Alright, time for admission of guilty pleasures.  You are never going to believe what show I have fallen in love with: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It came on  the air while I was in college and watching exactly one hour of television per week (The X-Files), so I never caught on to it when it was new.  I saw my first episode a couple of weeks ago when I was home sick.  It is a lot of fun: the writing is witty, with good jokes and a well-developed mythology, the acting (by a few of the actors, anyway) is pretty good, and the whole thing is so campy that it is pure fun to just sit back and watch.

The cable station FX has been broadcasting repeats; the first episode I saw was near the end of season 5, and after the final episode of season 5, they looped back to the pilot.  Coincidentally (or perhaps not) this is exactly the same point when UPN started re-running season 6.  So I am currently in two timelines.

I have fallen in love with the character of Willow, played by Alyson Hannigan.  She is absolutely adorable, especially in the early episodes.  She convincingly played a 15 or 16-year-old, and if I had gone to high school with the character I would have had a crush on her character that would have torn the world apart.  The character is a good girl, witty but shy, brown hair and brown eyes, is a computer hacker and perfect student.  In those episodes I find her ten times as cute as Sarah Michelle Gellar, the blond lead, who does not at all pass for a high schooler.

I knew I shouldn’t have gone looking around IMDB.  I told myself that I would find out Hannigan was a crazy drug fiend or something and it would shatter my retroactive fantasy of a fictional character.  But I looked anyway.  To start with, she is older than I.  She is three years older than Gellar.  She dated the drummer from Marilyn Manson’s band.  She played a raunchy character in the “American Pie” movies.  So much for the good girl crush (I know I should be able to separate the actor and the character, but I’m not very good at that.)

So I read the bio trivia on Gellar.  While pursuing her acting career she gruaduated with a 4.0 average from high school.  She collects antique books.  She has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.  She dated nice guy Jerry O’Connell, and is now engaged to nice guy Freddie Prinze Jr.  And she plays the slightly trampy character on “Buffy”.  Aye, me.

OK, guilty admission II.  I also love the program Alias.  It is just as campy and just as fun as “Buffy”.  I suspend my Coleridgian disbelief on the coatrack by the door and let myself become invested with the soapish characters.  Pure fun.  And it does not hurt that Jennifer Garner is gorgeous and that she is frequently costumed for her undercover work (get your mind out of the gutter!) in revealing outfits.  You will note that there is no hyperlink associated with Garner’s name above.  You know why?  It’s because I am intending to stay far, far away from her IMDB bio page.  May the fantasy continue.

Note added 19 June 2002:  So far four friends have contacted me letting me know that they too are fans.  This rampant Buffy-watching may be a silent epidemic of catastrophic proportions.

Thu, 13 Jun 2002 00:12:06 +0000
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