The Whedon/Abrams panel was probably the panel highlight of my Comic-Con experience, and it particularly stood out after the long string of much less exciting movie release panels that we had to sit through in order to guarantee we’d have seats. This is of course a severe reduction, but my impression of the big name movie panels we saw (including RED, Battle: Los Angeles, Salt, MegaMind, and Tron Legacy) is that most actors are pretty boring (except for Will Ferrell and Tina Fey for MegaMind), most of the screened questions from the audience are repetitive (“What kind of fight training did you have to do?” “How are you dealing with this as an adaptation?”), and although the idea of using Comic-Con as a platform for previewing new things is a good one, everyone has a higher level discussion when we see enough from a preview to actually talk about it. (“So, we really didn’t see any glimpse of what the evil aliens will look like in this film, but… could you talk about them?”)

Seriously, look at Mary-Louise Parker's face as she listens to Bruce Willis.

Which is why it was such a relief, and so completely awesome, to have Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams come out and be able to talk about well-known work, about narrative and storytelling, about inspiration and the production process, and about their own experiences as fans. It was fascinating to hear both of them talk about the differences between making movies and making television, and to hear Joss Whedon say that although movies are hugely satisfying because they have firm and final endings, he feels that long form storytelling is more rewarding and much harder. The moderator, Doc Jensen, also asked about serialization on television, and both men admitted to understanding the financial motivation for non-serialized shows but having absolutely no creative interest in them. “Stories imply time,” said JJ Abrams. “Stories imply inevitability and some kind of progress.” “I don’t think the networks will ever, ever ask for that,” added Whedon. “The networks will never admit that people want that, because they do see the cash cow of ‘The Mentalist! Let’s all do The Mentalist!’ And when Lost first hit and was blowing up huge…they were still like, ‘We don’t want that. That successful, Emmy-winning thing? No, we don’t want that.’…And it’s very weird, because ultimately, the serial is always going to be the thing people remember. What do they remember about Cheers? It’s Sam and Diane, not a great joke from Cheers.”

What came out of their discussion of serialization, including Joss Whedon’s trials with the cancellations of Firefly and Dollhouse and the unrepeatable structure of a show like Lost, is a huge disconnect between the stories people like Abrams and Whedon want to tell on TV and the capacity for network television to produce those shows. Recently, Abrams has been more successful than Whedon in creating television for the networks, but as he mentions in his descriptions of both Fringe and his new show UnderCovers, it’s because he’s been careful to balance the standalone aspect of an episode and his own dominant interest in longer story arcs. One of the most interesting moments for me was when Joss Whedon admitted that in making Dollhouse, he just had not realized how much the networks have changed, and had not come to terms with the idea that he has a cable rather than network mentality. “I definitely was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”

Whedon did talk about preparing to do The Avengers, and insisted on describing to JJ how fully he loved Star Trek. “I have had actual moments of sheer fucking panic because I love Star Trek so much.” In turn, Abrams talked about the process of rewriting, and when Whedon mentioned that he doesn’t really write second drafts, Abrams shot back “You bastard!” But however much fun they had joking around and teasing each other, it was hard not to come away with a sense of how tricky the television landscape is right now, and how swiftly the networks are changing. I can only hope that when Joss Whedon is done with that silly Avengers movie project, there will be a new Whedon show on cable.

I can also hope that next year, after we figuring out some of the basic Comic-Con ins and outs this time around, we get to attend more panels like this one.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has had one of the strongest presences in academic writing about television, or at least, it did until The Wire was crowned “the best show in television history,” and it became popular to fret over urban violence and the inevitable failures of modern institutions. Do not mistake me – I am all in favor of jumping on the “best show in television history” bandwagon, because The Wire just blows everything else out of the water.

Still, Buffy holds a special place in the development of academic television criticism, because while The Wire was catapulted quite quickly into canonical status (is now the subject of classes at Ivy League universities, has become a benchmark against which all other television is compared, is constantly perceived in relation to Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, etc. as way of solidifying its high-culture position), Buffy grew into its position slowly, and the whole process was accompanied by persistent navel-gazing. There are dozens of books, but take for example Buffy Meets the Academy, a collection of essays broken into sections: Power and the Buffy Canon, Buffy Meets the Classics, Buffy and the Classroom. My favorite essay titles in the book include “Buffy Never Goes It Alone: The Rhetorical Construction of Sisterhood in the Final Season” and “Buffy’s Insight into Wollstonecraft and Mill” – the text is constantly reaching toward the language and references of a standard critical discussion, but is ever self-conscious about making a popular network television show with an audience of teenage girls its subject.

Buffy became an academic hit largely because it turns several favorite gendered tropes on their heads, and dramatizes the reclamation of the Gothic as an empowering female genre. Where the vampire story traditionally narrates the travails of lovely, victimized women, dangerously attractive vampires, and chaste, heroic male saviors, Buffy re-cast the role of Awesome Vampire Destroyer as a far-from-helpless heroine, known for her roundhouse kicks and her attraction to Bad Dudes. It’s not hard to read all sorts of gender politics, role reversals, high school metaphors and sexual commentary into Buffy. But it needs to defined against not just Gothic genres, but also earlier high school-focused television.

One place to see this clearly is in the dialogue, which is crucial on Buffy. Where shows like Beverly Hills, 90210 has a dialogue pacing that forces you to wait entire geological eras before the next line comes lumbering along, Buffy is fast and funny. Joss Whedon-eque dialogue became as important a defining characteristic for the show as Sorkin-esque language on The West Wing or Sherman-Palladino for Gilmore Girls. The common denominator for all of them is speed, but where Sorkin utilizes uncannily complete dialogic paragraphs and Sherman-Palladino was queen of the pop-culture reference, the language on Buffy can be undervalued as merely relentlessly quippy. It is brimming over with ironic one-liners, frequently voiced by Xander, (“Yesterday my life was like, ‘uh oh, pop quiz.’ Today, it’s ‘rain of toads”), but Buffy and even the villains get their fair share of humor. As Buffy nervously enters the dank, dripping sewer that houses the Big Bad of Season One, an ancient vampire called The Master, she comments that it looks like he has some water damage. “Oh good, the feeble banter portion of the fight,” he responds. When Willow worries about asking out Oz, who is a few years older than she, Buffy (who is dating a vampire) replies, “You think he’s too old ‘cause he’s a senior? Please. My boyfriend had a bicentennial.” (Many more examples here.)

Yes, it’s quippy. But the dialogue maintains Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s careful two-tone balancing act, allowing it to walk the tightrope between Gothic plotlines and an average teenager coming-of-age story. At any moment where horror threatens to overrun an episode, a quick dose of snark yanks the atmosphere back into a more grounded framework. Simultaneously, as Buffy’s painful character development forces her to cope with all the usual, awful realities of adulthood – traumatic first sexual experience, death of a parent, assuming the role of caretaker – the dialogue often shifts into a sincere mode, allowing characters to express hesitance or blunt sadness without the benefit of mitigating humor. Dialogue knits together all the light high school comedy with dark monstrous destiny, and as the series moves into later seasons, performs an impressive reversal, where monsters are the light action sequences that punctuate bleak real-world problems. Particularly in seasons six and seven, the quips that were previously used to pepper scenes of apocalyptic danger begin to appear more frequently as Buffy tries to apply for a loan, or get a job that actually has a salary. “Are you in the wrong line? That’s for deposits, that’s for withdrawals, and this one…is for getting kicked in the face.”

The Gentlemen

Of course, I can’t talk about Buffy and dialogue without at least mentioning the episode “Hush,” which appears in the show’s fourth season. A seriously scary group of fairy tale demons called The Gentlemen arrive in Sunnydale and steal everyone’s voices, Little Mermaid-style, so that no one can scream when they start cutting out peoples’ hearts. For the entire body of the episode, there is no dialogue at all, and Buffy and the Scooby Gang resort to writing on dry erase boards, using overhead projectors, and miming (often lewd) gestures. It’s an amazing sequence, and it establishes that Buffy can work without a steady stream of wry, underhand comments. Still, it’s clear that “Hush” is an exception-proves-the-rule example, where the absence of dialogue only heightens our awareness of how crippled the show would be without it.

Willow and Buffy realize they can't speak

As a subject for academic attention, though, I feel sure the show’s incessant punning hinders its foothold as a serious cultural object. It’s not always easy to think about Mary Wollstonecraft in the context of a show where the villain cries out “You were destined to die! It is written!” and the heroine answers, “What can I say? I flunked the written.” But the cheesy, goofy dialogue is really the forum where all those gender politics and David Lynchian dream sequences are built, and where Buffy’s role as a believable sixteen-year-old is defined again and again. Whatever the case, shows like The Wire begin to take their place in a television canon, and Buffy gets stuck underneath the deeply serious enterprises like The Sopranos or Mad Men. But I really believe Buffy has been an important catalyst for television criticism, and hope that it won’t get slowly relegated to the teenage girl-friendly genre project it superficially resembles.