Once upon a time, rumor had it we were going to get a show called Ripper that spun off Anthony Stewart Head’s character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer that would follow the former Watcher back home to England where he’d get up to a variety of supernatural skulduggery. The Buffy Season Eight and Nine comic books have seemed to have foreclosed that possibility—Angel, Buffy’s vampire-with-a-soul sometime lover did kill Giles by snapping his neck. But the Mary Sue makes it sound like a Ripper show, or even just a show with Anthony Stewart Head and magic, from Whedon might be a possibility again, this time on the BBC. The project, if it ever were to happen, actually sounds like the kind of thing that Netflix ought to be all over.

Currently, Netflix has been all over continuation of cancelled series like Arrested Development, remakes of well-regarded programs with high-priced talent attached like House of Lies, and deeply random original series like Lillyhammer, which just got renewed for a second season. It’s a combination of daring shots in the dark and utterly conservative programming. Something like a Whedon-Head reteam would let Netflix walk a middle path. The show would attract a dedicated fan base, but it would also be an original project, one that wouldn’t absolutely require hardcore membership in the Buffy or Angel fandom. It’s the kind of project that might work well with a shorter order than a network season, something that Netflix seems to be focusing on. And unlike Netflix’s other original projects, this would be one that critics actually created a buzz around. The whole project may be a pipe dream. But it would be less silly than Netflix spending even 30 seconds considering keeping Terra Nova alive.

Normally I wouldn’t do this, but Cabin in the Woods relies so much on the element of surprise, that you should not read this post if you haven’t seen it and care about being spoiled on it.

As I wrote after seeing the movie at SXSW, Cabin in the Woods, I wrote that the movie is a fantastic extension of Joss Whedon’s long-running interests in the bureaucracy of evil and the beauty of the monstrous. The work that Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford are given to do as the control room operators of the Apocalypse, the torture pornographers who happen to be humanity’s saviors, is just a delightful, funny, sensitive use of both men. And the gorgeousness of Whedon and Goddard’s monsters is something to behold—I found myself unexpectedly moved by the man with the gears embedded in his skull and the ballerina dentata that Dana and Marty encounter in the elevator.

But I was disappointed by one element of the movie, which felt to me like a bit of a regression from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the treatment of Jules, the blonde sexpot who is the first of the characters to get killed by the murderous hillbillies the friends unwittingly unleashed in the basement. Whedon told Vulture that he sees Jules’ character as an attempt to answer some of the same questions as Buffy was:

Cabin isn’t overtly a feminist work necessarily, but it is built on the same question that built Buffy the Vampire Slayer: If you have a blonde who is perfectly nice and funny, why are you intent on her coming to a bad end? What is the purpose of the final girl, as she’s called? All these people, all the characters behave a certain way, and there is a progression of what they have to do, to allow themselves to be written off as sex fiends or druggies or bullies or complete idiots in the face of true danger, and you just don’t get in the way of that. It’s about being stereotypes versus fleshed-out people. There was never a question — the nudity had to happen, because the movie is about objectification and identification and that’s what horror is about. Drew and I were not unhappy if the hot blonde took off her shirt — hey, we thought it was a good decision! — but mixing titillation and mutilation started to become a very weird confluence. It’s not the same kind of pleasure for us. Those are two separate things. But that’s the foundation of what we knew was part of the film, and we were the most timid filmmakers ever about it.

But Jules’ character is the one that’s least-played with, the least-subverted, and the one we see suffer the longest. We learn that Dana isn’t really a virgin—she’s just the best the people orchestrating the sacrifice have to work with. Curt, the giant jock, turns out to be a pre-med smarty. Stoner Marty’s protected from the malign influences of the people manipulating them because the pot he’s smoking ends up inoculating him to the pheromones they’re pumping into the cabin, and he’s the one who figures out how to get them into the complex. (Holden doesn’t get much of a fair shake either, and it’s too bad that both of the characters of color in the movie are somewhat quiet and detached). But we don’t get a clear debunking of whatever stereotypes we’re supposed to have about Jules. Clearly, she’s being influenced by the chemicals, the heightened moonlight. But we don’t know what her base behavior is like, whether she and Curt were already sleeping together (though I assumed so) before the trip, why her actions here are surprising—when we meet her, after all, she’s bugging Dana to be less of a prude.

I asked Whedon about this at South By Southwest, where he seemed kind of irritated by the question, telling me that “I don’t think Jules comes off as dumb…We did want to be making that movie at the same time that we were talking about that movie and making images that were sexual and sometimes exploitive.” (After that line drew a lot of applause, he noted “I don’t think I’ve ever been applauded for exploitation before.”) I agree with Whedon that those things aren’t incompatible. And a movie is always going to offer less time to develop its characters and debunk simple tropes than a television show us. But I was sorry there wasn’t a little more detail in there, something that would have heightened the sense that even if, in the balance, the world isn’t worth saving, there’s some real pain in the loss. If anything, Cabin in the Woods feels like it’s coming from Willow before Xander talks her down at the end of Buffy season six, rather than Buffy herself.

Lost Girl, the Canadian fantasy series about Bo, a succubus, and the rest of the faerie world she operates in, which is headed into production on its third season and finished airing its first season on SyFy last night, has attracted comparisons to Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its progressive attitude towards sexuality and sexual orientation and its detailed magical world. It’s not quite Buffy—a story about a hot bisexual succubus who seduces people for good will never be as subversive, or as funny as a high school built over a portal to Hell and a cheerleader who battles the forces of evil. But the differences between the two shows aren’t entirely a bad thing: Buffy laid a foundation on which Lost Girl‘s building a somewhat more sexually progressive and more diverse universe.

Lost Girl represents, in television terms, a generation of forward progress from Buffy when it comes to sex. Sex is literally life-giving to Bo, rather than conflicted in the many ways it is in Buffy. While initially she operates a lot like X-Men‘s Rogue, sucking her victims dry of chi to the point of their deaths, as she becomes more confident in and knowledgeable about her status as a succubus, Bo stops draining her partners while still drawing sustenance—and joy—from sex.

Unlike Buffy, whose on-screen partners have, alternately, lost their souls, ignored her afterwards (college boys can be jerks, too), turned to vampire hookers out of a sense of inadequacy, and tried to rape her, Bo doesn’t get punished for sleeping around. When she sleeps with Dyson (Kristen Holden-Ried), the wolf-shifting fae and cop who’s her entree into the faerie world, the scenes are choreographed to be enticing, rather than a form of self-punishment, like Buffy’s first house-destroying night with Spike, her second vampire lover. Dyson may be convenient to Bo, the same thing Buffy accuses Spike of being to her, but their encounters don’t make anyone involved hate each other.

And unlike how Buffy handled Willow’s coming-out as bisexual, having her transition from attractions only to men to (on-screen, at least) attractions only to women, Lost Girl is confident enough to have Bo’s sex life reflect her stated sexual orientation. She’s capable of loving and desiring both Dyson and Lauren, the human doctor in service to the fae who Bo falls for—and of being hurt by both of them. The heterosexual and same-gender sex scenes are filmed differently, to be sure—when Bo sleeps with Dyson, it’s all dramatic lighting and multiple sexual positions, while the night she spends with Lauren is silk sheets and sweet nothings. But even if the show doesn’t quite have the courage to treat the scenes as if they’re similar, it’s progress to have a bisexual character dating people of multiple genders calmly and without comment, instead of functionally confining them to heterosexuality or homosexuality.

It’s not the only way Lost Girl is more representative than Buffy. Bo and her roommate Kenzi (a human con artist played with delightful spunk by Ksenia Solo) hang out a bar owned by “Trick” McCorrigan, a powerful fae who also happens to be played by Rick Howland, an actor with dwarfism, in what may be the only performance featuring a person of short stature on television where their dwarfism isn’t a regular and explicit plot point. The most powerful official in the fae universe, the Ash, is played by Clé Bennett, a Canadian actor of Jamaican descent. And Dyson’s partner in his day job as a cop, Hale, is also black, a nice improvement on the all-white Scooby Gang.

It’s too bad Lost Girl doesn’t quite have a mythology or psychology is rich as Buffy, but then, almost nothing on television these days does. But it’s laying down a marker for fantasy, reminding us in a world where we have diversity in our monsters and myths, it’s not so strange to have a true diversity of people.

It’s difficult to talk about The Cabin in the Woods, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s much-delayed, highly mysterious horror without spoiling it altogether. And while I’m not the world’s most spoiler-averse person, I am going to hold off on discussing the film in any specific detail, though this post will affirm that certain elements are present in the movie, until it’s in theaters, and I’ll revisit it once folks have had a chance to see it. This post is spoiler-safe if you are only concerned about specific plot points. But if you don’t want to know anything about the movie whatsoever, hold off.

In very general terms, it turns out I was right that the movie is about the bureaucracy of evil. And in a lesser way, it’s a sustained exploration of another major theme in Whedon’s work: the beauty in evil.

Over the course of Whedon’s career, he’s shifted from writing purely about the people who escape from bureaucracies and started to spend more time on the people who participate in running organizations, some of whom commit significant evil in the course of their work. We see the Watchers largely from Buffy’s perspective, and the ones who are allowed to have stand-alone stories, and whose perspectives and growth we have access to, are apostates. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce is fired for incomepetence, and Rupert Giles defies the council before he is dismissed. Maggie Walsh is murdered as a direct result of her manipulation of the Initiative beyond its original parameters. Riley’s struggles against the Initiative, first as a reformer and then a flawed revolutionary, are as important an aspect of his character arc as his relationship with Buffy. He finds peace when he finds a role that suits him within the government, and that new organization becomes not just the source of his job, and his family. In Firefly and Serenity, we see the same pattern again: we see the agents of the Alliance through River Tam’s memories, or through their encounters with the crew of the ship. And the Operative is redeemed when he accepts the truth about the creation of the Reavers and calls off the agents of the Alliance.

Dollhouse, however, spends substantially more time with the agents of both the U.S. government and the Rossum Corporation, tracing the damage that they do to other people and that participation in the system does to them as well. Corporations, it seems, are self-replicating machines. And fully half of The Cabin in the Woods is spent with and told from the perspective of the movie’s bureaucrats. They get to be just as quippy as the average teenage Whedon hero or heroine, and they get to be tragic in a way that’s compromised and adult.

That’s not the only way the movie feels like it’s different in degree, if not in kind, from Whedon’s past work. It’s also got some of the best monster design in his ouvre. Whedon’s always been very good at creating novel monsters—the Mayor’s demonic form, the gods breaking through from Glory’s ritual. But often, he creates unease by implanting monstrous behavior and worldviews in extremely beautiful human forms. We’re disturbed by seeing David Boreanaz, James Marsters, or Clare Kramer behave in ways that are horrifying particularly because we’re taught to equate physical beauty with goodness. The monsters in Cabin in the Woods can, at times, be much more foreign than that. The loveliness in some of that moster design is impressive, an inverse aesthetic subversion. I found some of the monsters genuinely moving. And for someone who suffers from unusually bad nightmares and has low tolerance for horror, that’s saying something.

By now, most of you have probably heard the news: after she got black-out drunk at a party and found herself pregnant and unsure of who the father of her baby is, Buffy Summers is getting an abortion in the franchise’s Season 9 comic book extensions of the television show. I’m profoundly relieved that, in keeping with his courage about social issues in general, Buffy The Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon has been firm that Buffy will definitely go through with the procedure, rather than following the lead of so many other pop culture artifacts, which generally have a character consider abortion before deciding to keep the baby. But even more than the fact that Buffy is doing this storyline, I think these comments from Whedon in Entertainment Weekly are important:

I think strongly that teen pregnancy and young people having babies when they are not emotionally, financially, or otherwise equipped to take care of them, is kind of glorified in our media right now. You know, things like Secret Life [of an American Teenager] and Juno and Knocked Up – even if they pretend to deal with abortion, the movies don’t even say the word “abortion.” It’s something that over a third of American women are going to decide to have to do in their lives. But people are so terrified that no one will discuss the reality of it — not no one, but very few popular entertainments, even when they say they’re dealing with this issue, they don’t, and won’t. It’s frustrating to me.

I don’t think Buffy should have a baby. I don’t think Buffy can take care of a baby. I agree with Buffy. It’s a very difficult decision for her, but she made a decision that so many people make and it’s such a hot button issue with Planned Parenthood under constant threat and attack right now. A woman’s right to choose is under attack as much as it’s ever been, and that’s a terrible and dangerous thing for this country. I don’t usually get soap box-y with this, but the thing about Buffy is all she’s going through is what women go through, and what nobody making a speech, holding up a placard, or making a movie is willing to say.

This is honestly one of the messaging issues I struggle most with. I defy anyone to read Adrian Nicole Leblanc’s Random Family and think that we shouldn’t provide more support for teenaged mothers. I may find it inexplicable that a 14-year-old would want to get pregnant or that a 16- or 17-year-old would want to derail their education by having a child and raising it herself, but for the sake of that teenager’s kids, I want her to have access to plenty of WIC, subsidized daycare, and health insurance. And I think it’s repulsive that anyone thinks we should start the process of trying to prevent teenagers from getting pregnant by making it harder for their children to grow up with adequate access to food, clothing, medical care and safe child care.

But that does leave a messaging window that requires a greater precision: it’s not easy to glamorize abstinence for a mass audience, but it is possible to talk up good grades and the opportunities that college, travel, and career bring along with them. We need pop culture to stand up not just for the right to choose, but to emphasize all the adventures you can have if you finish your education and find a fulfilling job. And those adventures don’t only have to include killing vampires.

By Ryan McGee

If you believe the economic realities on display in several of ABC’s recent comedic programming, then you think that current vocational trends predominately favor women. In terms of television, however, this “mancession” simply doesn’t exist, especially when it comes to developing strong three-dimensional women that can support a program’s narrative. Characters like Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation and Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife are exceptions that prove the rule, to an extent. But even their arcs are based within an ensemble structure, a structure which has strengthened the shows even while decentralizing their female protagonists.

Should shows be built around a single character pillar, regardless of gender? That’s a perfectly good question to ask. Breaking Bad didn’t really gain power until Walter White stopped overshadowing his onscreen compatriots. And Parks started to flourish only after simultaneously toning Leslie down while expanding the world around her. But it’s infinitely more likely to launch a show based around a chemistry teacher gone to seed than an overly optimistic female government worker seeking to improve her community. We’re somehow more OK with the former than the latter, at least in our entertainments.

The problem isn’t just that there are so few females in the anti-hero position. It’s that the anti-hero position is such a default in television following The Shield that it’s limited the way in which stories can be told on the small screen. Leslie Knope’s optimism is downright revolutionary in comparison to her narcissistic, self-loathing, yet self-justifying counterparts in primetime. It’s not enough to simply be an ordinary person that strives to do good only to face obstacle after obstacle in achieving that goal. We have to watch shows give us walking talking figures that are grotesque, funhouse mirror versions of our own worst impulses in order to either work through our own issues or take heart in knowing our vices pale in comparison to the Tony Sopranos, Vic Mackeys, and Jax Tellers of the world.

When females do end up in this “anti-hero” slot, the shows don’t often know what do with them. A long string of semi-recent Showtime programs have dealt with complicated women, but often in uncomplicated ways. Other than The United States of Tara, which spent three seasons coming to grips with its own conceit, the network’s signature female-led shows demonstrate women behaving badly without true context for their actions. As such, their supposedly outlandish behavior exists in a curious vacuum in which Jackie Peyton, Cathy Jamison, and Nancy Botwin pantomime grief, rage, and illicit behavior in a relatively sterilized environment. They don’t get into the true moral muck of their male counterparts, often because the shows shy away from making these women into the monsters men are so often allowed to become.

All of which makes me wonder why we’ve decided that horrible people need to be at the center of shows, when simply having flawed ones will do. Enter Cordelia Chase, someone not high on the list of even Joss Whedon acolytes as the poster child for basing an ideal television lead upon. I’m not here to start a flame war over whether or not Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel was the overall better show. But I am here to say that I tend to prefer Angel by a slim margin, and Cordelia Chase helps tip the balance in that show’s scale. That may make many of you reach for your replica Mr. Stabbys and seek to stake me. But hear me out.

Cordelia Chase appeared in the very first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on March 10, 1997, and made her finale appearance on Angel in its 100th episode nearly seven years later. Like many characters on Buffy, she was initially written as a stereotype only to reveal hidden layers along the way. Big deal, you say: so did everyone else on that show. Which is fair, but what’s intriguing about Cordelia is that her story, like that of Xander’s, was initially one in which she was an ordinary person caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Buffy was the Slayer, Willow eventually turned into the world’s most powerful witch, and Giles was both a Watcher and an excellent performer of Who covers.

But Cordy? She didn’t have anything going for her except the nagging feeling that she should be doing more with her life. Her original status as the Mean Girl stemmed from economic and social superiority, but like many pop culture figures in that position, it was a façade more than a reality, a role that she played because she saw no other way. It’s interesting that what inspires her trip to Los Angeles (and, by extension, over to Angel) after graduation from Sunnydale isn’t anything demonic, but rather mundane: tax fraud. Stripped bare of both economic comfort and psychological comfort post-graduation, she moves to LA to become an actress. Of course, what she finally finds is purpose.
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Since I read it, I haven’t been able to stop thinking reading Amanda Marcotte’s excellent essay on why the television shows that are critically considered to be the best we’ve seen in the last decade all focus on men, almost all of whom are anti-heroes. There’s no question that some of this is a result of who’s creating these critically-lauded television shows: lots of Davids for the big three of Deadwood, The Wire, and The Sopranos, and lots of dudes generally. But it’s not that men are incapable of creating astonishingly good female characters, and in fact, many of the shows that occupy the second tier of great television programming feature innovative, emotionally compelling female characters. It’s not a question of creating great women. It’s a question of getting them at the center of the frame, and of getting their perspectives to be the dominant ones for a change.

To try to figure out how to do that, and what we can learn from some of the best female characters of the last 10 years, I’ve asked Amanda, Ryan McGee, and Rowan Kaiser to put some thoughts to paper about the fictional women who have touched them most. Amanda’s post on Community‘s Britta Perry will go up tomorrow, followed by Ryan on Buffy and Angel‘s Cordelia Chase, Rowan on Veronica Mars, and me on Gemma Teller Morrow on Friday. I’d be curious to know what some of your favorite women are, particularly if there’s someone you think I haven’t come across yet but who I might love.

I just finished W. Scott Poole’s Monsters in America, and while I think the book has an unfortunate tendency to wander away from its central thesis (and as a result to not entirely prove it), the premise is interesting enough to merit further consideration. Essentially he argues that “the narrative of American history can be read as a tale of monsters slain and monsters beloved” — and more specifically that in the United States, monsters exist not just as engines of social control and reflections of our anxiety, but as things that we define ourselves by conquering. Poole describes one delightful example, the arrival of what a lot of people thought was a large sea serpent off the coast of Massachusetts:

Numerous New Englanders claimed to have seen it, and everyone tried to invest it with meaning. The Gloucester serpent quickly, in fact almost immediately, mae its way into political discussion. The anxious maritime entrepreneurs of Gloucester gave their sea monster the nickname “Embargo,” a reference to the controversial Embargo of 1807…The 1817 Boston broadside certainly makes it clear that destroying the monster in Gloucester harbor was the community’s first priority. On the first day of the sighting, ‘a number of our sharp-shooters’ were in pursuit, firing muskets at the serpent. There seems to have been no public discussion of this effort. It was assumed that killing the monster was the only possible course. The men of the New England coast killed giant sea creatures for a living, and this particular wonder would receive the same treatment. The monster in American history is not simply that which destroys. It is a being that must be destroyed.

Poole doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining how that American mindset is different from that of other countries, mostly asserting that it’s the case, even though I think he might have built a stronger one. The Puritans’ commitment to destroying monsters didn’t stop at self-control: Cotton Mather and others were all too eager to visit bodily destruction on the people who they believed had become monstrous in the country they’d come to subdue. The transformation of slaves who rebelled against their treatment into monsters in the canon of American mythology certainly had real-world consequences in the militarized mindset of the pre-Civil War mindset, and the treatment of fugitive slaves. But there’s no question that America is very good at mobilizing swiftly to absolutely destroy the kinds of things we’ve decided are monstrous, whether they’re New England sea serpents or al Qaeda.

It would be interesting to consider whether there’s a distinctly American approach to monsters that originate elsewhere. The edit and reframing that produced the American version of Godzilla turns the monster’s death from a tragedy and ominous warning into a triumph. In Europe, we desperately need Van Helsing to corner Dracula. Here, apparently, teenage girls can dispatch them either by slaying or seduction. The mark of real victory over a monster is when you don’t need to be afraid of it any more. America hasn’t defeated all of its monsters, and it never will. But to a certain extent, it can’t. It’s hard to remain exceptional if there’s nothing left to stand against, no way to distinguish yourself by the victories you can achieve that no one else can.

A couple of weeks ago, some literary wags started tweeting that we should #OccupyAvonlea, the fictional home of that infamous anarchist green hair dye fan Anne of Green Gables. Since, comic book characters have occupied Gotham and Metropolis. But Gotham seems like it would be a dangerous place to camp out in (and how much park space does it really have?), and Avonlea’s a little remote to keep an occupation going. So here are the five best fictional places to occupy:

1. Sunnydale: One of Scott Eric Kaufman’s students suggested it would be a bad idea to occupy a town that’s built on a Hellmouth. But given security concerns at Occupy encampments around the country, there could be a definitive advantage to having a slayer on the prowl, keeping an eye out for vampires and sexual predators alike. And Buffy and the Scoobies have special experience in taking down nefarious mayors, so Occupy Sunnydale wouldn’t have to worry about getting kicked out of their encampments:

2. Pawnee: Leslie Knope can conjure parks out of pits. She can throw harvest festivals while dispelling Native American curses. She can program repeated end-of-the-world vigils. She summons baseball fields out of vacant lots, and at next to no cost. As a mainstream Democrat who’s deeply invested in the electoral process, Leslie might not be fully on board with the alternative world-building element of the Occupy movement, but the woman can handle a logistical challenge. Occupy Pawnee would have the best tents, the most Port-a-Potties, and the tastiest Reasonablist-provided donuts:

3. Nellyville: St. Louis rapper Nelly’s created a fictional kingdom that sounds like a pretty great place to hang out. As he explains, it’s a town that’s already committed to rectifying income inequality, where “all newborns get half a mill” — so much for pesky student loan debt — paper boys have Range Rovers, the town’s redeemed the false promise of “40 acres and a mule” with “40 acres and a pool,” and the weather’s determined by democratic vote (if not by consensus). Still, Nellyville’s gender politics and criminal justice could use some work — automatic executions for murder are a little harsh.

4. Westeros: If the Occupy movement would be about perfecting a society that’s in decent shape in Nellyville, Occupy Westeros would be a somewhat more urgent proposition. After all, in this shattered kingdom, the 1 percent don’t just control most of Westeros’ wealth: they can rape and murder members of the 99 percent with impunity. There would be logistical challenges, too. In Westeros, when they say winter is coming, they don’t just mean you’re going to have to keep taking snow-soaked sleeping bags to the laundromat to dry them out until April. But holdfasts are easier to defend than public parks. As are giant walls made of ice. And nothing brings the 99 percent together faster than hordes of ice zombies:

5. The Ministry of Magic: Those sections of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows may have turned off a lot of readers, but they mean that some of the most politically potent figures in magical Britain have a lot of camping experience. Plus, the ability to have tents that are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside solves overcrowding, and Hermione’s enchanted purse would solve a lot of logistics problems. Given that income inequality has a discomfiting tendency to produce a lot of genocidal racists in the country’s wizarding community, pushing the Ministry towards a more just economic system and more tolerant policies towards Muggles can go hand in hand.

The bridge is yours.

-Occupying Sunnydale would probably be pretty challenging, particularly in terms of getting folks through the night.

-Someone just give Spencer Ackerman a side hustle writing for X-Men already.

-Have Axe’s advertising campaigns worked too well?

-If you don’t want to read long fantasy books in long series, you probably shouldn’t read long fantasy books in long fantasy series.

-Seriously. Not good: