t have the art of punning down. Remember, the puns she programmed into Warren’s Buffybot also fell flat (“Bargaining, Parts 1 & 2,” 6-1, 6-2).

¹⁴
“Hush” (4-10) is the first episode where Tara is credited, but Willow meets her prior to this.

¹⁵
Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself
by Melody Beattie—you’ll find this on
amazon.com
also.

¹⁶
In “Tabula Rasa” (6-8) Willow uses magic to erase Buffy’s memory of Heaven, but instead everyone’s memory is erased. When memory is restored at the end of the episode, Tara realizes the magnitude of the danger to Willow and does the only thing she knows how—she leaves Willow. Note that Willow’s horrible mistake is completely fixed when they get their memories back. She does not suffer a consequence of her actions—except that Tara leaves.

¹⁷
In “Villains” (6-20), Willow tortures Warren to death.

¹⁸
In the first few episodes of the seventh season we see that Willow has undergone some heavy ritual initiation at the hands of a coven in England—people qualified to initiate Willow. We see her with a changed attitude, but ritual initiations can’t be completed without manifestation in Life—without tests to be passed where the stakes are real. Now, if the initiatory pattern is to be completed, Willow’s life has to fall apart.

¹⁹
Intimate Adventure—
Publishers Weekly
, November 10, 1989, p.22. Defined and explained at
www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventure.html
where you will find links to the complete article “A Proposal for a New Genre,” reprinted from
The Monthly Aspectarian
(
www.lightworks.com
)

²⁰
Jacqueline Lichtenberg biography and bibliography can be found at
www.simegen.com/jl/
.

O
N TELEVISION
, Buffy and her gang must contend with unseen horrors, unspeakable evils, and the dark and shadowy manipulations of secret organizations bent on reshaping the world in their own image. In reality, the writers, producers, and cast of the show contend with much the same.

The names are different, of course, but the objectives and methodologies are remarkably similar—as are the tools at their disposal, the main ones being censorship and pressure. Censorship to remove thoughts and images they find offensive, and pressure to incorporate ones they deem desirable. The degree of success in achieving these goals depends on the power of the entity.

Starting with some of the most powerful beings, in the
Buffy
verse, the Powers of Darkness are opposed by the mysterious Loa, the Spirit
Guides, and the Powers That Be—benevolent entities that guard, protect and shepherd, but not to be trifled with lightly. In the real world, there are the various corporate sponsors, whose advertising dollars pay the bills of commercial television, keeping shows safe from the dreaded cancellation. Both rarely speak, but when they do, the pronouncements are dire.

As Joss Whedon remarked in an interview with
Zap2it.com
, “Double Meat Palace was the only thing we ever did to make advertisers pull out. They did not like us making fun of fast food.” Consequently, Buffy got a new job for season seven and the Double Meat Palace storyline was scrapped.

At the same time as the advertisers would have been making their displeasure known, there’s an exchange in the “Loyalty” (3-15) episode of
Angel
, where Wesley goes in supplication to an icon of the Loa, only to find it’s a human-size anthropomorphic hamburger. The fiberglass statue grows and animates, then hits Wesley with a lightning bolt, crying, “Your insolence is displeasing!” Wes responds, under his breath, “Try chatting with a cranky hamburger . . .”

It’s hard not to read this as a commentary on Joss Whedon’s company, Mutant Enemy, dealing with the burger advertisers.

Of course, the Loa, the Spirit Guides, and the Powers That Be (and the related corporate sponsors) are not the only entities our heroes must contend with. Buffy and the Scooby gang also deal with the Watcher’s Council, which is also generally benevolent but is interested in the Slayer only as she is of use to it. Whedon and crew? The network executives, again with a similar relationship.

Television networks censor and pressure in service to their financial needs and corporate ends, not the artistic needs of an individual show or the wishes of its fans. For example, the much-anticipated kiss between Willow and Tara had to wait until another show on the WB,
Dawson’s Creek
, showed a kiss between Jack (Kerr Smith) and Ethan (Adam Kaufman, who also played Parker that same season on Buffy). This quick peck was a television landmark, a gay kiss in a teen show, but the WB chose to give it to another show—not because it was necessarily better for
Dawson’s
than it was for
Buffy
, but because it was better for the network. It would be another season before a lengthier gay kiss on
Dawson’s
and the even longer and more comforting kiss between Tara and Willow in “The Body” in season five. And even then, it is something that the network is still sensitive to.

As reported by Nicholas Fonseca in
The Crass Menagerie
article “Foul
Language. Raunchy Sex. Gore galore. On TV?,”
¹
“Buffy
exec producer Marti Noxon says UPN censors have more qualms about Willow’s romance with Tara (Amber Benson) than the show’s campy violence or ravenous (straight) sex scenes—including that racy interlude last winter in which Gellar’s Slayer offered oral pleasure to Spike. Laughs Noxon, ‘Yeah, that one was pretty dirty.’”

A more significant example of network censorship occurred in season three, with the suspension of the episode “Earshot” (3-18) in the wake of the Columbine High School shootings. “Earshot” (3-18) dealt, in part, with the possibility of a school shooting, and the following interchange was viewed as something too sensitive to be aired in the United States only a week after the murders:

    
W
ILLOW
: We have a list of the people in the cafeteria. I’ll do some computer work, match it against the FBI mass-murderer profiles. We can rule some people out.

    
X
ANDER
: I’m still having trouble with the idea that one of us is just gonna gun everybody down for no reason.

    
C
ORDELIA
(sarcastically): Yeah, ’cause that never happens in American high schools.

    
O
Z
: It’s bordering on trendy at this point.

Canada, however, was not as traumatized by the US high school shooting, and in certain areas, “Earshot” (3-18) aired as scheduled, leading to a rampant bit of tape-trading between US and Canadian fans, and, even more significantly, the rise of Internet bootlegging of copies of the episode in
MPG
file format. This only increased as the WB decided they would also delay the second half of the season finale, “Graduation Day, Part 2,” (3-22) for fear of being held liable if any violence happened anywhere during a high school graduation ceremony.

Thankfully, only Sunnydale had its mayor turn into a giant snake and attempt to eat the graduating class, so there was no spontaneous use of flamethrowers and crossbows from high schoolers across the United States. What there was was an unprecedented rise in file-trading and tape-swapping, much to the chagrin of the WB. Especially after series creator, Joss Whedon, told
USA Today
, “Okay, I’m having a Grateful Dead moment here, but I’m saying, ‘Bootleg the puppy.’”

In the end, the WB could only put a stop to the file-trading—and their own projected loss of revenues for a couple million-dollar episodes—by finally airing both of the “forbidden episodes,” as they were dubbed by Joss in one of his postings in the Bronze, the
Buffy
posting board:

Then, of course, there is self-censorship on the part of the writer, because they know what will sell with the network, and there are only so many outrageous things one can do at once. As Joss said to
Entertainment Tonight
on March 31, 2000, “The censors aren’t really a problem for me, because I’m not really big into gore.” This, for the WB, was a selling point, as reported by A.J. Jacobs in the April 25, 1997,
Entertainment Weekly
: “‘It’s the least bloody violence on television,’ boasts The WB’s Garth Ancier.” Thankfully for Joss, this was a stricture he could work with, responsible for gore-free vampire dustings, as well as the following quote in the same article: “As far as I’m concerned, the first episode of
Buffy
was the beginning of my career. It was the first time I told a story from start to finish the way I wanted.”

A popular argument goes that since the networks own
Buffy
, all of this is not, in fact, censorship, merely editorial control. Nevertheless, editorial prohibitions and pronouncements—especially ones which the creators do not agree with—are censorship all the same. They are merely called something different for internal politics and to separate them from
government
censorship, which is, in principle at least, prohibited in the US by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Buffy
, however, is global, and the First Amendment only protects the freedom of those who own the presses, not the freedom of those who work for them. Studios are free to make whatever edits they want, subject to their agreements with the artists, and television networks are free to “edit for content” (censor) for rebroadcast, subject to their own agreements with the studios.

Beyond the networks themselves, there’s the industry-sponsored Television Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board. This industry ratings board is appointed by the networks to regulate their shows, and is roughly analogous to the late unlamented Principal Snyder, whose final words before being eaten by the Mayor were “This is not orderly. This is not discipline! You’re on my campus, buddy! And when I say I want quiet, I want . . .”

Like Principal Snyder, the bureaucrats of the ratings board are often clueless, unable to deal with things that don’t conform to standard expectations. (“You. All of you. Why can’t you be dealing drugs like normal people?”) While policing episodes for George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” (excepting “piss,” which has been used multiple times on
Buffy
), they miss obscenities that aren’t part of the American idiom. For example, Spike continually flips a two-fingered gesture that means the same thing in Britain that flipping a one-fingered gesture with the middle finger means in the US. Then there are interchanges such as the following from season five’s “The Gift”: