Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Thank you so much for your recent short article on your blog, about quality television and how some of the best movies were shown there. I would like to point out one unusual program development, which works sort of opposite to your article: How a bad movie about a young teenage vampire slayer later became the finest television program ever put on TV — I speak, of course, of Joss Whedon’s 144-hour, 7-season long television movie "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which stands heads and heels above programs such as "Lost" in the quality of it writing. Certainly Whedon would never have ended a season as ham-handedly as the writers did for the first season of Lost, and would not introduce an entire new slate of characters in the second, when they already had 44 good ones to deal with. "Lost" is certainly good, but is not as canny a program as "Buffy."

But your point is otherwise well taken! Thanks for raising it.

Dana J. Lawrence Davenport, IA

Jim Emerson: Actually, the only reason I didn’t mention "Buffy" was because I haven’t seen enough of it yet (only parts of the second through fourth seasons) to feel confident about discussing it in any detail. I’m hoping to catch up, though, now that the whole series is on DVD. Meanwhile, I recently watched the whole first season of "Veronica Mars" on DVD, a terrific mystery series that does for high school detectives (Nancy Drew meets film noir) what "Buffy" did for... high school vampire slayers. Joss Whedon himself is a huge fan — and, now, so am I. It’s the kind of TV series a movie critic can love.