I disagree. I think the show slowly started to unwind after its first season. It started to take its self more and more seriously as seasons went on - resulting in two final seasons so terrible, it was like every bad episode of the X-Files back to back for two years.
Hehe, great, but what exactly do you disagree with? What I said, specifically, was that season seven (I never mentioned season six at all) was pretty bad, but that I enjoyed it more than the earlier seasons
specifically because I watched it week after week with a group of friends, as opposed to the earlier seasons which I'd watched on DVD. I wasn't saying that it was a good season, and I agree with your general sentiment (although, to be fair, I do think highly of the series as a whole, and I do think there were a few brilliant episodes in the last seasons - it's just that the overall quality wasn't there any more) - I was merely talking about how the manner in which you experience a show affects its perceived quality.
I mean, ultimately, doesn't TV always lose something after its first airing? I really dislike 24, for example - but above all, I think it's lame because when you watch it on DVD, the idea of every episode being an hour of real time turns out to be a fake gimmick. I can certainly see why people who watched on TV, with properly-placed commercial breaks and with just one episode a week, would have liked it more than I did.
The same goes for Angel; while Season One was awkward, it was its own thing. The seasons that followed tried very hard to have their own "film noir mythos" that failed pretty hard, especially with the main character suddenly having a son from the future or whatever the hell that was.
Its as if the show forgot that it shouldnt try to be bigger than its title suggests. A show titled "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" shouldn't attempt to have the biggest, most tragic teenage lovestory of all time.
Yeah, yeah, I get what you mean - though IMO, one of the biggest problems for both of these shows was that the fans tried to make them into something they weren't. I mean, you gotta be fair - if you listen to a Joss Whedon commentary on any of these episodes, he literally talks about how he basically wanted to make Party of Five, but with more rocket launchers. Yeah, sometimes he did things specifically to prove that something could be done in a TV show, but those were just three or four particular episodes (the silent episode, the musical episode, etc., etc.). The rest of these shows were pretty much pure entertainment, and they were simply unfortunate enough to attract a really, really academic following that started writing papers and theses on Joss Whedon as an
auteur.
I think when you go into any show which has ties to real life, no matter to what absurd tangent it is taken, you enter with preconceptions. Really good sci-fi or fantasy can mirror events and have you seeing the world through another perspective without even realising.
I know what you mean - sci-fi can be great as a way of de-emotionalising an issue to present a point of view that you normally wouldn't see. But, here's the thing - these issues are temporary. I mean, in twenty years time, Star Trek's commentaries about the Vietnam War will be painfully obscure for most people.
(Of course, the way BSG treated the Iraq occupation won't be obscure in twenty years time because it's a newer issue - but oh, boy, will it be embarrassing for its producers. Seriously, people who made this show will look at their work in twenty years and they simply won't be able to come up with a satisfactory answer as to why they were so petty and stupid - sure, they put in a lot of important issues, but the way they got them across has been horribly mean-spirited)
And that's the way it is with most of the stuff sci-fi explores - it's temporary. If you make an episode that refers to a particular event, you can get a very important point across, and it's an extremely valuable thing - but it's no more valuable than if you make an episode that simply talks about relationships between a group of people. Stuff about relationships will seem fairly trivial, but it's also ageless, and equally relevant at any point in history - that's why people still go to the theatre to watch Romeo and Juliet, while hardly anyone (except for a still fairly big group of English literature students, admittedly) remembers what Gulliver's Travels was all about.
But let me be clear, I don't think Buffy contributes to anything, this is probably partially because I find the majority of the characters to be abnoxious and self involved, particularly Buffy and her sister; heck spike seemed to be the most human of all the characters when I watched it. Personallity changes were frequent and each transition was jarringly immediate.
While I disagree about the personality changes (that's
the thing that got me into these shows in the first place - the fact that not only people changed over time, but that they did so in an understandable way), the rest is pretty accurate. And you know, you have to be fair - a show for teenagers, about teenagers, will have to involve a lot of obnoxious and self-involved characters
. IMO, that's the value of these shows - if a teenager watching Buffy gradually realises (like Buffy herself) that his behaviour actually has an effect on other people and that it pays to not be so self-involved all the time... then he's got more out of it than he ever would out of BSG or Star Trek. I mean, even Star Trek at its finest, clearest (you know, like The Wrath of Khan with its noble quotes about "the needs of the many") will just plain have no impact on people, precisely because it's so distant and abstract.
)
In any event, I liked Voyager. I just have to see the rest of it. Plus it spawned a great couple of games in the Elite Force title.