An immutable law of information is that media are only truly creative when they are either being born or dying. In between, a medium is mostly just another timid marketing tool. And since the old networks are slowly dying and new channels are being born all the time, TV is entering one of its more creative phases.
Now that we have an infinite number of TV cable channels and broadcast networks, we tend to assume that the quality and cultural significance of our viewing options are declining. Not that we have ever viewed TV as a major cultural medium, but that attitude - which assumes TV is lowbrow and shoddy by its very nature - has kept us from taking any television seriously.
More channels have made way for niche and alternative programming, which break ground previously untouched by the dreary, monolithic big three: ABC, NBC, and CBS. But even the networks are taking notice of the success of off-beat hits. Dramas like ER and NYPD Blue, for example, represent quantum leaps forward for the medium that brought us Gunsmoke, The Brady Bunch, and Leave It to Beaver.
With this slow wave of improvement, TV is becoming a lively, diverse medium that mirrors the country's freewheeling culture. Just a few years ago, it was possible to keep track of every major program on a network's prime-time schedule. Now, TV listings look like a Manhattan phone book, with something for everyone. And if you're young, skeptical, and technosavvy, it's a gold mine.
Fox, notably, led the charge in the broadcast arena. No "big-three" network would have aired an animated series in prime time, let alone one about a dysfunctional family, like The Simpsons. Only a fledgling like Fox, with little competitive choice but to break all the rules, would have tried it. Ditto with The X-Files. You can bet that five years ago no NBC execs would have taken a weekly series about two renegade geek FBI agents tracking down fat-sucking monsters, murderous circus freaks, and conspiratorial aliens. Their tedious market research and demographic profiles couldn't possibly have suggested that a series like that would ever work.
So even though the expansion of TV - with cable's violent and sexually explicit films and not-so-soft-porn channels - is frequently reviled as unhealthy, we forget about channels like AMC, A&E, Comedy Central, The History Channel, and The Discovery Channel, which have brought film, history, the arts, science, and documentary back to television, where only PBS had gone before.
An immutable law of TV is that the lifespan of a good series is just a few years, and The X-Files has been looking weary of late. We're sorry about Mulder's sister, but it's time for all of us to deal with it and move on.
Which brings us to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, (Mondays at 9 p.m. PDT), a loopy, endearing drama in its second year on the WB network. Inspired by the truly awful movie of the same name, Buffy is much better than its progenitor, but not yet nearly as good a broadcast as The X-Files has been in recent years; but Buffy is startlingly fresh, and is showing all the nascent signs of cultdom, including Usenet newsgroups and Web sites.
While Buffy generally lacks the writing, acting, production values, and dark political overtones of The X-Files, it is lighter and, in many ways, less pretentious. It does, however, share The X-Files' passion for gross and disturbing fiends, and for deformity and industrial-strength dismemberment.
And like The X-Files, Buffy is both self-mocking and revealing. Buffy lives in Sunnydale, a tongue-in-cheek invocation of American innocence and naivete, and goes to Sunnydale High, where she's a social misfit. Buffy happens to have the power to kill the vampires, monsters, zombies, and other demons of the underworld that rise up to feast on human flesh. She'd rather be watching TV or out dancing but, hey, duty calls.
"Got to go," Buffy tells a friend in her businesslike way. "No movie tonight. Something has risen from the dead and has to be sent back."
The appeal of both shows is a testament to the way young adults - especially the geeks and misfits among them - view authority. As with The X-Files, Buffy's heroes live in a world without any real authority or backup. The police and others who might help - government, parents, scientists, doctors - are either part of the conspiracy or too clueless to grasp what is really happening.
Like Mulder and Scully, the personal lives of Buffy and her friends are bleak. They wish they were popular; they long for love. But they know too much about how the world works to be happy (Buffy's parents are divorced, for example), and they are cynical - allergic to the posturing, moralizing, and false piety that comes from adults and popular culture.
Buffy's friends are the ungainly, the brainy, and the socially disconnected. Willow is a computer geek, digging up vital information on the Net, and Zander is the proto-nerd. Giles, Buffy's guru, mentor, and advisor on the Dark Side (and the only older person involved in the lives of Buffy and her friends), is the school librarian, a luddite who refers to computers as "those things" and is always rushing off to pore through musty books for clues and portents.
In broadcasting, there is no greater or more urgent challenge for writers, producers, and advertisers than to pick the rare program - one out of hundreds - that will, for one reason or another, pull away from the pack, touch a nerve among some segment of the culture, and score big. The expansion of TV has made the odds of success better than ever before, although that kind of success is still elusive and difficult to predict.
After all, few people predicted that The Simpsons or The X-Files would be so successful. It's always a crapshoot. There are countless forgotten losers and a tiny handful of winners. There is nothing concrete that links the standouts together, except for this: Consciously or not, they reveal something about the culture around them.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
