You are wrong.
Having an animated series that told adventures back in the high-school days would have been awesometastic.
I don’t know, I am just not a fan of this kind of cartoon, plus no SMG…
btw just watching this, pretty fun! : )
So after finishing the Wire, I looked at other impulse TV series purchases that I’d made based on recommendations here at Qt3, and I found out I owned Buffy, the complete series.
So I started watching last night.
Man, this is rough. Going from the Wire to this is … god, I don’t have the verbal skills to do it justice. The fight scenes are so bad. The lines are so cheesy, the production values/lighting on the show leave a lot to be desired, and most importantly, the music is so cheesy.
I’m not sure if I can stick around through the whole first season, but I’ll try. I’ve heard that the show only starts really getting good in Season 2.
You have to remember that Buffy first season was a mid-season replacement. They get an actual budget in season 2 that just keeps getting bigger as they go on.
It’s better a few seasons in, but it’s never going to approach The Wire, in any measure.
The first season’s short. Even I admit that it’s rough, and literally the only time I watch season 1 is when I’m going through the whole show start to finish with someone who’s never seen it…but it’s worth it. When the show gets going, it’s brilliant.
Buffy =/ The Wire.
The two shows are just so drastically different in almost every way that comparison just doesn’t make sense.
I enjoy both, but making comparisons is just an exercise in futility.
Yeah, it’s the ultimate apples and oranges. There’s some superlative writing in Buffy that couldn’t be conceivable in a show like The Wire. It’d be like criticizing Radiohead because you were just listening to Ella Fitzgerald, or something.
You can objectively compare production values between the two despite the different genres and it’s easy to see that Buffy never got the funding that The Wire had. Now, I’m not saying that a cheaply made show can’t be as good as an expensive one, but all other things being equal, it makes a difference.
I love Buffy, but it was never the best looking show by any means. Even at it’s funding height, the show didn’t begin to approach the kind of production values or camera work that an average prime time drama has on the “big three.”
Subjectively, I’ll agree with extarbags. As big a fan as I am, the show is just not as good as The Wire.
It’s not the best-shot show ever, but from season 3 onward it looks perfectly fine on that level, quite up to the standard of professional TV production. Most “cheesiness” that would be perceived comes from the fact that it’s trying to visualize stuff that requires a lot of FX or makeup. The Wire presumably had a bigger budget; it also didn’t have stories involving demons and whatnot. There’s some suspension-of-disbelief that goes into it, and some allowances made for production limitations, as there is with a lot of superlative sci-fi/fantasy TV.
To me, that kinda stuff falls away pretty quickly, as long as it attains a base level of competence, which Buffy did and often exceeded. As most TV dramas boil down to characters talking to one another, writing and acting come to the fore. On that front, the best of Buffy is certainly as good as, or better than, anything I saw from Season 1 of The Wire. (I haven’t finished watching the show, so can’t speak to its quality in subsequent seasons.) Much as I like that season, I see nothing in it that strikes me as more memorable, more aesthetically accomplished, or more clever than Buffy episodes such as The Zeppo, Doppelgangland, Superstar, Innocence Part 2, or Once More With Feeling. The shows are operating in totally different modes and have totally different aesthetic goals, and based on The Wire’s Season 1 I can’t agree that Buffy is “just not as good,” at least at their respective peaks. (I’ll have to see if The Wire gets materially better in subsequent seasons.) Episode-to-episode consistency might be better on The Wire though; Buffy’s a pretty uneven show.
I’m just not sure a comparison between two such vastly different shows is likely to be very illuminating. To go from a gritty realistic crime drama to a fantasy/satire/coming-of-age-tale that employs supernatural genre elements metaphorically to explore the experience of young adulthood, and that contains within its compass enormous freedom of experimentation with the hour-long TV drama format: the contrast is so huge that it will become too easy to deride the latter as “cheesy” or something, without really getting a bead on what the show’s about or what it’s trying to do. And that would be a shame.
The two shows are so vastly, vastly different comparing them isn’t very useful. Buffy was a genuinely great show, with some episodes that are TV Hall of Fame-type masterpieces (The Body stands up to anything in the history of the medium). It’s well worth watching, but you have to accept that it is what it is, for example, it’s a campy teen supernatural adventure show on the WB.
I’d agree, but Rock8man is already mentally making the comparison. He can’t help it, having just watched The Wire. We can go around and around on this, but I think it’s important to set the expectations suitably lower for Buffy.
I’ve said in this very thread that The Body is hands down my favorite episdode of anything ever on TV. Everything about it is perfect and I don’t think I’ve ever seen an episode of TV that really captured that feeling as well as those scenes did. That said, I’d still say that The Wire is just a flat-out better produced show.
Does Buffy accomplish what it set out to do better than The Wire? I don’t think so, but that’s my opinion. YMMV. As far as production values, music, choreography, etc, I don’t think Rock8man is wrong to say he perceives them to be lower in quality. They are.
Edit: Hugin says it better.
Rock8man can set his expectations wherever he wants, but I think it’s good to go into something with a willingness to take it in on its own terms, not bring in preconceptions from something completely different. With that mentality one risks not really seeing what’s there, because one is distracted by what it’s not.
I don’t think Rock8man is wrong to say he perceives them to be lower in quality. They are.
Didn’t say they weren’t, but I disagree with you on the relative importance of that, particularly where a) the show’s interest mostly comes in the writing/acting, and b) they reach adequate professional standards of competence, which Buffy certainly did by Season 3, excepting the odd cheesy FX shot. (If we started calling every sci-fi/fantasy show out for weak FX, we’d lose half the canon…)
Really, though? I’ve watched episodes of Mad Men and Modern Family back-to-back. I have absolutely no inclination to make any comparison between those two shows.
They’re just way too different and it isn’t like you have a one-channel DVR and you have to decide which you’re going to record.
Compare Buffy to Supernatural, Smallville, or True Blood even. I think there’s meaningful comparisons that can be made there. But comparing it to the Wire is like comparing Buffy to Mad Men. Not much can be done with that.
The sad thing is, the fight scenes in Buffy never gets that much better, whereas you’ll see in the last two seasons of Angel some of the best choreographed fight scenes on TV (though that’s not saying much.)
Okay, so compare it to True Blood. I think my point still stands. The production value is lower on Buffy. I like Buffy more, but I’m still going to have to give it to True Blood for money being shown on the screen.
I haven’t seen Supernatural, but the couple of seasons of Smallville I saw seem to match up in production values.
Apparently, saying that Buffy was a cheaply made show is cause to break out the internet pitchforks. I’ve said multiple times that my subjective judgment of Buffy is separate from judging how expensive the show looks. I’m sorry to say this, but it’s a cheap looking show. It just is. You can either ignore that and look at the show’s overall emotional effect on you, or you can be completely turned off by that cheapness and never get over the hump. The point is that for some people, the lower production value is a barrier to enjoying the show.
“Cheap looking” compared to what? Compared to the other FX-heavy stuff of its era (Deep Space Nine, say), it looks right on par.
CGI is better now, obviously, and shows are now filmed in HD, but post-S1 Buffy is pretty comparable to other shows of its type and era.
It seems weird to me to be looking at production values/budget as a primary criteria, rather than looking at how it effects the actual show (e.g., the loss of a lot of licensed music in Supernatural).
But hey, if it’s something that matters to you, go for it.
Well duh.
Though I’d say ‘The Body’ is Wire-level good. And I’ve always had a big soft spot for ‘OMWF’
Keep watching - as good as season 1 is, it’s the overall weight of the followups that really takes it into the stratosphere.
The shows are operating in totally different modes and have totally different aesthetic goals, and based on The Wire’s Season 1 I can’t agree that Buffy is “just not as good,” at least at their respective peaks. (I’ll have to see if The Wire gets materially better in subsequent seasons.) Episode-to-episode consistency might be better on The Wire though; Buffy’s a pretty uneven show.
I’m just not sure a comparison between two such vastly different shows is likely to be very illuminating. To go from a gritty realistic crime drama to a fantasy/satire/coming-of-age-tale that employs supernatural genre elements metaphorically to explore the experience of young adulthood, and that contains within its compass enormous freedom of experimentation with the hour-long TV drama format: the contrast is so huge that it will become too easy to deride the latter as “cheesy” or something, without really getting a bead on what the show’s about or what it’s trying to do. And that would be a shame.
Well put.