I started writing about BUFFY's "The Body" on the 25th anniversary and it spiraled into a personal story about other episodes that mattered to me

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. 

Today is the 5th anniversary of SUPERMAN & LOIS!

The pandemic absolutely destroyed any sense I had about the passage of time. How else to explain that today marks five years since the premiere of SUPERMAN & LOIS?

As a lifelong Superman fan, this series was a big deal for me on a lot of fronts. It was my first writing credit, my first staff job, and the first time I went to set to produce an episode.

However, it was not my first job in TV. Before that I had been a Writers' PA on NCIS: NEW ORLEANS and a Writers' Assistant on BLOOD & TREASURE - both CBS shows, by coincidence. There was still a bit of an awe to working on a network show back then. I remember almost exactly ten years ago, around mid-April 2016, I found myself alone in the writers' room on NCIS: NOLA. The finale was just about to start shooting so most of the writers had finished their work for the season and had started hiatus. Our upper-levels were mostly working from home and since the production draft of the finale was distributed, I'd been given the go-ahead to finally clear the board of that episode's storybreak.

As I cleaned the cards, I specifically remember thinking that in a month, some 14 million people were going to be in front of their TVs, watching scenes that started right there in the room a couple weeks ago as just a few words on a dry-erase card. 14 MILLION PEOPLE were going to be entertained by the results of ten people debating in this shitty room in Santa Clarita.

I had to consciously remind myself of that because from my perspective, I never felt any audience reaction to the show. My parents and another family from back home watched the show, but beyond that I didn't know anyone in the real world who even seemed aware of it. And this was not a show with a passionate online following, or at least not one in the internet corners where I went. At the start of the season, then-showrunner Jeff Lieber had introduced my public (i.e. non-Bitter) Twitter handle to his followers as the new assistant on the show. I gained about 50 NCIS-related followers from that... but a significant number of those handles were variations on "Mrs. Scott Bakula." It was a reminder where the truly passionate appeal of the show laid.

Thus, as far as feeling the audience's presence... I really didn't. And certainly, had no place where I felt any appreciation of the work that was being done in the writers room. BLOOD & TREASURE had a smaller audience - it premiered at 5.62 million viewers and finished the season at less than half of that - and it still had more linear viewing eyeballs than our highest rated episode of S&L.

But the difference with S&L was that that audience was very much in evidence. They were impossible not find online. The show was regularly discussed on the geek sites I visited often and in comic stores and at conventions, people were familiar with the show and had a deep awareness of the stories.

When you work on a character like Superman, you're very aware there really aren't any Superman shows or movies that become obscure. (The 1988-92 SUPERBOY TV series is an exception, and only because that show was completely pulled from any kind of distribution for decades.) Whatever you make with that character is going to live forever - for good or for ill. I don't know if there will be any 20 year oral histories of BLOOD & TREASURE, but I'm certain that SUPERMAN & LOIS will get some kind of retrospective whenever a big anniversary rolls around.

I'm proud of our contribution to the Superman mythos. I think we honored the characters and who they were supposed to be while also telling our story in a period of Clark and Lois's life that hadn't been covered on-screen before (and was barely touched in the comics too.) I think it was very important that we didn't just retread the Reeve films, or any of the TV shows. The show had its own voice AND a large number of fans watched because they felt it was doing Superman and Lois Lane "right." That kind of result is never effortless.

It was also a show whose creation was defined by the pandemic to some extent. We were ordered to series in January 2020 and the writers' mini-room assembled a month later, in mid-February. At that point, the plan was that the room would work for six weeks mapping out the start of the series. We were figuring out the characters, the long arcs, even sketching in the first six or seven eps conceptually. Then we take a break at the end of March to shoot and edit the pilot, at which point we'd see how all of that played on screen, which in turn would guide the writing and the shooting of subsequent episodes.

As it turned out, all hell broke loose with COVID in mid-March and so we not only started working via Zoom, but the pilot production was pushed. And then it kept getting pushed further and further. As the lockdowns stretched on, there were definitely days where I worried that the show would just be cancelled outright.

By the time we started shooting the pilot in late October, we'd broken 11 or 12 episodes, and had full scripts for most of the episodes before that. It was probably inevitable that many of them would be adjusted as we saw how the actors and storylines were coming across on-screen. And yes, pretty much every episode got rewritten, many of them significantly. It was an enormous amount of work for our upper level writers, but I'll always remember that since we'd spent nearly a year learning more and more about our characters, those rewrites were what really elevated the show to what the audience experienced. Creatively, it was a better show for the extra time we were forced to take making it. Though I did occasionally threaten to have T-shirts made for everyone that said "The Season So Nice, We Wrote It Twice."

Every now and then I'll see one of our detractors snark about "CW writers." The disrespect irked me, even though I should have just taken it as evidence of the speakers complete ignorance and dismissed their statement altogether. Every writer on S&L who wasn't on their first job had credits on premium cable TV shows, network shows, or both. That's a fact that generally holds true across most of the CW shows. I obviously can't speak about shows I didn't work on, but I know that our team worked as hard as any pay-cable staff and took their work equally seriously.

As I've said before - working on this show was a great gift. During the pandemic, particularly during the part of it when my father died, nothing helped preserve my sanity more than being able to go into a room and spend the better part of the day talking about the Superman mythos. I'll also never forget the thrill that came one day in fall when we saw the first costume fitting photos of Tyler in the new suit. I remember thinking it was one of the best on-screen Superman costumes and it was a privilege to be the first to see it. During a dark time, those wins meant everything. The show became my refuge from the pandemic and everything bad associated with it. When it finally premiered, I recall seeing several viewers talk about what it meant to them to have a positive and uplifting show to invest in while they were emotionally processing the horrible year that had just passed.

For a great many reasons, this show will always be inseparable from the pandemic for me. It hung over the entire production, but particularly the first two years. COVID complicated production in so many ways - and certainly this wasn't unique to our show. Our first season was so delayed in starting filming that our final episodes ended up airing deep into summer. The staff had assembled to begin planning Season 2 before the first season had finished airing, and that was so close to the end of shooting that people like our showrunner Todd Helbing had essentially no break between season 1 and season 2. And that's not even getting into how Season 2's airing schedule ended up with some long breaks between episodes because COVID shutdowns slowed production. It made hard jobs even harder.

In spite of all of that, one aspect of SUPERMAN & LOIS I'm most proud of is that if you just take in the episodes themselves, it doesn't feel like a show that was made during COVID. The many compromises don't show up on the screen and I feel pretty confident that the new audiences that discover the show over the next 20 or so years aren't going to have confusion or questions that end up being explained with "We did it that way because of COVID."

As I said, if there's one thing you know about working on these shows it's that some fans will still be talking about it and debating it years later. We already gain new viewers all the time. I pretty regularly see people posing things on social media to the effect of "I just started binging SUPERMAN & LOIS and it's already one of my favorite shows! How did I never hear about this?"

Back in the late 90s, when I was still in school and could only dream of being a TV writer, two of my favorite shows were STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE and HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET. Both shows dealt with complex characters who often had to reckon with thorny moral issues and situations that challenged their belief. Another thing they had in common was that despite critical acclaim, neither one ever had a large audience. Even among their peers, they earned fewer eyeballs than some of their more mainstream cousins.

For me, this also meant that stumbling across someone who was as passionate as I was about those shows was a rare occurrence. It wasn't like finding someone who liked SEINFELD, or FRIENDS, or ER. Those were the most popular shows on TV - of course you'd find people who loved them. But a fellow DS9-er?  It also was like a secret handshake that revealed "This person is in the club. This one is a cool guy." In college, there was a guy on the fringes of my friend group who I didn't click with the first time we met. We were definitely oil and water... until the day when we discovered we were both HOMICIDE fans. Almost immediately, we reevaluated each other and our connection through the show turned us into great friends.

And so, on those nights when I'd dream of writing for a show like the ones I'd watch, I often thought about how it probably be more rewarding to write for a DS9. It might not be loved by every Star Trek fan, but the fans you HAD were the kind that would hang on every episode. If you hit that kind of audience, you knew that what you wrote would mean a LOT to a small amount of people. 

A Superman show that aired on the least-viewed major network and that probably found most of its audience on streaming probably isn't too far off from the kind of reception I imagined getting all those years ago. As time has gone on, DS9 has become so popular in TREK circles, so often cited as "the best" of all the shows that it has become hard to remember just how mixed a reception it got in its original run. I wonder if I might someday look back at this post on a subsequent anniversary and remark that SUPERMAN & LOIS's audience has bloomed similarly?

But even if it doesn't, it was an honor to be a part of this show, no matter how big the audience was.