Random Thoughts on Television, Television Aesthetics, and Online "Criticism":

Think of this blog entry as a series of commercials and two scenes from a once popular MTV show:

Commercial 1. TV, at its best, is, in my opinion, more like a novel than a film. Film almost always, if we want to continue to use literary metaphors here, is more akin to a short story. There are exceptions (examples include Jacques Rivette's 750 minute long film Out 1 and Bela Tarr's 450 minute Satantango). This, of course raises the question of whether television, because it is potentially longer and allows for greater narrative complexity and a greater degree of character development, is necessarily better than film. Some critics say yes, others, of course respond with a no. For an interesting discussion of the TV is more like a novel and hence better than film theme in contemporary criticism see David Lavery's "The 'Television is Better than the Movies' Meme" (http://cstonline.tv/telegenic-5). As for me I don't know whether television's potential to be novelistic makes it better than film. It definitely makes television different from cinema.

Commercial 2. In my not so humble opinion it would be nice if US TV became more like British TV (at least in certain instances). Life on Mars ran for 16 episodes on the BBC. Period. It left this viewer yearning for more, something any "good" TV show should do, in my opinion. US TV, if the show becomes popular, on the other hand generally milks it for as much, literally, as it worth in the process turning a show that might have been great if limited to a smaller number of episodes into a dead horse which its creators and writers continue to flog and which the network continues to squeeze for as much advertising revenue as possible, the primary raison d'etre, of course, of US commercial television (commodity aestheticism). This generally leaves this viewer generally wanting less (example, The Simpsons since season six). I guess I should end by noting that cable TV networks like HBO and Showtime and beyond have, in limited episode series like Sex and the City, the Sopranos, and Californication, borrowed the BBC, ITV, and C4 model.

Commercial 3. Genre, genre, what is genre? The nature of the genre of science fiction and what constitutes the science fiction genre, for instance, has been debated ever since its "inception" and typologisation (doesn't debate and controversy make the intellectual and academic worlds go round?). There is no and has never been a unitary notion of what science fiction (or any other generic form for that matter) is. The fact that some online critics can write as though there was or is a single definition for science fiction is, to say the least, depressing.

Commercial 4. Value is cultural and social and, to paraphrase a cliche, in the eye of the beholder. How do I know that value and beauty is intersubjective and subjective? I have looked at how "readers" at sites like Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk react aesthetically to the literary, film, or television texts they choose to review. The aesthetics of these reviews vary. Some "readers", for instance, like Rush (me), the progressive rock band, others don't. Some "reviewers" like Alexander Payne's film Sideways (me), others don't. So given that we know that how people react to texts is subjective and intersubjective because reactions of value vary empirically the question of why so many "critics" continue to write as if their particular culturally and socially constructed views are transcendental and universal must rear its "ugly" head. My own sense is that ideology is driving much of this notion that specific views are universally valid general points of view. Additionally, I suspect that this discourse about likes and dislikes serves an identity and community function: when one finds those who agree with ones views ones self-esteem is raised and one potentially finds a community of common interest one can become a part of, a community which has the potential to provide one with an almost constant self-esteem boost and an almost constant substantiation of ones (unrecognised) particular perceptions.

Commercial 5. The potential problem here, of course, is that if one concludes that values are purely subjective and intersubjective there is no way of arguing that a classic work of poetry by say Shelley is any better than a poem by a Hollywood celebrity like Suzanne Sommers or that a film like Citizen Kane is superior to juvenalia like Star Wars.

So if it is not possible to make any aesthetic judgements about a work of literary, film, or television "art" what do we make of the fact that those who are supposed to know about quality, academics and critics, have written more about the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard than about any other television show in the known universe and about that uberpopular filmmaker George Lucas? What do these academic practises say (sociologically, aesthetically) about the "quality" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the films of Jean-Luc Godard and lack of quality of Suzanne Sommers and George Lucas if anything?

Commercial 6. One of the things that has fascinated me recently is the fact that so many commentators on Joss Whedon's Dollhouse (Fox, 2009-2010) in its early broadcast days were commenting rather forcefully and rather conclusively about an open ended text, commenting on a text that is not yet closed. The fact that Dollhouse was an open text makes many, if not most, of these critical comments problematic at the very least since it is an open text. I would think that it might be wise for such "critics" to wait to see what is going to happen in Dollhouse (or any other open ended show) before they make certain comments about it or at the very least exhibit a healthy degree of tentativeness in their "readings". Yes I know this jumping the gun tendency is one characteristic of many humans. This doesn't excuse it, however.

Now Back to The Hills for a three minute scene. Scene 1. Speaking of early reader reactions to Dollhouse, here are a few of my Casablanca moments, my I'm shocked, shocked reactions to some of this online "criticism":

Casablanca Moment 1: I am shocked shocked that some online critics appear to have the attention span of an MTV commercial or the Hills (thirty seconds and three minutes). I guess some would give up on War and Peace after the first chapter. Why do I suspect that this tells me a lot about the contemporary human reading and television and film watching condition?

Casablanca Moment 2: I am shocked shocked that some online critics think they can make a TV show better than Joss Whedon and stock company can and have. I can't help but wonder why they aren't aren't making TV shows by the dozens? Forgive me for this cliched moment.

Casablanca Moment 3: I am shocked shocked that some online critics think every show should express their own politically correct ideological prejudices. Perhaps we should just turn TV and films and literature over to a bunch of politically correct academic activists whose bodies and minds have been programmed to endlessly produce politically correct programmes complete with politically correct stereotypes and politically correct caricatures. And while we are at it, let's blackball all politically incorrect writers like Margaret Atwood (shame on her for having a nasty femme fatale in one of her novels).

Casablanca Moment 4: I am shocked shocked that many online critics, when it comes to Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, seem to prefer a rehash of Buffy, Angel, or Firefly (forgetting, of course, that these are actually quite different shows than Dollhouse in a number of ways). Perhaps those cybercritics who want endless repeats of something Joss that came before could simply watch repeats of Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead of Dollhouse. Or perhaps we could create a cadre of Stepford Writers who would simply endlessly repeat themselves (oh we already have). Gee wouldn't that be wonderful? See Hollywood's strategy of broadcasting endlessly formulaic shows is a smart one. Call Me Mr. Anti-genre but I thank the gods that European art cinema breaks out of this endless rehash formula.

Commercial 7. So what type of criticism do I like. As a former Biblical Studies student I have long been enamoured of the exegesis, hermeneutics, homiletics model of criticism. In other words, I firmly believe that one should analyse the text one is given before one jumps to interpretation of that text and homiletics. Unfortunately, it appears that so many online critics start with a type of I'd of done it in this way form of homiletics and often never work their way backwards.

Commercial 8. I have long been wanting a spokescritic for the ADD generation to do for boring, cheesy, eeew black and white, and eeew subtitles what Susan Sontag did for camp. Perhaps our online critics can produce and post here essays entitled "Notes on Boring", "Notes on Cheesy", Notes on Eeew Black and White" and "Notes on Eeew Subtitles" so to bring critical and intellectual rigour to these apparent central components of ADD Criticism. Any takers?

Now back to The Hills for another three-minute scene. Scene 2. The issue of authorship, of course, continues to haunt film and its, to a large extent, bastard cousin, television studies. Auterism, so the story goes, originated among the young turks of the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s as the politique des auteurs, the auteur policy, the auteur polemic. It then made its way across the Channel in the pages of Movie, and across the Atlantic in the critical polemics of film critic Andrew Sarris who canonised the theory in reviews in the Village Voice, in his famous and infamous article in the journal Film Culture in 1962, and eventually in his influential and popular book The American Cinema. Through much of the 1960s and 1970s auteurism dominated much of film criticism and writings on film through journals like Cahiers, Movie, and Film Comment and dominated much of the film book publishing industry via publishers like Zwemmer, Barnes, Tantivy, Studio Vista (the British publisher of Movie's Movie Paperbacks), Praeger, Doubleday, and Indiana University Press.

For the most part auteur criticism wasn't controversial with respect to the European art cinema. Auteurists and critics of auteurism like Penelope Houston and Pauline Kael alike agreed that filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard were auteurs, were artists. What was controversial for critics of auteurism was its claim that directors in the highly entertainment and collaborative studio system, directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford were the authors of their films. Sight and Sound, the influential British film magazine run by Penelope Houston, in fact, rejected a paper on Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho by a critic who would publish extensively in Movie, Robin Wood, on the basis that Psycho and Hitchcock were not and could not to be taken seriously next to the auteurs of the European art cinema.

In the late 1960s thanks to cultural ferment, the academicisation of Film Studies, and the revival and rise in popularity of a number of social theories (Marxism, the linguistics of de Saussure, Freud, Structuralism, Semiology, Lacanianism,Post-Structuralism, and Deconstruction among them) auteurism came under attack for reasons other than that the products of the Hollywood entertainment industry were not to be taken seriously. Both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, prominent figures in the new social theoretical ferment, and both from France, accused Literary and Film Auteurism of romanticism, of raising the author (in film, the director) to Olympian status and detaching him or her, in the process, from the social and cultural contexts that surround human lives and proclaimed the "death of the [romanticised] author". It was the new and supposedly improved Cahiers du Cinema and the British journal Screen which were the conduits for much of this anti-auteurist film criticism in Europe and North America.

The notion that one must place authors into their social and cultural contexts, of course, was not new in the 1960s and 1970s. Marxist cultural critics had been making similar arguments at least since the 1920s. It was as fair a point than as it was in the 1970s and is today. The problem with some of this anti-auteurist criticism was that in their haste to condemn auteurism for its ahistorism the new "radical" critics set up one thread of auteurism as its straw man, the most "romantic" of auteurisms.

It must be remembered, however, that not all auteurists were the same. Auteurist polemicists who wrote for Cahiers like Godard and Francois Truffaut tended to think that the films of every Hollywood studio auteur (Howard Hawks, Nick Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Budd Boetticher) were worthy of careful study and attention and, on the aesthetic level, worthy or praise, often effusive praise. For another auteurist, Andre Bazin, the godfather of Cahiers and modern film criticism and analysis, however, not every film by every auteur, and he didn't think there were many auteurs particularly in Hollywood, was worthy of aesthetic praise. Some were simply bad movies. Even for that great boogeyman of critics of auteurism, Andrew Sarris, not all Hollywood directors were auteurists (members of his pantheon of film directors). Most, in fact, were metteurs en scene's, company men, cogs in the impersonal Hollywood machine with no observable style or point of view. It was only in a few specific instances then, for critics like Sarris, that a Hollywood director was an auteur, someone who managed to put his or her personal stamp on a mass produced product (Sarris pantheon of auteurs included Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Lubitsch, Welles, Chaplin, Murnau, Keaton, Griffith, Ophuls, Lang, von Sternberg, Flaherty).

So how does all of this relate to television? Well the same old question about whether to auteur or not to auteur has impacted the ever expanding "discipline" of Television Studies. Stacey Abbot's book on Angel (Wayne State University Press), for instance, makes an argument that we have seen before in Film Studies, namely that television and in her case the television show Angel, is made by a group of people and so cannot be the product of one individual author. The problem with this television is collaborative perspective, however, is not whether television, any more than film or literature, is collaborative. It is and they are to varying degrees. The question is whether Joss Whedon, the co-creator or Angel along with David Greenwalt, is Angel’s auteur, Angel’s conductor-creator. And while all things Angel (and Buffy, Firefly, Serenity, and Dollhouse) may not end with Joss they certainly, as Buffy, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse writer Jane Espenson says, begin with him and return to him throughout the course of the creative process. Joss, as Buffy’s costume designer says, even had a hand in what Buffy’s characters wore. Anyway, one has only to look at the themes that suffuse Whedon’s work in general (feminism, masculinity, family, existentialism, and moral choice to name only a few) to recognise Whedon’s guiding hand in the series.

So come on, let's stop arguing about authorship in film and television. Some television shows like some films and some literary works are authored. Let's start working to understand the forces that impact film, television, and literary authorship (genre, production contexts, personal background, historical social and political contexts...).

Buffy Blog: "Lovers Walk"

As with "Revelations" the very title of this episode, "Lovers Walk" written by Dan Webber (who will go on to write "The Zeppo") and directed by David Semel, tells us a lot about what is going on in the episode narratively and visually. "Lovers Walk" centres around several lovers walks, several lovers walks that have woven themselves through seasons one, two, and three of Buffy. There's the Spike and Drusilla lovers walk, the Willow, Xander, Cordelia, and Oz lovers walk, there is the Buffy and Angel lovers walk, and there is the Buffy and Slayer lovers walk.

Spike, the monster of the week of "Lovers Walk" if you will, has returned to Sunnydale looking for the lover that spurned him for a chaos demon, Dru, knocking down the same Welcome to Sunnydale sign he knocked down the first time he arrived in sunny Sunnydale in "School Hard" in season two. This new and not so improved Spike who arrives back in Sunnydale is not the same Spike who arrived in Sunnydale early in season two and left in the last episode of season two. The new Spike returns to Sunnydale a drunken mess and with little of the self-esteem he had in season two. It is the "truce" that Spike made with Buffy which has, claims Spike, led Dru to leave him, caused him to turn even more to demon alcohol, and led to his loss of self-esteem and manhood (a loss treated in humourous fashion in this episode as well as later ones as we will see). Spike turns to Willow at the end of act one and particularly in act two to help him with his lovers walk. For the first time but not the last time (see season four) Spike threatens Willow sexually and with death if she doesn't help him get Dru back.

Willow, as we know from earlier episodes of season three, is engaged in her own lovers walk. She and Xander have been secretly having an affair behind Oz's and Cordelia's back. Feeling guilty about this after Oz gives her a Pez Witch Willow goes to a magic shop (the clerk at the magic shop just like the clerk we saw in the magic shop in season two's "Passion" will be killed by a vampire) where Spike, who overhears her telling the clerk she wants the ingredients to perform a "delusting" spell so she isn't cheating on Oz anymore, decides to kidnap Willow (he also kidnaps Xander since the Xandman is present at the "delusting" spell Willow is trying to perform at Sunnydale High). Before Willow can do the spell, however, she needs her spell book which she has apparently left at Buffy's or told Spike she left at Buffy's because she knows that Buffy can deal with Spike. So off Spike goes to Buffy's house in search of the "missing" spell book.

Spike arrives at the Summer's house just as Joyce is having a telephone conversation with Buffy about college--Buffy, Cordela, and Willow (despite Willow's anger at scoring only a 740 on the verbal part of the SAT) did quite well on their SAT's (poor Xander didn't saying Willow's verbal score was similar to his total score) and so Buffy, as Giles notes, can get a first-rate education at the college of her choice. During the course of the episode Joyce, Giles, and even Angel push Buffy to consider leaving the slaying to Faith, at least for the moment, so she can go off to the university of her choice. Buffy, however, has something other than college on her mind. While Joyce is talking to Buffy about college Spike arrives and Buffy hears his voice across the telephone line hurrying home. Before she can arrive, however, it is Angel, who Joyce doesn't realise has come back from a hell dimension to what we think is the rescue. It is not that simple, however. Joyce knowing only that Angel turned into a demon in season two and that Buffy and Spike worked together to defeat Angel at the end of season two is skeptical of Angel's claim that Spike is dangerous. While Angel is trying to warn Joyce and Spike is faux threatening Joyce Buffy arrives. Buffy invites Angel in to the Summer's home and prepares to kill Spike until Spike tells the Slayer that he is the one who kidnapped Willow and Xander and that he will only let them go if Buffy and Angel help him get the ingredients for the love spell he wants to let loose on Drusilla. Buffy and Angel, of course, have no choice but to do what Spike asks. So off they go to the magic store.

As this is Buffy things are not that simple, however. At the beginning of act two the Deputy Mayor has informed the Mayor, who we know is the big bad of season two and once Buffy and the Scoobies out of the way has big plans which we are not privy to yet, that Spike is back in town. He asks the Mayor what he wants to do about Spike. He tells the Deputy Mayor to send a "committee" to deal with the Spike problem, to kill him, in other words. As Spike, Angel, and Buffy are leaving the magic shop with the ingredients for Willow's love spell they are confronted with the mayors welcoming committee. The epic fight that results will restore Spike's self-esteem and manhood. At the end of act three Spike leaves Sunnydale to, as he tells Buffy and Angel, to do what he should have done in the first place: torture Dru until she loves him again.

So one lover's walk may be over but as I noted this was not the only lovers walk of "Lovers Walk". During Buffy's, Angel's, and Spike's trip to the magic shop and during the epic fight with the mayor's committee Spike, insightful as ever (Buffy notes that she can't for whatever reason fool Spike), notes that Angel and Buffy despite claims that they are simply friends will never be friends. Their blood, he says in a wonderful speech, is screaming their mutual love inside them. Blood, not for the first time nor the last, is important in the Buffyverse.

While all of this is going on another lovers walk comes to a conclusion. Oz and Cordelia heading off to find a Giles on a Watcher's retreat in Breaker's Woods, are able to find Willow and Xander thanks to Oz's werewolf heightened sense of smell (she is scared Oz says). The Willow and Xander they find, however, are a Willow and Xander in loving embrace. Cordelia seeing this turns and heads up the stairs leading to the basement in which Spike has been holding Willow and Xander against their will. The stairs collapse leaving Cordela impaled on a piece of metal and Oz off in search of medical help. The scene ends with Cordela fading into unconscious.

What follows is a truly mean, to us viewers anyway, cut. The camera cuts to a funeral. The camera then pans to Buffy and Willow in the cemetery discussing the fallout from Willow's and Oz's lovers walk. Willow tells Buffy that a lot of grovelling on her part will be necessary for her to get back into Oz's good graces and that Cordy is in the hospital and is expected to make a recovery. Sigh of relief.

The episode ends with some closure to each of the lovers walks we have seen throughout this episode and earlier in season three. Willow, as I said, intends to grovel her way back into Oz's good graces. Cordy tells a Xander who brings flowers to her hospital room that she never wants to see him again. He leaves. Buffy tells Angel that they are not friends and that if he can't tell her he doesn't love her she must leave him presumably forever. Angel says nothing. Buffy leaves. Spike heads off to get Dru back through, we presume, loving torture. Each of these seeming conclusions are ambiguous, however. At the end of the episode we see Angel, Willow, Oz, Cordy, and Buffy silently experiencing the pain of the lovelorn alone in loneliness. We are not shown whether Spike got Drusilla back or not. Where these lovers walks and the pain they often bring will lead us will become apparent throughout season three and throughout the remainder of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. God Joss and Company really seem to revel in bringing us viewers the pain.

God I love this scene: The Joyce-Spike scene that follows Buffy hearing Spike's voice on the telephone, is, like the first one in Becoming in season two, wonderfully humourous and shows the chemistry the two actors, Kristine Sutherland and James Marsters, had together. I love it when Spike asks Joyce if she has any of those little marshmallows for the hot chocolate she has given him to drink. Spike in a domestic setting is inherently funny.

Censorship and the Modern World

Censorship is tricky. There are various types of censorship (political, economic, religious). There are various ways in which censorship works (centralized coercion, self-censorship).

One could (and I am sure someone has) undertake a foucauldian analysis of censorship. Foucault, of course, argues that in the transition from the world of monarchs, lords, ladies, and theocracies of various degrees with their spectacles of disciplining and punishing (inquisitions and public executions) to the “modern” world where socialization, a socialization where discipline and punishment were internalized, made censorship less the province of centralized powers and more the practise of internal self regulation or censorship. Of course, the old centralized forms of censorship remained (the banning of Dr. Zhivago by the Soviet elite) and remain but self censorship (the absence of Noam Chomsky from “mainstream” US TV because of self censorship by those networks rather than any official government ban) has come to dominate censorship practises in the modern capitalist dominated world.

I am fascinated by the forms censorship takes and the way people try to get around it. Here are a few Chomsky, one of the leading analysts of US foreign policy, used to show up on PBS--William F. Buckley’s Firing Line to be specific--before Firing Line went off the air and America’s political powers that be brought that network to heel through a cutting off of its funding and the use of a puritan dominated FCC to regulate its content (PBS’s Steambath in the 1970s and Tales of the City in the 1990s had some full frontal nudity and, in the case of the latter, representations of extensive drug use and portrayals of homosexuality). He still occasionally shows up on cable TV’s C-Span. The science fiction/fantasy television show Twilight Zone used metaphor to comment critically on American racism, for example, at a time when Jim Crow dominated the US South. CBS and Proctor and Gamble compromised with the makers of The Dick Van Dyke Show allowing Mary Tyler Moore to wear Capri pants once an episode. Buffy the Vampire Slayer got a way with a lot of sexual innuendo through metaphor, the use of British slang, and body movements. To some extent Twilight Zone and Buffy got away with what they did because they had a lot of fantasy, science fiction, and fable in them and weren’t regulated to the same degree as more “realist” television fictions were. This was also true to some extent in “authoritarian” modern regimes like that of the USSR. In the USSR noted author Fazil Iskander's literary fables used metaphor to make critical political points about the USSR. Were the censoring bureaucrats simply too literal minded to get it?

Reflecting on Utopia on the Hudson?

As most of you know, I am currently living in Albany, New York (though I don't really consider it my "home") a city that, since the 1960s if not before, has been faced, like other rust belt cities in the United States, with economic, cultural, and housing stock decline. And like so many other American cities that experienced manufacturing decline and white flight to the suburbs Albany has, over the years, tried to stem this decline.

I can't help but compare what the College of Saint Rose has done to try to stem this decline--taking over and converting houses and other buildings in the old Pine Hills neighbourhood of Albany for various uses including student residences--to what the University at Albany is doing--renting out part of the Alumni complex near Saint Rose (wouldn't it be nice if this could be transformed into a humanities and social sciences residential college with a bit of Oxford and Cambridge thrown into the German mass production education model we use now?) and building hordes of little mustard coloured boxes (there's money in them there being a landlord hills?) in the suburbs where UAlbany is located. I guess I appreciate what Saint Rose has done more than what UAlbany has done.

Why? Because Saint Rose is, it seems to me, contributing to the preservation of Albany's architectural and cultural history and is doing something that I think is positive for their town and gown relations. UAlbany seems me to be separating itself more and more from old Albany in a variety of different ways (why not purchase buildings around the old campus between Washington and Western and convert them for multiple uses including residence like Saint Rose?) putting more and more of its eggs in the nanotech is utopia basket. I sometimes wonder how long it will be before the UAlbany finally faces up reality (the inevitable budget cuts which just keep on coming and giving and turning UAlbany from a second or third level research university into something else) and changes its name from the University at Albany to the Albany Institute of Nanotechnology?

Whether the state of New York and UAlbany's decision to go the tech route (and subsidise tech development with tax payer money) pays off is as yet unclear. I suspect that the result will be the addition of a few hundred jobs to the Capital District, most of which will be filled by the middle class. I also suspect that many of those who relocate to the Albany area because of these new "high tech" jobs will live in the suburbs not in old Albany. I thus suspect that Albany's decline will continue. I also suspect that SUNY and UAlbany will continue their decline and that the four university centres (Buffalo, Stony Book, Binghamton, Albany) will continue to look more and more like Ball State and Bowling Green rather than anything resembling the great state research universities of the American Midwest like Indiana University, Bloomington, or the University of Michigan. None of them, save perhaps Buffalo, were ever the equivalent of the great state research universities of the Midwest or Chapel Hill, Berkley, UCLA, or UT Austin, anyway. But hey, don't take what I say seriously I am, after all, simply a cynic embittered by life (life is, as Buddhism teaches, suffering).

Buffy Blog: "Revelations"

The title of this episode "Revelations", written by Doug Petrie, his first of many, and directed by James Contner really, as is so often the case with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, says it all. This episode is really about four things: secrets being hidden, lies being told, the trust issues that result from keeping secrets and telling lies, and the almost inevitable revelation of those seemingly repressed secrets and the consequences these revelations have for our Scoobies as they will out.

On the surface level "Revelations" is yet another monster of the week episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "Revelations" monster of the week is the demon Lagos who comes to Sunnydale in search of the hidden Glove of Myhnegon (Lagos's attempt to find the hidden glove in crypts in Sunnydale's cemeteries seems an apt visual metaphor for hidden and surfacing secrets in this episode). But as we all, dear readers, know by now Buffy never operates only on the surface or literal level. As I mentioned earlier it is the secrets and the lies necessitated so that the secrets can be kept hidden which constitute the thread that has been running through so much of Buffy season three and which constitute the thematic and metaphorical level of Revelations. Buffy has been keeping Angel's return from a hell dimension secret from the rest of the Scoobies and has been lying about what she has been up to. Xander and Willow are secretly involved in a relationship with one another and have been keeping it secret from the rest of the Scoobies and particularly Cordy and Oz, for obvious reasons. Finally, their is a new Watcher in town, Gwendolyn Post, Mary Poppins, Miss Priss, both names Faith calls the new Watcher, and she, as we soon learn at the end of act two, is keeping a secret. She is a rogue slayer who is after the dark power that the Glove of Myhnegon can bring.

To achieve her end, obtaining the Glove of Myhnegon, Gwendolyn Post, Mrs., plays on Faith's jealousies and fears, Faith's jealousies of Buffy and the other Scoobies and Faith's fear that to the Scoobies she is and will always be an outsider. Mrs. Post first gains Faith's trust by telling our Slayer that she will make her into a superb fighting machine through intense training and praises her Spartan warrior habits while at the same time playing oh so subtly on Faith's jealousies and fears by telling her that the Scoobies had a secret meeting to which Faith, as Faith says, was not invited.

Xander who has his own jealousy and fear issues, all relating to his discovery that Angel, Buffy's one and only--Xander still on some level wants to be Buffy's beau--has returned from a hell dimension and he and Buffy are once again in full kissage mode. At the Bronze Xander tells Faith the real reason for the secret Scooby confab, Angel is back. Faith, being rash like Buffy has been rash in the past--a potential Slayer trait apparently--goes into full manichean overdrive seeing Angel, a vampire, as the enemy a Slayer must kill.

While the Xander and Faith scene is playing out Giles has called Mrs. Post to a meeting at his office where he reveals to her that a friend of Buffy's has the Glove of Myhnegon and that it can be destroyed by a pure flame. Clubbing Giles unconscious (yet again) Mrs. Post heads to the mansion to get the glove. Not realising that Angel, who is still suffering physically from the trauma of returning from a hell dimension, Mrs. Post takes a shovel to Angel thinking she has killed him. But Angel, as we know, is a vampire and quickly recovers leading to a fight between Angel and Mrs. Post. Just as Angel gets the better of the Watcher Faith arrives.

Faith, of course, thinking that Angel has attacked Giles now acts to protect her Watcher from a vampire who she thinks is evil. The result is the first, but not the last, knock down drag out fight between Faith the Vampire Slayer and Angel the vampire with a soul. Just as Faith is about to plunge a stake into Angel's heart Buffy arrives. Grabbing Faith's arm Buffy stops Faith from staking Angel. Soon Slayer and Slayer are locked in an epic battle, the first but not the last. With Faith, Buffy, and Angel out of the way and a newly arrived Xander and Willow told to help Faith and knocked unconscious respectively Mrs. Post gets what she came for, the Glove of Myhnegon. She puts it on. The hinges of the glove clamp on to her arm, she recites an incantation, and lightning strikes, lighting which can be fed by Mrs. Post through the Glove of Myhnegon.

Buffy and Faith stop fighting with each other. Mrs. Post shatters Faith's trust in her by giving the Slayer a "word of advice". "[Faith]", she says, "you're an idiot". With Faith drawing Mrs. Post's fire Buffy grabs a sizable shard of glass and throws it at Mrs. Post severing her glove arm. Mrs. With the glove gone Mrs. Post is struck by lighting and dies.

While the threat from the hidden or secret monster of the week, the rogue Watcher Mrs. Post who has turned to the dark side is over, the consequences of the secrets and lies that have woven their way through season three are not. Willow and Xander have managed to keep their relationship secret, at least for the moment. Buffy apologises to the Scoobies for not telling them that Angel had returned. Despite apologies being offered the tensions that characterised the intervention that the Scoobies had for Buffy earlier in the episode still, one can't help feel, tensions that led Giles to sternly tell Buffy that by keeping Angel's return secret she has abandoned her Slayer duties and disrespected him, the man who Angel viciously tortured, hover beneath the surface. When Buffy goes to Faith's Spartan hotel room to do "damage control", as she puts it, Faith, after a brief and pregnant moment during which Buffy asks Faith to trust her, and she almost does, returns to the attitude she arrived in Sunnydale with, the attitude that she can't trust anyone, even Buffy, and that she must from now on once again look out for number one, herself, alone. This trust and looking out only for number one will come back to haunt Faith and the Scoobies in season three and beyond as we will see.

Buffy, by the way, is wonderful in portraying lost opportunities. For example, when Buffy is at Faith’s motel in “Revelations” as she is about to leave after trying to make things right with an emotionally distant Faith (“damage control”), Faith calls to Buffy. When Buffy responds to Faith, however, Faith, after a brief pause says “nothing”. One gets the sense that Faith’s failure to talk further with Buffy after her own overture is a lost opportunity for closeness between the two and her possible integration into the Scooby Gang. It may also prefigure what is to come.

A Few Thoughts After Watching Ab Fab...

Recently I worked my way through the relatively new 2 Entertain/BBC DVD set of Absolutely Fabulous (BBC 1992, 1995, 1996, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2011, 2012), a set, by the way, which claims to be absolutely complete but is not. It is missing the 1994 Comic Relief Pet Shop Boys, Jennifer Saunders, and Joanna Lumley Absolutely Fabulous song sketch, the 2005 Comic Relief sketch, the appearance of Eddy and Pats on the US sitcom Roseanne, and now, thanks to the recent reappearance of Ab Fab on the Beeb, the two holiday specials and Sport Relief sketch from 2011 and 2012 and the upcoming Olympics special set to be transmitted in July.

For my money Ab Fab, as it is often called by its fans, is (or should be) in that heavenly pantheon of great almost transcendental sitcoms along with Fawlty Towers, The Good Life, Butterflies, Are You Being Served, and the first series of Worst Week of My Life. Ab Fab starred Jennifer Saunders (Edwina "Edina" Eddy" Monsoon) of French and Saunders fame, Joanna Lumley (Patsy Stone), Julia Sawlaha (Saffron "Saffy" Monsoon, daughter of Edina), Jane Horrocks (Bubble, Edina's employee at her PR firm), and June Whitfield (Edina's mum). Saunders, like John Cleese and Connie Booth in Fawlty Towers, did double duty writing every one of the 36 episodes of Ab Fab (the number of episodes at the time of writing; three more are expected during 2011) just as Cleese and Booth co-wrote every one of the twelve episodes of Fawlty Towers.

During its run Ab Fab became an international phenomenon particularly among women and gays (some one once commented that Eddy and Pats looked, dressed, and acted a bit like drag queens on steroids). A French version of the show, Absolument fabuleux, appeared in film form in 2001. There were a couple of attempts, both failures, to do an American version of the show the first by Roseanne Barr a fan of the show, the second as recent as 2008 which starred Kathryn Hain and Kristen Johnson (of 3rd Rock from the Sun fame). While Barr was not able to get her version of Ab Fab on American television she did manage to bring Eddy and Pats to American TV shores. Edina and Patsy show up on Roseanne (ABC, 1988-1997) during the final season of that show, the infamous Roseanne becomes wealthy after winning the lottery season, in the episode Satan, Dear in 1996. The Pet Shop Boys, appropriately enough, along with Saunders and Lumley did a sketch pop video for Comic Relief called "Absolutely Fabulous" (1994). And while the song with its clips and dialogue from Ab Fab was certainly meant to be comic and parodic it was also an homage to this wonderful show.

There is so much one can talk about when reflecting on Ab Fab: the quality and intelligence of its scripts, its humour, both cerebral and physical, its parody and satire of upper class and upper middle class women obsessed with staying young through cosmetic surgery and botox, its portrayal of Eddy and Pats as anti-maternal sex, drugs, and rock and rollers who have never grown out of adolescence, its creation of a world in which its parents, well Eddy and Pats anyway, are adolescents and its teenage children, Saffy, adults, its surrealism, and its impact on television in its wake. Ab Fab, to choose just one example, influenced Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004). Sarah Jessica Parker was said to have studied Ab Fab in preparation for her role in Sex and the City. But, and this is an important but, there is an important difference between Ab Fab and SatC that should not be forgotten. While SatC was earnest in its revelries in fashion and celebrity culture Ab Fab parodied the world of fashion and celebrity and often savagely satirised it. That said it must be remembered that in Ab Fab Saunders gets to eat her cake and have it to for while Saunders satirises the world of fashion and celebrity Edina and Saunders herself, listen to her commentaries on the box set, and Patsy also revel in the designer clothes they wear.

Blackadder of Dibley: Brief Thoughts on Blackadder and the Vicar of Dibley

I have been a devotee of British television since the 1970s when I began watching--religiously--Upstairs Downstairs on American Public Television. Recently, thanks to time off from school and no summer teaching for the first time in years I have been watching a lot of British television on DVD. In the last several weeks, I watched the classic BBC programmes Tutti Fruiti (1987), Blackadder (1982, 1983, 1986-1989, 1999) Vicar of Dibley (1994, 1996-2000, 2004-2007), the Worst Week of My Life (2004-2006) series four of ITV's Lewis, and series six of the superb ITV show Foyle's War (2010). I have just set off on an Ab Fab marathon. Poor Saffy.

Watching Blackadder and Vicar of Dibley in succession has foregrounded the many similarities between these two classic situation comedies. Both are, of course, in part, the brain childs of British writer Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill). In many ways the vicar of Dibely, the Reverend Geraldine Granger (Dawn French) is a double of the Blackadder himself, Edmond Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson), after the first series anyway. Curtis (or was it his Blackadder writing partner Ben Elton) once commented that Edmond is, to some extent, an intelligent and cynical twentieth century man plopped down in the surreal worlds of Mediaveal, Elizabethan, Regency, and Great War England and Great Britain. Vicar of Dibley's Geraldine similarly is a late twentieth century woman, intelligent and cynical, plopped down in the surreal pastoral intellectually stunted world of the rural and pastoral village of Dibley. As such both are, to some extent, latter day versions of Green Acres (CBS, 1965-1971) with its Manhattan lawyer Oliver Wendell Holmes (Eddie Albert) plopped down into the surreal, irrational yet rational world of Hooterville.

Edmond and Dawn are not the only doubles in Blackadder and Dibley. Baldrick (Tony Robinson) from Blackadder and Alice Springs Horton (Emma Chambers) from Dibley are also doubles of each another. Both are generally dim but occasionally insightful. And both oftentimes drive their masters, Baldrick is Edmond's servant or underling, Alice is Geraldine's verger, to violence, verbal and physical.

These are just a few of the similarities I see in Blackadder and Vicker of Dibley. There are, of course, others--both are intentionally structured around a series of sketches. And there are also, of course differences, different times, different places, difference in the degree of parody and satire. What these similarities tell us about authorship and genre in television is, I think, quite a lot.