Top Ten Life Lessons I’ve Learned from Joss Whedon Shows*

10. It really is the little things.

Kaylee from Firefly was intensely happy about that box of strawberries that Book brought on board. Same goes for the mega-ruffled dress and the hot cheese at the party in “Shindig.” She’s got crap-all for creature comforts on board Serenity, but she makes the most of the few she does have. A lot of times you can’t control the big stuff in life—like being arrested as a space pirate. But you can make the most of the little things and enjoy life anyway.

9. Don’t ever let anyone erase your personality and memory and store it in their sketchy corporate offices like they do in Dollhouse.

This one seems pretty self-evident, but, you know—still good advice in case they ever do invent this tech.

(However: would we remember if they had?)

8. Beware the power of the dark side.

Willow fails to heed this advice in season 6 of Buffy, and she goes Dark Willow in a major way. I’m not sure she ever truly recovers from the terrible things she did. Willow’s experiences also show how important it can be to surround yourself with people who bring out the good parts of you—not the bad. Former rat Amy was a decidedly bad influence on the magic-addict. If she’d stayed in her little wheel things may have gone very differently, and Will wouldn’t have had to worry about those pesky dark magic roots in her hair. 

7. Curiosity isn’t always a good thing.

Oh, Fred. You had to open that stupid crate. And then you got killed and possessed by a socially awkward blue demon. Sometimes it’s best to just leave the bad stuff buried.

6. Maybe little white lies aren’t so bad.

On each show, the compulsive truth-teller made a bad end: Cordelia on Angel, Anya on Buffy...Spike became the one who always spoke his mind on the final season of Angel, and then he got dusted (though that was technically on Buffy). I can’t actually remember anyone telling the truth all that much on Dollhouse, though. It might have had something to do with all the brain-wiping going on.

5. Be nice to your boss (and co-workers)

This one’s from all the shows: for example, it seems like the funnest folks all got invited to go make a fun Shakespeare comedy at Joss’s house. Epic!

4. Sometimes you can make a whole lot out of a little chance.

This one’s backstage too: James Marsters was only a guest star for an episode or two, but he so rocked it as Spike that he made an entire career out of it. Extremely epic!

3. Think outside the box.

Buffy solves her final, seemingly unsolvable challenge, by doing just that: she releases the Slayer magic-dust or what-have-you to all the girls with the potential to kick vampire ass. All the other slayers seem to have been thinking too small: patrol, stake, repeat. But being an innovator has its advantages.

2. Running away is a short-term solution.

On all the shows, the main character tried to outrun his or her past, tried to leave and start over, but their past always caught up: Buffy tried to quit several times, and even suffered at least two mental breaks trying to escape being the Slayer. She tried to go to college and be a normal girl. The universe responded by sending her the source of all evil and then her town was sucked into hell. Mal tried to run away from all responsibility, only to accidentally adopt a heaping load of it when he let himself have a soft spot for River. Angel ran to L.A. but his past kept catching up. And Echo was only born because Caroline was running away from who she was—and wow did that not end very well. 

1. You can make your own family.

This happens on all his shows, really—often the characters didn’t have families, or were running away from them for various reasons. But they made their own, and stuck by those folks through thick and thin--and sometimes even hell and back. 

*or, I’m not at Comic-Con—AGAIN—which really sucks

Buffy: Sixteen Years Later

Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired on March 10, 1997 and ran until May 20, 2003. I still remember the first episode I caught—“The Pack” from season 1. It was summer, I’d just moved to Florida, and the WB was rerunning the first two seasons on Monday and Tuesday nights. It wasn’t long before I realized I was watching what would become my favorite show, ever. Later on, I fell pretty hard for Firefly, but since it never really got to become a series, Buffy still holds the top spot for me. More than that, I’m going to claim it changed all of our lives. 

How, you ask? Here are five reasons. Feel free to add more in the comments ;)

5. @$%-Kicking Heroines

Yes, there are fighting female characters who predate her: Ripley from Alien, Xena, and Sarah Connor. But Buffy stands out because for a couple of reasons. First, she’s young—just a high school sophomore, facing down demons and saving the world. Second, she dusts vamps, then goes home to change into a cute outfit for a night out at the Bronze with her friends. She doesn’t give up her femininity to fight. Throughout the series, Buffy struggles to balance a “real” life with her calling. But it’s not incidental that she does: one of Whedon’s main themes as the series progresses is that Buffy’s friendships, her ties to the world, are what set her apart from the slayers who came before her.

4. Genre Mashing

Today, you can go to the bookstore and buy Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or rent Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. We don’t think too much about mixing our genres. But when Buffy premiered in 1997, its mix of horror, comedy, and teen angst was still pretty new. The teens on the show didn’t dress or talk like mini-adults. Just a few years before the epitome of teen shows was Beverly Hills, 90210. On that show, their idea of comic timing was an occasional lame pun. And the very special episodes felt forced. When Buffy was funny, it was hysterical (see: Buffy and Spike’s “engagement” in season 4’s Something Blue). And when it was “vey special” it was heartbreaking. I’m still not over the end of season 2.

3. Great writing on teen television

...and not just on gritty, "serious" dramas. Again, the teen shows of the nineties (I’d say eighties, but there weren’t many teen shows before the nineties) were incredibly contrived and staged compared to Buffy. And forget about teen shows for a second, think of the shows you watch now. Unless they have a former-Buffy writer on staff (and sometimes even if they do) the dialogue can be kind of cringe-worthy. Watch an episode of Revenge or Once Upon a Time and then try to imagine how it might sound if Joss wrote it. But he’s a little busy now since the number one movie of 2012, I guess.

2. The Whedonverse

No power in the verse can stop him: Joss has created an entire Whedonverse, for those of us who will follow him anywhere. I’ve loved almost everything he’s done (the only exception for me is Cabin in the Woods.) Now that Avengers has exploded, a lot of the formerly uninitiated are starting to discover the genius of Whedon: Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse. If you have Netflix and a takeout menu your weekends could be set for the year.

1.     Words

This one is number one for me. The other week I was in a Twitter chat with some other debut authors, and one of the questions was about our influences. A lot of writers in the chat were mentioning classic authors. But I said Joss Whedon. The way his characters spoke on Buffy still echoes through almost every show and book with teenage characters. Watch an episode of anything on the CW or ABC Family and you’ll hear at least a hint of Buffy-slang. His signature anthimeria: turning adjectives to nouns or verbs, is now a part of our regular speech. The Scooby gang was generally fighting for their lives, but they never stopped being witty while doing it. Even small throwaways, like the names of random demons, were a chance for comedy: for example, the sixth season demon M’Fasnick (like, Mmmm, coookies?) Buffy was even known for tossing off a memorable one-liner before offing a vamp. The way these characters spoke was revolutionary: inspired by real slang, improved by genius writers. I catch myself writing a Whedonism pretty often. And I’m guessing I’m far from the only one. 

This Sunday marks sixteen years since we were first welcomed to the Hellmouth Buffy may not be the most important show of your life, like it is for me. But I can almost guarantee that something you’ve laughed or cried at in the past sixteen years has been influenced by the genius of Joss.