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May 20, 2003
Bye, Buffy
Preparatory to tonight's series finale, Salon offers up a friendly Buffy retrospective and an interview with Joss Whedon. Sort of nice to see him taking responsibility for his creation:
"It's Sam and Diane [from "Cheers"]. That's why we had Angel go bad when he and Buffy got together. Because -- and I've gotten into so much trouble for this phrase -- what people want is not what they need. In narrative, nobody wants to see fat, married Romeo and Juliet, even if fat, married Romeo and Juliet happen to be [Dashiell Hammett's detective couple] Nick and Nora Charles and they're really cool and having a great time in their lovely relationship and really care about each other and have nice, well-adjusted children. Guess what? People don't want to see it."
It's also good to read he was just being pragmatic when he got rid of the "cramping vampire early warning system":
"You make up rules that you need and jettison the ones you don't. I had to jettison one of the rules from the movie, which was that Buffy had sort of a cramping every time she was around a vampire. In a series I didn't want her to always know when she was around a vampire. And that's too bad in a way because it was a very primal, feminist concept that she literally feels it in her womb, as it were. But I had seven years and she needed to be surprised."
Posted by mph at May 20, 2003 08:56 PM