Yesterday was the first anniversary of Michelle Trachtenberg's passing and it got me thinking about how it probably was the anniversary of the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER episode, "The Body." For those not immediately understanding the connection - Michelle played Dawn Summers, Buffy's sister, on that show, and "The Body" is a touchstone episode of TV centered on the death of Buffy's mother.
As it turns out, a day separates the two anniversaries, but it is the 25th anniversary of that powerful episode. As someone who had their budding TV writer mind blown by it when I saw it in my dorm room back in 2001, I kinda reel at the fact it's been that long and modern TV still lives in the shadow of this show's influence and its contemporaries. In 2001, 1976 would have seemed like ancient history in TV terms. Yet, just looking at the words "The Body," takes me back to experiencing the show all over again.
I did a two-part examination of this episode sixteen years ago (I've been really doing this for that long? Oy) and so I'm not going to rehash or recap much of the episode. If you want to see what I said back in 2010, go here and here.
I wrote those pieces while under the shield of anonymity, so there were a couple personal details I didn't bother going into at that point. For me, there are certain shows and episodes that are indelibly linked with what was going on in my personal and professional lives at the same time. This particular season of BUFFY was airing concurrently with me running my campus TV drama. It was my Fantasy Showrunner period while I was writing and directing episodes with friends that would later air on our campus's closed circuit cable channel.
(This too I have talked about in greater length, here and here.)
We'd been shooting the show for about six weeks. At this point, we didn't even have a completed cut of an episode. But everyone involved was having so much fun that the actors had already be asking me "Do you think you'll do this again next year?" My answer was always, "Let's survive this season first!" But in truth, the wheels had already been turning in my head.
The first season was being written in "Exquisite Corpse" style. I wrote the pilot, introduced the characters, set up a lot of conflicts and stories, and ended it on a cliffhanger. I hand the script to the next writer/director and they go wherever they want, setting up the third writer and then the fourth. As showrunner, I set up a rule that in the first round, you couldn't kill off any characters.
But being the first writer in the second round, I had first shot at killing someone, and so I did. The boyfriend, Josh, to our female lead, Katherine, just wasn't coming across on screen the way we wanted. So, first chance I got, he was dead. For fun I'd suggested that when each of us wrote our cliffhangers, we should write down where we'd take the storylines after that if we were in charge. Then at the end of the season, we'd see how close we were.
It forced me to give a lot of thought to the consequences of killing Josh. And in my wannabe showrunner-trained-by-the-WB brain, it didn't take too long to decide that a REAL writer wouldn't just let Josh's murder be a cheap stunt. It should be a character defining story for Katherine and that the next season she should be sliding further and further into depression. It would lead to some powerful, emotional character work akin to what I found in my favorite shows. I even envisioned the climax of this story being her friends staging an intervention as her depression progressed to full on suicidal.
My film professor had warned me years earlier that every student film was about alcohol and suicide. I failed to heed this.
I remember we shot the murder scene outside in the cold on Saturday, February 10th. That was when I tipped off my lead actress to my thoughts and subsequently told one of my other writers. He seemed utterly perplexed that I would want to tell that story on the show. So I explained to him the three episodes of TV that were huge influences on me.
The first was an episode of THE WONDER YEARS called "The Accident." Kevin and Winnie see each other for the first time a couple months after they broke up. Kevin is concerned that she's hanging out with some older boys and isn't acting like herself. She pushes him away, tells him she just wants to forget everything that happened the last three years (i.e. since her brother died in Vietnam). Kevin isn't sure what's going on with her, but it's not good. In the end, she's in a car accident and gets a broken leg for her trouble, which seems to be a wakeup call. If you remember anything about the episode, it's probably the final scene, where Kevin climbs up to her window as the anachronistic music cue of Bob Seger's "We've Got Tonight" plays and Kevin and Winnie say "I love you" to each other.
The second one was "Crosetti," an episode of HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET that deals with the suicide of one of the squad's own, Detective Crosetti. When his body is pulled out of the harbor, Detectives Munch and Bolander immediately assume suicide, but out of sensitivity, Bolander is ordered to investigate it as wrongful death. Half the episode is the squad dealing with how shocking it all seems and the other half is about how Lewis, Crosetti's partner, is in denial that it's suicide and actively tries to mess with witnesses who'd speak to Crosetti's depression.
Most people remember that episode for the final scene where Andre Braugher's Pembleton defies a "no honor guard" order and salutes the funeral procession in dress blues. I remember it for the previous act break. The autopsy report comes in and the tox screen leaves no doubt that Crosetti intentionally overdosed. In an incredible performance from Clark Johnson, we see Lewis's denial collapse like a house of cards. His voice breaks and in sobs that make no effort to put on a brave or masculine front, he cries, "He killed himself!" as Bolander immediately drops any antagonism to Lewis and pulls him in a bear hug.
This history informs my third episode of choice, a later episode of HOMICIDE called "Have a Conscience" that climaxed a long-running story where Detective Mike Kellerman, played by Reed Diamond, had been accused of taking bribes and spent weeks being portrayed in the media as a dirty cop. Even though he's exonerated, it wounded him deeply that his coworkers thought he was crooked and the combination of that with a brutal case and a guy on the street recognizing him as that dirty cop sends him over the edge. His partner, Lewis stops by his houseboat that evening and immediately intuits that something is seriously wrong with Mike.
A good chunk of the episode is Mike holding his gun during a breakdown, clearly on the verge of ending it all. Lewis, who probably wouldn't usually be the guy you count on to diffuse that situation, is desperately trying to get through to Mike, to reach him on some level. The emotional stakes couldn't be higher - he lost one partner to suicide. He can't lose another. It's absolutely intense, and I'd never seen ANYTHING like that on TV. Apparently the whole suicide plotline freaked out NBC so it's a minor miracle the episode was even made.
You've probably forgotten how I got here, but all of that was what I was trying to unpack to my skeptical friend who wasn't understanding why I'd send the show down that path. And then a couple weeks later, we were there, watching "The Body" together, both of us determined not to ugly cry in front of the other. The next time the subject came up, I remember eventually he said something like, "No, I get you. For every 'Something Blue,' you're gonna have a 'The Body.'"
Of course, by the time the scripts for season 2 were written and given to the cast, "The Body" was several months old. A very large number of people who worked on my show were BUFFY fans, so more than one person's reaction was, "You're trying to do something like 'The Body,' right?" A couple times I tried to explain, no, I really wanted to do something dark before I even saw that episode, but ultimately it was just easier to say "Yes."
My depression and suicide storyline taught me an extremely important lesson. I knew it was a big tonal departure and ultimately the intervention episode was Episode 5, which meant for four episodes, Katherine's plot was going to be about steadily ratcheting up her depression. Four full episodes where the main character has some heavy stuff to deal with. I wasn't experienced enough to understand how much gravity the main character pulls, even when you try to balance an episode with lighter, wackier humor. Your lead character is like a gravity well, pulling the tone of every other storyline into it.
Basically, in my bid to be dramatic and meaningful, I killed the fun train. I haven't watched it in 24 years, but even at the time, it didn't take me long to realize my error. There were some effective moments, surely... but it was also often too indulgent, too melodramatic and too "Look at me! I'm directing." My dialogue was too on the nose in places and there was too much of it.
In other words, the mistakes everyone makes on their first couple scripts. I'm not kidding when I say I learned more doing this TV show I never got any kind of school credit for than I did from anything else in college. When you're churning out that much output, spotting your weaknesses happens much more quickly and you can start growing past them sooner. The lessons of that season are ones I carry into my work to this very day.
If you've done the math, you might have realized that this second season of our show was being produced while Season Six of BUFFY was airing. That season is built around Buffy suffering intense depression following her resurrection and her friends' discovery they tore her back not from Hell, but Heaven. It's dark but not in the cool, compelling way BUFFY always had been. This season was straight up depressing. Buffy's come back to life and life SUCKS. Season Six piles on the misery and there's a point where it feels like every episode is crafted to add to Buffy's misery.
This was a 22 episode season and to really twist the knife, the emotional low of the season spanned seven or so episodes that took something like four months to play out on screen thanks to long hiatues. Somewhere in the midst of that, I said to myself, "What the hell were these writers thinking? Why would they let this depressing storyline take over the show for so long? No one wants to see our lead just beaten down week-after-week... OH SHIT. I did the same thing!"
There was a bit of a relief in knowing that your idols jumped headfirst into LITERALLY the same mistake you made. And there's also some dark humor in venting and ranting about a creative decision you see as an unforgivable mistake, only to realize you could be talking about yourself. I was so concerned with making something "important" and "meaningful" that I failed to consider how much that storyline ran counter to everything else I enjoyed about the show... and certainly what other people enjoyed in the show.
I don't believe a creator should consider the audience as their first priority. You tell stories you want to tell, something that matters to you, and you hope the right people get it. But sometimes it's possible to lose sight of why you want to tell that story, and you end up making something that you yourself wouldn't even enjoy.
Hard lesson to learn, but I'm glad I learned it early.
An additional grace note to this story is that about two years later, EVERWOOD did a season long arc of Amy Abbott falling into depression after her boyfriend's death... and they fucking nailed it. After like two years of beating myself up for getting it wrong, it was so instructive to see how Greg Berlanti, Rina Mimoun and the rest of the writers crafted a story that took Amy to some dark and unlikable places without it all swallowing the show whole. I spent that whole season going, "This is what I was TRYING to do!"
This was yet another reason why it felt like such a full circle moment when I actually got to write an episode with Rina on SUPERMAN & LOIS. Every now and then, life comes together so neatly that you'd swear someone was writing it.
As for "The Body" itself, it's a powerful episode of TV. I still see it used as a touchstone for when a show does a super-serious episode. At the time, I remember being pissed that the Emmys utterly ignored this in every category. Ignoring Sarah Michelle Gellar's intense performance felt especially criminal. And this is one area where my feelings have evolved in 25 years.
SMG was great in this episode, but you know what? She slayed (ha, ha) every episode. BUFFY was a hard enough tone to hit in the writing, but even when the writing is there, an actor who doesn't know how to play those tonal mixes and shifts can bring everything down. And it's even more clear to me in hindsight that there is far too little respect paid to genre that kicks ass at being genre.
Fans spent years saying "The Body" was Emmy-worthy and it was a snub to show it no respect. And then one day it hit me - one of the defining features of "The Body" is that it has virtually zero supernatural elements. Joyce Summers dies of an aneurysm - nothing supernatural, nothing the result of a villain trying to hurt Buffy. It's so mundane and human. Spike isn't even in the episode and when a vampire does show up in the final moments, it's mostly there just to remind us that Buffy's day job doesn't stop even on the worst day of her life.
And it goes without saying that BUFFY's traditional humor is all but absent.
Are you following where I'm going with this? We bought into the idea that in order for BUFFY to be taken seriously by its peers, it had to strip itself of so many of the defining things that made it "BUFFY." It's like saying that if you want a genre show to be honored, the first thing you do is erase everything that makes it genre and just do what a normal drama would.
Fuck. That.
I'm not saying creators shouldn't do that if they want. But when you step back, there is something deeply elitist about the attitude that "oh, now that you're only playing the piano keys that all the normal shows play, we can take you seriously." It's like saying, "BUFFY's so unique and specific... have you tried just being PARTY OF FIVE for an episode?"
There's a lot in "The Body" that's relatable, emotionally powerful even. For some, it might be cathartic to see their heroes experiencing normal grief that they can relate to. I'm not taking shots at any of that.
But is it superior to letting BUFFY just be BUFFY? Maybe the better question is: of all the stories that could be rewarded, is this one head and shoulders above the rest?
I say no. Give me the Musical Episode, the Graduation Episode, the Angelus-kills-Jenny Episode. Give me the ones that embrace genre, not tamps it down so the normies don't get scared off. When you ask me, "What BUFFYs should have gotten Emmys?" I don't know if I'll be so quick to go to "The Body" as an injustice.
Which is not to say that it isn't still deeply powerful and heart-wrenching. And I'm sure I wasn't the only writer to fall on my face trying to do something like it. The good part is once you make those mistakes, if you're smart you won't make them again.
And sometimes you have the relief of seeing the pros you look up to fall into the same trap, even if they started from much stronger footing than you.
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