Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Thanks for enjoying that comparison. I sometimes worry that comparing episodes of "Buffy" or "Angel" to events on other genre TV shows in the past marks me as a 'hopeless case' or media SF geek.

But what the hey, I DO love and have on tape almost every episode of "B5" and "DS9" and "Alien Nation" and several key episodes of "Farscape" and other "Trek" series. And I AM intimately acquainted with every science fiction-ish show produced during the 'wilderness years' of the 1970's and 80's, when you watched it, no matter how bad or good it might be, because you were damn lucky to get ANY science fiction on TV, and most of the time you had none [and these kids today, they don't know how spoiled they are, 'cause in MY day you had to walk five miles through the snow to see a "Star Trek" re-run, and ... oops, there I go again, lapsing into curmudgeonliness]. "Planet of the Apes", "Man from Atlantis", "Fantastic Journey", "Logan's Run", "Battlestar Galactica" and "Galactica 1980", "Buck Rogers", "Wonder Woman", "The Bionic Woman", "Misfits of Science", "V", "The Phoenix", "Wizards and Warriors", "Voyagers", the British imports on PBS ... unsung masterpiece, guilty pleasure, or memory-I'm-trying-to-repress, I saw them all.

And then the universe smiled upon us, and there was CGI, and it was good and less expensive to produce, and there was J. Michael Straczynski, and he was good (and he begat Sheridan and Delenn and G'Kar, who were very, very good), and there were story-arcs on a "Trek" series set in the liminal gray areas of a space station somewhere between reason and faith, and then there was "Xena" and she was good (especially when she was being bad), and then there was Joss Whedon and "Buffy", and lo, it was very, very, VERY good. Guess it's time I give this a rest, eh?