This may come as a surprise to some of you, but not that many people have actually been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (UPN, various Canadian stations, 8 p.m.) over the show's many seasons. Of all the shows on the four major networks and the two mini-networks, UPN and the WB, Buffy often came in near the bottom of the Top 100. Given the amount of media attention the show has received, especially its imminent demise, you'd think it was a huge hit.
The two-part series finale of Buffy starts tonight, and it has had oodles of attention because people who matter -- what passes for an intellectual class in the United States and Canada -- have closely watched it. Buffy has been the subject of about 100 books, countless seminars at conferences where academics take popular culture very seriously, and there are several hundred Web sites devoted to the series, its characters and their motivations.
The cliché that is always trotted out by journalists is that Buffy is "basically a teenage coming-of-age story." That's because somebody associated with the show uttered the phrase some years ago. It's become rather like saying that Seinfeld was a show about nothing. There's a grain of truth, but it's actually nonsense.
Like The Simpsons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has managed to exist on several levels. It has a rare sense of humour about itself -- an attribute that appeals to entertainment writers who like to think that they can be knowing and ironic about popular culture. It has been a heterosexual love story, a lesbian love story, a mother/daughter drama and a saga about high-school geeks.
However, what has really made Buffy important and unusual on television has been its concentration on right and wrong. It has always been about moral issues, situational ethics and the burden of being compelled to do the right thing.
There are many TV shows that purport to take life seriously, but few actually have a moral intelligence. They are simple-minded, innocuous and insipid. Buffy has been about the delicately intricate problem of morality. It has always suggested that what's right is a constantly shifting thing. And that's the human experience.
In tonight's episode, everybody is as muddled and bummed out as can be. The gang -- Buffy, Xander, Willow, Spike, Dawn, Anya and Giles -- spend a lot of time sitting around talking about how bummed out they are. Buffy's new superenemy Caleb is out there somewhere, being especially menacing. Meanwhile, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar, who looks terribly tired) has acquired an axe-like thingamajig but nobody knows how it works.
Another apocalypse is playing out, which leaves a lot of dust and dismay. There's a very sombre air to this Buffy. Sure, there are jokes and some scenes brim with the show's characteristic tongue-in-cheek humour, but sadness pervades it.
I'm not going to give away very much here. Too many people are eagerly awaiting tonight's episode and its continuation next week as the last-ever Buffy episode. What happens tonight and next week is sweetly melancholic, and only a subdued version of the ongoing assessment of the modern moral state that has always been the core of the Buffy story.
Six Feet Under (The Movie Network, Movie Central, 9 p.m.) continues to be a perplexing delight. What perplexes me is the evolution of the show's main female characters.
This season, Ruth (Frances Conroy) has busy been at home, fixated with the pedantic, eccentric young intern Arthur (Rainn Wilson), a character who is somebody's idea of an ubergeek. With his fixation on his cloth hankies, socks and old sci-fi movies, Arthur is a perambulating caricature. He's not real and yet poor old Ruth has fallen hard for him. This is doing a terrible injustice to Ruth Fisher.
Meanwhile, Lisa (Lili Taylor) is now the show's villain. From the very first episode of this season it was suggested that Nate (Peter Krause) hadn't died and gone to heaven. Nope, in marrying Lisa he'd died and gone to hell. In the last few episodes, Lisa has emerged as the prototypical wife who suffocates. She's a kind of new-age supershrew, a woman who regulates Nate's pleasures with an awesome precision and terrible disregard for the chap's needs. He only wants to have a couple of beers and smoke a joint every now and then, but in wanting that he's a sort of Antichrist to Lisa.
Meanwhile, Claire (Lauren Ambrose) is one of the few sympathetic female characters on the show. That's because she's an artist and she's dallying with a guy who is assumed by everyone to be gay. She also gets the best lines -- witty zingers that puncture the preoccupations of the rest of the Fisher family.
Six Feet Under is really a celebration of narcissism. Their own gnawing needs trap all the characters, and the show celebrates this self-absorption. As this season progresses, it has become clear that Freddy (Freddy Rodriguez) is the only character with an ounce of sense. His impatience with both his wife and with the eternally self-absorbed Fishers is a breath of fresh air.
24 (Fox, CH, 9 p.m.) should be good tonight, but it would be hard to top last week. What I'm wondering is this: Is Gary actually dead or was he wearing a bulletproof jacket? Maybe Jack will have another opportunity to tell Kim, "Shoot him!" That would be brilliant.
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