Sarah Michelle Gellar

It’s been a hard year for Buffy. First, she died. Then, some mischievous demon moved the show to UPN. Then, she came back to life only to discover that her phony sister Dawn hadn’t been turned back into mystical energy and was still an über-annoying teenager. Her friends variously got on a plane to England, left at the altar, and killed. All in all, the sixth season of Buffy gave Buffy herself very little to smile about.

Now that the season is over, and Sarah Michelle Gellar no longer has to be dour, depressive Buffy full-time, she appears to be compensating by smiling and giggling her way across the country. On the covers of InStyle and Entertainment Weekly, the talk-show circuit (Conan, Letterman, and Rosie all in a single week), and the MTV Movie Awards, Gellar has endeavoured to show the public how different she is from Buffy. Gellar loves to eat! She’s obsessed with Kylie Minogue’s ass! She has a healthy and functional relationship with a non-undead man! Totally different, casting directors of America! Take note!

The reason Gellar may be so anxious now to distance herself from Buffy is that she is clearly pondering moving out of Sunnydale for good. At the end of the 2002-03 season, Gellar’s Buffy contract will be up, "freeing" her to take on more film roles. These days, she’s telling InStyle that she never thought Buffy would last more than a season, complaining to EW that the show’s move to UPN has been trying, and opining to Zap2It.com that a feature film based on the Buffy TV series wouldn’t work; however, Gellar probably wouldn’t be working so hard to separate her professional identity from the character of Buffy if someone kind would sit her down and explain to her — using visual aids, perhaps — that Buffy is the best thing ever to happen to her career, and that she should cling to the deck of that sinking ship as long as she possibly can.

(Because it is a sinking ship. Even a Dawnie-come-lately like this commentator knows that the appointment of Marti Noxon — author of the soppiest, schmoopiest episodes in the series’s history — as executive producer was just the intake of breath that preceded the show’s painful, season-long death rattle. That series creator Joss Whedon — who wrote the screenplay for the original movie, and has also written and directed most of the series’s best episodes — has seemingly abandoned the show to Noxon’s stewardship as he works on his new FOX series Firefly isn’t a good sign for Buffy’s longevity. (And as an aside to the aside: Firefly is doomed, too, as have been every non-X-Files sci-fi series FOX has scheduled on Friday night. Remember Harsh Realm? The Visitor? Strange Luck? Exactly. As if the time slot wasn’t enough to jinx the show, FOX has also asked Whedon to reshoot the Firefly pilot, which doesn’t inspire much confidence either.))

While Buffy — due to its berth first on one and now on another marginal TV netlet — has never exactly been a Nielsen powerhouse, it is an enduring cult classic, legitimately on a par with the aforementioned X-Files. Since Gellar portrays the title character, the show obviously rests heavily on her diminutive shoulders, and she has inhabited it for six seasons with grace, humour, vulnerability, wit, confidence, and ass-kicking ferocity. If Gellar hadn’t been credible in the role of a teeny blonde Valley Girl who could, when called upon, beat the unholy shit out of all manner of otherworldly villains, the show would not have lasted as long as it has. For years, Gellar has earned kudos from TV critics for making Buffy a unique, even iconic TV character, and in this commentator’s opinion, she deserves all the credit she gets.

But when it comes to movies, it’s a different story. Either Gellar has a tin ear when it comes to choosing scripts, or she has yet to work with a director able to massage the waxy, hard-eyed demeanour (that serves her so well as Buffy) into a recognizably human character, as opposed to a smooth, shiny, injection-molded RealDoll. The result is that, while she has appeared among the ensemble casts of more than one successful film (I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2, for instance), every movie she’s carried has had a disappointing take at the box office. Cruel Intentions made back its budget, but Simply Irresistible proved to be inaccurately named, and the release of Harvard Man was delayed for months — never a good omen. A week ago, this commentator would have predicted that Gellar’s latest foray into film — the live-action adaptation of the non-beloved cartoon Scooby-Doo — would have been a much bigger failure (due to its much bigger $80 million budget) than any of Gellar’s previous films, but despite its overwhelmingly negative reviews, it has finished #1 in its first weekend, and set a new record for the biggest June opening in movie history.

So, surely there will be a sequel. And probably it will also make a lot of money. But if we are to believe that Gellar is sincere in her claim in the current EW cover story — that "[i]t’s not just about making $100 million at the box office — it’s about a craft, a profession" — we fail to see how Gellar will be fulfilled artistically by throwing over Buffy in order to make more Scoobys. That is, if the reason she wants to widen her current two-and-a-half-month movie window is to devote more time to this new film franchise, or others like it (since practically every other movie she’s made has met with a stiff yawn by the filmgoing public), Gellar will be able to wave up at her one-time co-star Jennifer Love Hewitt on her way down the fame ladder. Buffy is the kind of complex, complicated role in the service of which actors long to ply their skills. When Gellar gives it up in order to have more time to devote to bringing third-tier cartoon characters to life, she will both dishonour her "craft," and stake her fame into so much dust.