Buffy the Vampire Slayer (8 p.m. Tuesdays, WB) A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Debuts: Spielberg's sci-fi series, Magic Johnson's talk show Y E S T E R D A Y The Truman Show Reviewed by Charles Taylor Jim Carrey busts out of the comedy bubble (06/05/98) Big Foot: An interview with Terry Gilliam By David Wallis The "Fear and Loathing" director stomps on Hollywood and American literalism (06/05/98) R E C E N T_. T E L E V I S I O N When Garry met Larry By Joyce Millman "The Larry Sanders Show" signs off after six seasons, but creator Shandling and his alter ego remain inseparable (05/29/98) You go, girls By Joyce Millman Time's up for "Murphy Brown" and "Ellen," but they were once TV's women of the hour (05/18/98) Cheerio, "Seinfeld" By Joyce Millman Saying goodbye to the greatest sitcom of all time (05/04/98) Tubbythumping By Joyce Millman Let the Teletubbies bashing begin (04/03/98) Let my people go -- to the movies By Joyce Millman A new cable documentary profiles the Jewish immigrants who founded Hollywood, but lost their cultural identity (03/19/98) BROWSE THE TV ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES

[ J O Y C E_.M I L L M A N__O N_.T E L E V I S I O N ]___ _____The "Seinfeld" gang got thrown in jail. Pembleton quit the homicide squad. Hank Hill was trapped in an exploding Mega Lo Mart. Small stuff, all of it, compared to the season-ending travails of Buffy Summers, the 17-year-old heroine of WB's sharp, shiny semi-hit, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." In the last episode of the season, Buffy was framed for murder, got kicked out of school, had a mega-fight with Mom, rescued her mentor, Giles, from a vampire torture chamber and saved the world from getting sucked into the mouth of hell by running a ritual sword through her relapsed bloodsucker ex-boyfriend Angel. Angel had been treating her like dirt ever since they slept together (ancient gypsy curse, long story), but wouldn't you know it? Right at the moment when Buffy was getting ready to spear his internal organs, the curse was lifted and Angel was back to his old self again and he got all weepy and told her he loved her, but she had to skewer him anyway to finish the world-saving ritual. Instead of the whole world getting sucked into hell, only he did, and his newly restored soul is presumably undergoing a hundred million torments, while Buffy -- now a teenage runaway -- rides a Greyhound bus to some scuzzy Nowhere and broods over all the many ways that life sucks. "Buffy" is the best. This past season (its first full one), the horror/romance/drama/comedy increased its viewership by 41 percent, even though WB moved it from 9 p.m. Mondays to an early 8 p.m. Tuesday slot to anchor a new night of programming. The show increased its profile, too, with the direct, melting gaze of star Sarah Michelle Gellar looking out at us from the covers of Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly and, most recently, from one of those milk mustache ads. But because many Serious Adult Viewers have yet to get beyond that silly title, and because not every city in the country has a WB affiliate, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" still qualifies as a cult pleasure. So, in the interest of keeping it Our Little Secret, I must insist that you eat your computer upon finishing this article. As "Buffy" fans know, Buffy Summers is a fairly typical teenage girl (broken home, bored with school, wears a lot of pale violet lipstick and '70s-retro hip-huggers and baby T's). But she's also a vampire slayer, pre-ordained to kick armies of undead butt. Her qualifications: superior demon-sensing intuition, impressive ability to throw and take a punch and tons of lethal sarcasm. Plus, she can run really fast in chunky platform shoes. Buffy only came to understand her destiny when she was summoned to the vampire-infested suburb of Sunnydale, Calif. (Her divorced mom thinks she was expelled from her old school for fighting, and welcomes this relocation as a chance for a fresh start.) There, Buffy met up with her "watcher" (handler and portent interpreter), tweedy school librarian Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), who told her Sunnydale sits atop the mouth of hell and it's up to her to keep a lid on things. Vampires and other assorted monsters keep swarming to Sunnydale like it's the Woodstock of the Undead (no, wait -- that's the Page/Plant tour); over the past season and a half, Buffy must have used up a whole forest of stakes. Taken separately, the elements of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which creator/writer Joss Whedon based on his (not as good) 1992 movie of the same name, aren't really new. Athletic and confident, Buffy is a kickboxing TV warrior heroine in the Xena mode. The supernatural angle puts the show squarely in the tradition of female-magic series like "Bewitched," "I Dream of Jeannie" and "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch," except those are sitcoms; and, while "Buffy" has plenty of ironic humor, it can be very, very dark. There's the Anne Rice/"Dark Shadows" vampire element, of course, and the Gothic romance/star-crossed lovers theme -- headstrong Buffy and brooding vampire-with-a-conscience Angel (David Boreanaz) make a beautiful, tortured pair. "Buffy" has the addictive quality of a daytime soap. And it's partly a tribute to those old '50s drive-in flicks about teens hormonally transformed into monsters, and partly a modern, knowing coming-of-age drama like "My So-Called Life." But Whedon energizes his metaphors -- high school as horror show, adolescents as lonely outcasts or predators in packs -- with a storytelling style that is both intensely emotional and devastatingly flip. "Buffy" approximates, perfectly, the mood swings of adolescence. Much of the show's charm (and humor) comes from the way the kids on "Buffy" shrug off the creepiness around them. There is no morose conspiracy theorizing or earnest attempts at scientific explanation. Some things just are, whether they're vampires or werewolves or cruel, yet popular, cheerleaders. They've got to be dealt with. Whatever. "Buffy" succeeds in large part because Gellar plays the role with just the right balance of bravado and sadness -- nobody else, not even her mom, can know what she's feeling inside. The writers give her great lines, expressed in "Clueless" meets pseudo homegirl teenspeak. When her punky vampire nemesis Spike (James Marsters) proposes that they form an alliance to get rid of the bad-again Angel, who has stolen Spike's girl, Buffy punches him in the mouth and snarls, "You're pathetic! The whole earth may be sucked into hell and you want my help because your girlfriend's a big ho? Well, let me take this opportunity to not care!" Indeed, one of the wonders of "Buffy" is how each member of Buffy's posse -- sweet computer nerd Willow (Alyson Hannigan), horny, unhip Xander (Nicholas Brendon), shy, bookish Giles, as well as the vamps -- has his or her own voice, unlike WB's higher-rated teen drama "Dawson's Creek," on which everybody sounds exactly the same. You feel like you know the kids on "Buffy." You've been there. Well, except for the vampires and stuff. Buffy is the classic misfit, the misunderstood rebel. She has amazing reserves of courage and self-respect and a highly developed sense of social responsibility, but her mother thinks she's just a boy-crazy troublemaker who gets bad grades. Buffy is saving the world, for heaven's sake, and her mom is grounding her. Buffy is literally a freak, and Willow, Xander and Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), the snob who lost face with the in-crowd when she started making out in broom closets with Xander, are shunned by their classmates. One of the sweetest (and most heartening) things about "Buffy" is how the outcasts and alleged bad seeds save the day. They're the only ones in town who really know what's happening, and they're smarter, deeper and more important than their self-involved peers or clueless parents know. Early on, "Buffy" was more obvious and jokey with its metaphors ("You're a 16-year-old girl who thinks her problems are the end of the world," Buffy's mom prattles). And it was a little too light-headed, with prissy Brit Giles not at all hip to the ways of American teens. This season, the show got creepier and kinkier, its vision more mature and daring, with the addition of the very cool British bloodsuckers, Spike and his dolly, Drusilla (Juliet Landau). Platinum-haired Spike is a droll cut-up; he calls humans "Happy Meals with legs." Dru is Ophelia with fangs, a sexy, mad, goth tart whose body vibrates with anticipation at the mere mention of blood. But "Buffy" really showed its nerve this season when it went all the way with Buffy's sexual awakening. In the two-part episode "Innocence" (written and directed by Whedon), Buffy loses her virginity to Angel on her 17th birthday. But she doesn't know that he's under that gypsy curse, which kicks in the moment he feels true love and robs him of his human soul. In a heartbreaking scene, after they sleep together, he turns into a taunting monster playboy who laughs at her inexperience, dumps her and dares her to slay him. Sort of like the "Afterschool Special" of every girl's nightmares. Buffy's loss of innocence shadowed Buffy for the rest of the season. In the astonishingly moving two-part finale "Becoming" (also written and directed by Whedon), she doesn't quite know how to deal with the pain of love and growing up. After she dutifully dispatches Angel, she runs away to punish herself and search her soul. Essentially, "Buffy" is about learning to accept the world -- and people -- as being more complicated than simply good and evil. She's adrift now, and confused, nursing the fresh wounds of budding adulthood. But you can bet she'll eventually snap out of it. She has to. She's got to get her boyfriend back from hell. SALON | June 8, 1998 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E _.T A L K Will Buffy go back to Sunnydale? Will Angel rise again? Indulge your Buffy obsession in Table Talk.