Joss Whedon's Biggest Buffy Challenge Was Moving Her From High School To College
Setting a TV series in high school puts a ticking clock on your characters. Even if you start them as new students, they're going to age out in a few years. Then you have to figure out how to keep them together. Whether it's every character going to the same local college (which is very unlikely) or making some sort of pact to stick together, education be damned, you've written yourself into a corner before you start. Still, it's hard to resist a high school story. It's a time of tremendous change when brains are still developing and consequences don't have the same fear attached to them that they will later in life. So, how do you manage it?
Joss Whedon tried with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and as someone who was watching the show live at the time, the solutions seemed to work for the most part. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Willow (Alyson Hannigan) both ended up at UC Sunnydale; it made sense for Buffy (she had one or two other things to think about in high school beyond homework), while Willow wanted to stay for the magic around the Hellmouth. Meanwhile, Xander (Nicholas Brendon) got a local job (which is exactly what you'd expect him to do); Oz (Seth Green) was alarmed by the presence of a secret monster-hunting group and left to protect himself; and Anya, the vengeance demon (Emma Caulfield), gradually began a relationship with Xander. It was all fairly logical, story-wise, and didn't feel too out-there, at least for the "Buffy" universe.
It was definitely a challenge, however. In fact, when interviewed by IGN in 2003, Whedon indicated it was possibly the biggest challenge he had to manage during the show's run.
'We're going to 90210 college now?'
When asked about the biggest challenge of transitioning the Scooby gang out of high school, Joss Whedon replied:
"The biggest challenge was, how do you keep your high school gang together without saying, 'We're going to 90210 college now?' [You're] treading the line between the reality of the thing and the fact that you want to keep all your characters in the same place.
"Ultimately, the season became about how fragmented they got and the fact that they didn't all stay in the same place. That was sort of how we dealt with it, but that was the trickiest part. And also, you know, creating a giant government super-soldier conspiracy on a television budget, where we had, like, a wall and a shrub. Ooooh, it's James Bond with his wall and his shrub!"
Whedon is talking about the Initiative, a secret military operation that was headquartered under the campus of UC Sunnydale. It led to Buffy's romance with a certain piece of dry toast named Riley (Marc Blucas, who should not be blamed for this at all). I'm not going to lie; that felt very forced to me at the time, and I absolutely hated the military storyline. It took me out of the supernatural stuff, even though that's what they were hunting. I did love their ability to get Spike (James Marsters) into the Scooby gang, but the rest of the Initiative was sort of messy. That said, the shifting around of the major characters and the focus on their split was a good move. Adding in the fact that the spinoff "Angel" gave another destination for our heroes helped a lot as well.
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is currently streaming on Hulu.