Favorite Whedon TV Show Meme

[shadowkat]

I can't remember what Whedon tv shows my readership favors. So perhaps you can help? My current guess is that you rank them as follows:

1. Buffy
2. Angel (with about 25-45% preferring Angel to Buffy for various reasons)
3. Firefly
4. Dollhouse (with 65% squicked by the series and finding it unwatchable)


Only 5% read the comics and liked them. Everyone liked Dr. Horrible. Few read the X-men comics by Whedon or stuck with them. So comics Whedon - not a fav. Also few appear interested in the current films, Much Ado, Cabin in the Woods, or Avengers. Am I right?
Here's a poll to find out, assuming people participate. As all mathematicians and staticians know...polls are repsentative of the sampling. If only 20 people take the poll?
You guess based on those 20. So...I have approximately 150 who have friended me, of the 150, about 50 probably read on a daily basis, of the 50, 30% are into polls. So..I have no way of knowing, do I? The only way I can know is if everyone who reads my journal and likes or ever liked Whedon shows takes the poll. And that's well impossible. So this is ...far from an exact exercise. (A lesson to the people out there who do a lot of surveys for sociology, psychology and marketing classes - people? They aren't that reliable. You know that right? IF not, just read the internet - it will prove it to you. There's a reason that sociology, psychology and marketing are considering inexact sciences or soft. They rely on inexact data that can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Lawyers love to poke holes in statistical data.)

That said, for a bit of fun, take the poll and see if you can prove me wrong? Feel free to link, since a lot of readers seem to be through links at times.

[Poll #1831422]

[Note: Won't be able to respond until late on Thursday or Friday, since I can no longer access personal blogs via my workplace. So can only access at home. PS: I reposted this poll fifteen minutes after first posting, because I screwed up on the last question and had to fix it. Now it should be fine. If you responded to the deleted post, please respond again. Thanks.]

[ETA: Read the comments. Fascinating.]

Comments

[flameraven.livejournal.com]

I'm clearly in the minority here, but I like Dollhouse the best. It took one or two single ideas and explored them pretty well for being squished into two seasons instead of three. I'm intrigued by all the characters, I think there's some really interesting moral ambiguities and complexities, and I was pretty impressed by the actors overall, and really liked the characters, even if most of them are terrible people. It had a lot of twists that genuinely surprised me, and, while a lot of them were painful, I didn't feel like they existed ONLY to torture the characters, something I think is very prevalent in later seasons of Buffy/Angel and which annoys me to no end.

Firefly was the first Whedon thing I saw, and I enjoy it. I think it's unfortunately too short to get a good feel of the series as a whole, but the characters were fun and I liked the space western theme. In terms of logical world building, no, it doesn't really make sense, but I like the mash-up of genres and it fits the general "adventure" atmosphere. I wish the series had continued long enough to get into the meat of its plot, but as it is it's a fun series and one that has enough stand-alone episodes I rewatch it pretty frequently.

Buffy/Angel... I think my experience was just all wrong for this one. I didn't watch it as a teenager, so characters intended to appeal to teenagers (lookin' at you, Xander) I mostly find annoying. I have very little familiarity with horror tropes, so it's hard for me to appreciate the deconstruction of them, and I came into the series spoiled for nearly every major plot point, although I'm not sure how I could have avoided spoilers when the show is 15 years old. I think overall it just feels too teen sitcom for me to really get into it? I don't know. It just doesn't click for me. It's not a bad show, I like reading analyses of it, I'm just not all that emotionally invested in any of the characters or their situations.

Angel... Angel was fine for the first two seasons. My frustration grew in S3 and I flat-out refuse to deal with S4. I might eventually be convinced to watch S5, but in general I think pretty much anyone is more interesting than Angel as a character, and as I know most of them are missing by S5, I don't have much incentive to watch more.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I think my experience was just all wrong for this one. I didn't watch it as a teenager, so characters intended to appeal to teenagers (lookin' at you, Xander) I mostly find annoying.


Eh. You know that 95% of the Buffy fandom on my flist is well over the age of 30 right? And most of us did not watch the series as teenagers.
There's a woman on my flist, a huge Xander fan, well-read, has a journalism degree, loves Community, and is over the age of 40. Very bright lady. Best not to generalize.

The comments above demonstrate that as well. They pretty much run the gamut. In particular read the comments regarding Dollhouse and Firefly - which demonstrate once again that old adage..."You're Friends Aren't Watching the Same TV Show You Are and That's Okay" - (they just aren't focusing on the same things).

[flameraven.livejournal.com]

Sorry, didn't mean to generalize, I was just sharing my experience and a few reasons why I think Buffy doesn't really work for me. Most of the people I've talked to about Buffy are my circle of friends-- all mid-20's, who watched it in high school, and I think a lot of the appeal for them is partly nostalgia factor. (This also seems to be the age range for the MarkWatches crowd, which is my other gauge of Buffy fandom.)

I realize you have an older crowd on your flist, though. What I meant is that Xander is very similar to the type of character usually included to appeal to teens. ("Look, he's skateboarding, because skateboarding is ~~cool~~") It doesn't mean that such a character has to appeal only to teens, or that he didn't get more character development later, that was just my initial impression. Xander is the bumbling comic relief, just like Willow is the shy geek and Buffy is the pretty cheerleader. They obviously grow out of these stereotypes through the show.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Hee...it's a really weird reading the new croup of mid-twenties watching it, because you don't know the pop culture references. (Whedon was about 32 when he wrote the series. And it's based on his own high school experience in many ways. Along with the other writers.)

* The skate board? This was a really big trend in the 1980s and through the mid-90s. Came into fashion with Back to the Future flicks. There were a lot of skate-boarding movies back then.

* The geeky/nerdy boy who fights vampires and lusts after the popular high school girl - was a huge horror trope in the 1980s and 1990s.
Fright Night, The Lost Boys, Scream all featured it. That character was usually the protagonist in all those films, except for Scream. He was also the lead in Dawson's Creek. The nerdy film geek. But you'd have to know 1980s and 1990s pop culture and teen films to get that. Now it's a cliche, but back then it was a trope. Sixteen Candles, Can Hardly Wait, Can't Buy Me Love, Rudy, oh so many of the films featured this character as a lead. Another was the notorious American Pie flicks.

So, what you see as a stereotype at the time the series was written, really wasn't. It was more of a trope.

It bears keeping in mind that Buffy and Angel are late 1990s series. Both ended in 2003-2004 respectfully. Pop culture has changed a lot.
In some respects they are both quite dated.

[flameraven.livejournal.com]

It's debatable whether I'd have known the references even if I was a little older and watching at the time, honestly. I do know some of them, like the 80's-90's skateboard thing. I remember there being skateboards everywhere as a kid. But my TV was pretty strictly limited, and mostly to either educational shows (PBS/Discovery) or whatever was on a few other specific channels. Mostly Nickelodeon. I remember watching a lot of the 'Nick at Night' stuff featuring the old black and white sitcoms-- The Munsters, Sabrina, Genie. I think there was some 60's Batman in there too. Some cartoons, but not many until the early 2000's. So almost no current pop culture outside of movies, and when I got to high school, we stopped having cable because we couldn't afford it. Even now, I have a TV but no channels, we use it for DVDs, video games, and Netflix.

I've made up some ground on this, but I still generally fail at knowing references, especially ones to specific shows or people. I know a bit more about 2000's and current references, but honestly it's not really something I pay much attention to. I know the information for the generally geeky shows I enjoy, and some movies, and that's about it. Fortunately, I've spent enough time on the internet that I usually know at least a little about popular things, if only by general osmosis.

Point being... yeah, even if I'd seen this in the 90's when it was current, I'd probably have been clueless as to the context of these things. Which was kind of my original point-- I don't think Buffy's bad at all, although I do have some issues with it, but I have clearly approached it from all the wrong directions, and it just hasn't grabbed me.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Probably wouldn't have grabbed you anyways.

Most, if not all, of the people that I know offline aren't really Buffy fans. My brother liked Angel better. That's why I went online to find people who liked it. ;-)