Vampire High!

Apparently it was necessary for officials at the Latin School in Boston to come forward and explain the fancy-pants school is not, in fact, experiencing a vampire infestation. As a Gawker commenter wisely observed, this is what happens when teenagers get their hands on all seven seasons of Buffy.

Next thing you know, students will be reporting classmates becoming invisible, devil dogs invading prom, and their graduation speaker turning into a giant snake. I can't wait to see the naysaying press release for each of those. The explanation will probably entail gangs on PCP.

True Blood: CLUNK!

That's the sound of Alan Ball attempting to deliver to viewers True Blood's central metaphor.

You'd think the images in the opening credits of white children in Klansmen gear and a church sign reading "God Hates Fangs" would be enough, but no: we also need at least one scene per episode of the spokeswoman for the National Vampire League advocating on television for vampire rights legislation. And we definitely need protagonist Sookie Stackhouse telling her best friend who thinks that vampires can put humans under their thrall, "Yeah right, and black people are lazy, and Jews have horns."

CLUNK! Did someone just drop a boulder on my head, or is Ball once again reminding us that vampires are not just vampires, they're also Jews, blacks, gays, disabled people, Alaskan Natives, Maoris, and [insert oppressed population that has at one time or another fought for their civil rights here]?

This parallel is condescendingly, repeatedly spelled out, and then bafflingly undermined, as in last Sunday's episode when the vampire Bill Compton tells Sookie he can, in fact, charm humans into letting him bite them.

Perhaps True Blood still hasn't quite found its legs. Ball's Six Feet Under, too, is embarrassingly heavy-handed in its earliest episodes.

But I can't help comparing this show to my gold standard for all vampiric programming, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy, too, relied upon a metaphorical foundation (high school is hell) but made that truth literal through action, rather than awkward dialogue, over the course of multiple seasons. If Buffy was written by Ball, a scene from its first season might go a little something like this:

Buffy: You guys, weird things keep happening here. I found a dead lunch lady in a locker today. She had bite marks on her neck.
Xander: Wow, that's super scary! Like something out of my worst nightmares.
Willow: I would even call it "hellish."
Buffy: Well, high school is hell after all!
(They all laugh wildly. Then they stop abruptly and stare at each other with expressions of dawning horror. Then they embrace. Exeunt.)

True Blood is not without its merits: I like Brit actor Stephen Moyer as the charming/menacing vampire Bill, and the sweaty Louisiana setting is dark and romantic and unusual in disproportionately-urban TV land. I just hope Ball and his writing team stop treating the viewers like dum-dums who need it explained, again and again, what makes the show's subject matter both alluring and relevant.

House 3/27/07: Don't Kiss Riley Finn Anytime Soon

I just... I can't ever forgive myself for forgetting to blog about this subject last Tuesday. Please consider this my penance, intended to hold you over until a new House airs at nine tomorrow.

Last week's episode would have been unextraordinary - that is, a standard-issue House, plus the bonus insinuation of a one-night stand between House and Cuddy - if it weren't for guest star Marc Blucas.

Blucas is known amongst Buffy obsessives as Riley Finn, Buffy's fourth and fifth season boyfriend, AKA the poor schmuck sandwiched between Buffy's two far more delicious vampire BFs. Think of Riley as some old liverwurst, and Angel and Spike as the homemade ciabatta slices that overpower the cold cut smushed between them. Riley started out sort of sympathetic - he was just an all-American boy who had no idea what he was getting into. But by the end of his run he was an intolerable meathead whose ego couldn't withstand a girlfriend with more brawn than he.



In fact, back in college my friend Lindsey and I used to scream at the television, "BLUCAS, YOU SUCK!" every time Riley appeared on screen. The refrain sounds obvious enough, but we came upon it browsing the Buffy forums on Television Without Pity. (Yes, it's been established that I include myself in the Buffy obsessives.) One poster was an alumnus of Wake Forest, a school for which Marc Blucas played basketball. And apparently, he sucked. Hard. So when this poster went to games, he would scream at him, "BLUCAS, YOU SUCK!" And continued to do so years later when Blucas appeared on Buffy as the character Spike once accurately nicknamed Captain Cardboard.

ANYWAY. I was glad to see Riley Finn go, but I'm always interested in seeing what Buffy veterans are up to these days. (Prognosis: not so good. Slayer. The voice of April in TMNT? Really?) So when Marc "BLUCAS, YOU SUCK!" Blucas appeared as Patient of the Week on last week's House, I was delighted. I was even more delighted when it turned out that his character had a genetic disease whose symptoms included, among other things, bacterial vaginosis in his mouth. Vagina Mouth. That seems like a generous ending for Riley Finn, no?

Oops... you know the rest

Because Britney Spears' recent history seems like something out of a cheesy TV movie, I got to thinking who would play who in an actual TV movie about her life. Truthfully, I have sympathy for the girl: she's clearly in the midst of a mental breakdown, which is no surprise considering the way she's hounded. At the same time, no one held a gun to her head and made her writhe around on stage wearing little more than a snake and setting women's lib back fifty years. She wanted the fame, and she got it.

So I have no qualms casting a terrible Lifetime biopic about her, using out to pasture TV actors. Without further ado, the cast from Snakes on a Dame: The Britney Spears Story.

Britney's mama: Cynthia Ettinger. Cynthia was last seen playing an amoral carnie stripper on Carnivale, and a buxom drama queen obsessed with Brian Cox(!) on Deadwood. She's voluptuous, bottle-blond, and has proven adept at playing wayyyy over-the-top women who want to pretend they're not middle-aged. She'd be perfect for the ultimate trashy stage mom.

Jason Alexander: The actual Jason Alexander, of course, should play Britney's childhood friend and first husband, just because I thought that's who she married when I first heard the news, and the mental image was hilarious!

Kevin Federline: David Faustino. He's certainly established his sleaziness, and I think his own aborted career is a nice parallel to K-Fed's (Faustino's latest movie: something called RoboDoc.)

Paris Hilton: Britney's former BFF would be marvelous as interpreted by Ripsi, the girl who was too bad for reality show The Bad Girls Club. If you get Oxygen, check out the episode where Ripsi gets wasted and attacks like, everyone. Trust me, it's so much funnier than it sounds.

The lady herself: I'd cast Clare Kramer as Brit. There's not much of a resemblance, but any Buffy fan remembers the havoc Clare wrought during the show's fifth season with her terrible, terrible performance. Britney and Clare are both bad at playing crazy (even if Britney is legitimately insane), and Clare could do justice to Britney's ridiculous, melodramatic life.

OK commenters. Who would you cast? I still need a Jamie-Lynn, here.

"Love makes you do the wacky." --Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Too right you are, Buffy, especially when the love in question is for two dead guys. Today, as part of the brilliantly-themed Vampire Blog-a-thon, sponsored by Nathaniel of The Film Experience, I will tackle the age-old question that has tormented academics and fangirls alike: Angel or Spike? (Or, if you prefer, Tall, Dark, and Forehead or Captain Peroxide?)



I'd just like to see [Angel] grow. Honestly, everything he's done so far I've enjoyed, so there's not really one thing. Maybe, like, golfing or something." --David Boreanaz
There's nothing I love better than one of these completely insane one-liners. Unfortch, Angel the character lacked much of Boreanaz's off-the-wall charisma. In my mind, Angel didn't grow much on Buffy. He had two wildly different states of being, yes: guilt-plagued, brooding good guy and nasty, rage-filled bad guy. The most he could do was flip-flop between those two and occasionally make Buffy cry. Perhaps the problem is that Angel was too much a part of Buffy's central metaphor that became the show's framework in the first few seasons. That is, High School Is Hell. Sometimes you sleep with a guy and he becomes a totally different peson. We all knew Buffy and Angel's relationship was doomed from day one, because so much was set in stone. If Buffy sleeps with Angel, giving him one moment of true contentment, he will revert to the evil Angelus. And in the Buffyverse, as in our world, there's not much hope for a partnership with those kind of sexual high stakes. Once Angel goes from a mopey repenter to Angelus, we've seen everything he can do. (That is, until his spin-off.)

"The truth is, I like this world. You’ve got – the dog racing, Manchester United, and you’ve got people: billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs." --Spike
Spike, however, remained an unpredictable presence for much of the series. Unlike Angel, he didn't have a split personality - no soulless doppelganger. Soulless Spike was not very different from Soul-Having Spike, so there were much fewer rules dictating his behavior. We saw from the beginning that he was a different sort of vampire, cut from a more romantic, Anne Rice-ish mold. The Judge told Spike and his highly irritating girlfriend, Drusilla, that they had too much humanity in them. "Yeah, what of it?" Spike said. Spike never seemed evil so much as a juvenile delinquent in arrested development. He took a manic glee in creating havoc for havoc's sake and had some of the best one-liners ever uttered on television. Unlike Angelus, who was a by-the-book villain, Spike was much more self-aware; he turned the bad guy cliches on their head. He also was incredibly sensitive, even without a soul: see season five's "Fool For Love" to see how quickly Buffy breaks the guy who has "always been bad."

"I love syphilis more than you." --Spike
Sigh. It's no surprise that Buffy should fall for either of these cradle-robbing creatures of the night, despite Angel's massive forehead or the fact that Spike's hair makes his head look like a Q-tip. But Angel is ultimately a eunuch, or the forbidden fruit if you prefer something less emasculating. Angel will always be Buffy's first love, but their relationship is a dead end.

In season four, Spike is rendered impotent by a microchip the Initiative places in his brain; in one episode, in which Buffy and Faith switch bodies, Faith-as-Buffy humiliates him sexually with some vivid dialogue. (I seem to remember "make you pop like champagne" being said at some point.) In season 5, Spike has an epiphany after having an erotic dream about Buffy. Turns out, all that fighting they've done is kind of like third base for Spike. And so begins some of the most perverse sex ever aired on network television. We all thank you, Spike.

Her relationship with Angel forces Buffy to become independent. She discovers when she must kill Angel, that at the end of the day she has only herself to rely on. Spike, on the other hand, forces Buffy into more existential dilemmas about herself, the nature of her job, her baser wants and instincts. And I don't know about you all, but exploring those baser wants and instincts were far more fun than watching Buffy swoon in Angel's arms.

Advantage: Spike.