MORE THAN A FEELING
“So did anybody . . . last night, you know, did anybody, um . . . burst into song?”
The sixth season was far different than any season that had preceded it, since it focused on the personal demons of the Scooby Gang. It begins with Willow casting a powerful spell to bring Buffy back to life; she succeeds and is thrilled to have resurrected her closest friend, only to eventually learn that she didn’t free Buffy from a hell dimension but rather pulled her out of heaven.
The season is dark and largely depressing season: Buffy is unhappy to be back on earth, Spike attempts to rape her to consummate his obsession with her, Willow wrestles uncomfortably (for herself and the audience) with her magic addiction, Xander abandons Anya at the altar, and Tara is murdered. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?
In addition, the Big Bad appears in the form of a troika of supernerds who don’t seem all that bad—the Trio: Warren Mears (Adam Busch), Andrew Wells (Tom Lenk), and Jonathan Levinson (Danny Strong, who has subsequently gone on to become one of the most successful TV and film writers in the business as the creator of Empire, a screenwriter for films like Lee Daniels’s The Butler, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, and the brilliant HBO telefilms Recount and Game Change). Of course, appearances can be deceiving . . .
The series also moved from its previous home on the WB to the United Paramount Network following a fierce bidding war. The studio that produced it, Fox, ultimately chose to migrate to a new network home for a larger licensing fee to cover the cost of a series that had grown far more expensive over the years (the show had long gone from filming on Super 16 mm in the early seasons to the traditional 35 mm film stock at the time as well). And with Buffy having died at the end of “The Gift,” the WB did nothing to dissuade viewers from thinking that the slayer was really six feet under and that they should, instead, watch Angel. Meanwhile, UPN embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign to let the audience know that Buffy was returning from the dead in a new home across the dial.
DAVID FURY
(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Joss was a little fatalistic. He felt he was not going to return to the show. That after season five he would not be coming back. He needed a break, he wanted to do other things, and the network was playing that negotiation game. We had an idea that this might be it. Some of us didn’t believe it. They thought it’s impossible; they can’t possibly let this go. But in essence they did. UPN saw an opportunity, because of the way the WB was playing with the value of the show and wasn’t sure they were going to pick it up, so Twentieth Television went, “All right, we’ll sell it elsewhere.”
KEVIN LEVY
(senior vice president, Program Planning and Scheduling, the CW)
I remember when I was at UPN we had a great marketing campaign for it coming back, “Buffy Lives,” which I thought looked great and really did a good job of sending the message that the show was transitioning over to UPN.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
(story editor, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
UPN really took a bath on Buffy and the reason they took a bath is that they couldn’t come up with any product to launch off of Buffy. They had a great lead-in, but they couldn’t get the material to get their next hit, and Enterprise wasn’t really helping them, either.
KEVIN LEVY
We premiered America’s Next Top Model after the finale of Buffy and that was amazing, because that turned into a giant hit for us at UPN. I don’t think Top Model would have been as much as a self-starter had it not had that lead-in. When we got wrestling it was a big deal; when we got the new Enterprise, that was a big deal, but this was a really big deal from a competitive standpoint, because it was taking away a major piece from our prime competitor, which was the WB. So not only was it an addition for us, it was addition by subtraction for them as far as our perspective went. And then we got Roswell as well. I remember when Dean Valentine, who was our CEO, made that announcement to the assembled company, there was just massive applause when we got it. It was very exciting.
MARTI NOXON
(executive producer / show runner, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Joss was really clear that resurrection could only come at a cost. That when Buffy comes back, it’s not going to be easy. I think that was sort of a genius twist in that we all assumed she had been in some sort of horrible place, and then we discover the reason the resurrection is so painful for her is because she wasn’t. That was what made it such a great revelation and made Buffy’s character a little more interesting.
When Angel came back from hell, he was twitchy for a whole different reason. But I do think Joss’s philosophy was right: if you’re going to defy the laws of nature in that way, you’re going to have to pay a real price. It had repercussions through the whole season.
DAVID FURY
The great thing about a show like Buffy is anything is possible. In a show with magic, in a show with dark magic, in a show with witches, bringing someone back to life is not a problem. It’s more like you don’t want to trivialize that they died. In other words, if somebody dies in an emotional way and then you bring them back and they’re fine, it would have been a total cheat toward everything we worked for in season five with Buffy’s death. Which is why Joss wanted Buffy to be less than herself when she came back. He wanted her to be damaged and sullen and unhappy. And the secret comes out in the musical where we find out she was in heaven and she was yanked out of it. She was happy, she was with her mother, and this is why I don’t know if I want to be back. “I was happier being dead.” That’s a huge thing to do.
MARTI NOXON
The way she came back was pretty much what people expected. Ultimately, I don’t think Joss wanted to waste a tremendous amount of energy in bringing her back. That’s not really what people cared about. It’s a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so they knew she was going to be back. It wasn’t like we went out of our way for the audience to say, “Wow, we never saw that coming.” At our writers meeting, we simply discussed what would be the most likely thing to have happen now if you were in this fantasy world.
DAVID FURY
When Joss presented that idea and when Marti and I were discussing it when Joss wasn’t around, because he was off writing the musical for the first several episodes of the season, we knew this had to be a very painful birth bringing Buffy back, and we had to play into that. That’s what people were responding to. They were saying things like, “It’s not as fun as it used to be; Buffy is such a drag; it’s so serious.” That was all intentional. There was a lot of discussion about that. How much of the audience was going to be alienated and when are we going to snap her out of this? Obviously, the key was it’s going to be the end of the season when she needed to climb back out of her grave for herself to decide she wanted to live in this world. That was the biggest part.
MARTI NOXON
Once Joss found his hook in the story—that she had been in a good place—he was really committed to the idea that she would not be all cheery when she got back. It’s funny, because although the show is not theological in that way, we finally ran out of excuses. Joss has often said that there is no “heaven” as such in the Buffyverse. But if there’s a bad place, there has to be a good place. Maybe it’s not exactly heaven, but there are counter forces to all other forces, and Joss was finally willing to accept that. A recurring them in Joss’s work and both shows is that life is hard and it’s people’s actions and relationships with each other that make it livable. He’s never said it was a pretty worldview.
JOSS WHEDON
(creator / executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Season six was basically about, “OK, now we’re grown-ups.” You take away Giles, because Tony wanted to go back to England. You see, the recurring theme is that whenever the actors are available, we work around it. But it made sense. We have no mentor, we have no mother, we have no parental figures.
MARTI NOXON
In “Flood
ed,” we were, like, “you know the house is a metaphor for all of the adult problems she’ll be dealing with,” It turned out pretty well. But we also said, “You know what, not that exciting to have Buffy deal with bills.” Because it’s not Buffy the Debt Collector, it’s not Buffy the Credit Card User, it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So we started toying with the idea of adult responsibilities and then decided we probably have to go to nasty sex instead. We tried out a bunch of those in “Flooded” and kind of dispensed with them, because then after an episode we were kind of, like, “Well, we probably don’t want her worrying about the actual realities of adult life because it got boring.”
JOSS WHEDON
We were dealing with marriage and alcoholism and a really abusive relationship. We were dealing with someone who is practically suicidally depressed. It’s weird, but people didn’t respond to that so much.
MARTI NOXON
We both wanted to reflect the tumult of being in your twenties. Even though the show wasn’t as clearly defined by metaphor as it was when we were back in high school, it’s appropriate. The twenties are a much more murky period. I think we both wanted to make sure that it felt very real; that when you get to the age that Buffy and the others were, there’s supposed to be this really strong conflict between that desire on one hand to be young and taken care of and irresponsible, and on the other to really take charge of your own life. Those two things pull you in really different directions. For me—and I think for a lot of people I knew at that age—it’s kind of a war. Sometimes the grown-up is winning and sometimes the kid is winning. That’s what we really wanted to deal with.
JOSS WHEDON
Season six of Buffy saw a very dark turn for the series, as Buffy herself, recently returned to life, spent most of the year in a very unhappy place and involved in a decidedly unhealthy relationship with Spike.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
(actress, Buffy Summers)
It was definitely tough for me. It’s so hard to separate myself from her, so it was tough for me to see these situations and think, “But Buffy wouldn’t do this . . .” And I felt pressure from the force of the fans. I know Joss and Marti both particularly talked me down from a ledge a couple of times, because it just felt so far removed for me at the time. And maybe that was the point—maybe I was struggling in the same way that she was struggling to find who she was. It just felt so foreign to me.
DAVID FURY
The dynamic changes a little bit when you don’t have the show runner and visionary of the show around and part of you feels like we’re kind of floundering. As much as we’re moving forward and we’re trying to anticipate and go, What would Joss do here? it was difficult. Marti tried to rely on me a lot for that. I was flattered and appreciative, but I had also been doing a lot of work at Angel and kind of splitting my time between the two, so I feel like I wasn’t available enough to her, which I felt very badly about. We tried to work together and Marti tried to run the show just as she felt Joss would, but I guess there was always a feeling in the back of our minds, Joss is coming back, right? The show is still going on, he’s not just gone, he’ll come back eventually. And he did come back. He was living on the East Coast at the time. He would fly in for a few days and discuss what we were doing for those first couple of episodes and he’d give us thoughts, and then he would go away again.
Marti never really, to my mind, got enough time to really mold into the role of show runner. As much as Joss said he was turning the show over to her, it didn’t happen sort of. I was busy writing the second episode, she was writing the first, and when we were writing, we were really not together during that period. So there were a lot of times when she would convene the writers while I was writing or I’d get together with some of the writers while she was writing. We hadn’t quite found the way we were going to do it. Joss would come in and give his blessing on certain things, give his notes on scripts we’d hand in, and then disappear again.
JOSS WHEDON
I do remember there was a time when I said to Marti, “OK, I think Buffy’s been gone for too long. We’ve lost her, and it’s time now to win her back.”
MARTI NOXON
I remember that day, too. It was just a day when everybody kind of thought, “OK, we’ve reached the bottom of the pool. It’s time to surface.” Sarah told me, “I just feel like I’ve lost the hero completely in all this exploration.”
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
I always looked up to Buffy. I thought when I was younger I would have loved to have a role model like that. A woman who showed you that you don’t have to be the smartest and you don’t have to be the most beautiful, but you can protect your family and the people that you love and you can be a powerful woman. I think that’s what made season six hard for me. For all of us, but especially Joss, Marti, and I, we love her and it was hard for all of us to watch her suffer. I think it was a part of growing pains. It was a tough time, and that’s what came through in the end, which was great, because when Buffy herself resurfaced, we all resurfaced and found our voice again.
JOSE MOLINA
(executive story editor, Firefly)
I think the show kind of ran its course. The show was designed to be a high school show. And the high school show ended in season three. Then they went to college and the show changed pretty drastically right then and there. So it was evolving, and even season four had some of the best episodes they ever did with, among others, “Hush”; season five is another college season but it had “The Body,” which is probably my favorite episode of Buffy, hands down. But you can tell, even in those episodes, that it was getting a little grown-up and a little dark and getting a little away from the more fun escapist stories that were there earlier. Of course, the arc of “Becoming” is one of the most heartbreaking arcs in genre TV that I’ve seen to date. So it’s not like the show was ever a laugh riot.
MARTI NOXON
We started to say, “Yeah, we recognize that the season was dark,” and now it’s what everyone says. I’ve talked to a lot of fans who really enjoyed the season and didn’t have problems with it since, overall, there was still a lot of funny and a lot of good. However, we definitely went to a very dark place, particularly with Buffy and Spike. I recognize that. We took that elevator pretty far down. We got the message that people didn’t like a dour Buffy, and, you know, we absolutely agreed. You can’t stay in that place. But at the same time, it’s hard to hear people say, “Yeah, it just wasn’t to our liking.”
We’ve had criticism before. Season four also got a lot of hits, so it was a little cyclical. Season four had a great deal of great in it, but people didn’t like Riley, people didn’t like the Initiative, people didn’t like Maggie. It was a loyal fan base, but we heard people wanted stuff to lighten up a bit.
JOSE MOLINA
Marti’s sensibilities might have been darker than what the show was used to. And it was really her show. Joss was there, but season seven he was running Angel and Firefly. So the change of ownership, if you will, was a little jarring. And, as many good episodes as there are in seasons six and seven, the change in tone sort of left me missing what was there before.
DAVID FURY
I will say the show got extremely sexual in the last couple of seasons. It went there. I know Marti and Joss wanted to push the envelope. Joss wanted to make the show darker and he wanted to push standards and practices into letting him do some really twisted things. He wanted Buffy to be self-destructive in a twisted way, and it’s hard to convey that in a family show or something that is more network friendly. Marti was very into the relationship stuff; she was into the Spike-Buffy thing and the sort of self-destruction, the idea of Buffy being reckless with Spike and getting into a kind of, like, hate sex. It’s kind of sophisticated dark stuff, psychology certainly. That was largely the tone of that season, which was a shift from what we’d been doing on the WB. It seemed appropriate at the time. I think Joss was a little surprised that there was so much pushback, but he never
regretted it or thought we made a mistake. He always knew it needed to be that way.
In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry is a cranky teenager. I told Joss that in season six Buffy is Harry. He needed to go through that. It’s part of the ritual of growing up into adulthood. It’s going through the process of being an asshole who hates everybody, because no one understands them. He agreed that’s sort of what Buffy was meant to be in season six.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Joss knowing where he was going with that, knowing that they would bring Buffy back but she would come back with problems. There’s that wonderful moment in an episode I wrote called “Dead Things,” where the nerd trio accidentally kill one of their ex-girlfriends, where it turns really dark. Buffy has been carrying on with Spike and she has that wonderful thing with Tara where she says, basically, “Please tell me there’s something wrong with me.” Because if she didn’t come back wrong, then these bad choices are her fault.
SARAH LEMELMAN
(author, It’s About Power: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)
Once Riley disappears from Buffy’s life, she faces much upheaval, especially since she dies for longer than a couple minutes when she previously drowned in the first season and is brought back to life by the Scooby Gang. This puts her into a deep depression, and she is seen as experimenting with her “darker” self. As a result, she finally gives into the temptation of Spike, who had been lusting after her for much of the time that Buffy was with Riley. When she proceeds with her “relationship” with Spike, she continues to hold the power, as she had done with Riley, but to a much greater degree. She is certainly no passive female and, instead, dominates Spike to the point where she effeminizes him. This negative and extremely cruel treatment of Spike ultimately leads to his attempted rape of Buffy.
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