maebmij’s blog

Might I highly recommend that if you have seen episode 78 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Restless” (episode 66 in the Australian box set), the final episode of season 4, that you listen to Joss Whedon’s commentary? The guy’s quite incredible.

One of the interesting take-home messages was how restricted things are when making a TV show. Some examples:

• The ‘secondary credits’ which display over the opening minutes of the show are contractually required. So when the director doesn’t want them distracting from the start of the show, he has to run filler-style story at the beginning until they’re over.
• Remember how Willow used to look extremely square at the start of series 1, and then she kinda got nerdy-cool? That was studio pressure to make her more palatable.
• There’s a lesbian kiss scene in this episode. Off-camera – it’s set up, and then the camera stays on Xander’s reaction as he watches, and only switches back to the kiss after it’s finished. The network asked them to reduce the length of the off-screen kiss in the name of good taste.

This last one made me think about our relationship with TV. It wouldn’t be a problem in a movie or a rented video, but we think of broadcast TV as something that comes into our homes uninvited. Therefore it must be held to lowest-common-denominator standards of decency. There was a quote from someone in the US administration, speaking about how pornography “invades our homes through our televisions and computers” – almost as if there is no human complicity at all in the media we consume.