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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

OGIC: Second things first: for aspiring Slayerites

October 28, 2003 by Terry Teachout

The great fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be available soon on DVD. You can make a case for any of the seasons between the second and the fifth being best. Put me on the spot and I’ll squirm and equivocate, and in the end take the fifth.


The fifth season begins and ends with two great, jaw-dropping surprises. Although the second surprise is bigger, the first one is gutsier; it’s completely disorienting, yet (eventually) satisfyingly accounted for. (It won’t be obvious what’s so surprising about it unless you’ve watched the previous seasons.) In between, the Slayer faces her mightiest opponent yet. True, every next Big Bad has to be tougher than the last, but by the fifth season the show had just about topped out in terms of magnitudes of villainy–there wasn’t much of anywhere to go after Glory’s high-heeled predations. Actually, the sixth season came up with a resourceful and potent solution to this built-in dead end; unfortunately, the individual episodes had become uneven and unreliable by then, lurching from classics like the musical “Once More with Feeling” to terrible clunkers about mystery meat.


If you’re like many friends of mine who missed out on Buffy during its run, but want to see what all the fuss was about, I have some advice. Start with the second season. The first season has its charms, but it’s different in character from the following seasons and is not the best introduction. Plotwise, there’s nothing you can’t follow in the second season without having watched the first. If you like the second season, go back and watch the first before you pick up again with the third, and then it’s smooth sailing ahead for a good sixty-some episodes before things start falling apart.


About Last Night: you ask, we deliver. Particularly if you ask in verse.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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