Once upon a time there was a TV show called Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. You might have heard of it. For seven seasons it consumed the otaku of the western world with its edgy take on adolescence and its super-hot titular character (the now has-been Sarah Michelle Gellar). Well, actually it consumed us for three seasons and then it got a bit disappointing but we all kept watching thinking it would get better until finally we couldn't even explain why we kept watching since it clearly wasn't going to get better.

Now, I particularly really liked the third season of Buffy and recently a friend gave me a copy of it. Not on DVD of course, because I am morally opposed to purchasing something on DVD when it can be obtained for free off the interwebs. Anyway, I dutifully copied this season onto my hard drive and looked at it briefly before... I went off to watch something I hadn't seen before.

Without being too philosophical, our time on this earth is relatively brief. We only get eighty or so years to experience everything that arts and literature has managed to produce in the last twenty-three or so centuries. The odds are stacked against anyone getting even close to just keeping up with all the new shows that go to air every week, let alone going back to the classics. Do we really have time to re-watch Buffy angst over Angel after he comes back from Hell? Or Xander and Cordelia to-ing and fro-ing about getting together and then Xander getting busted making out with Willow and so on and so forth? When I haven't even finished reading War and Peace yet? Or, to be less pretentious, I have never even watched Alias? There is always something new to experience, something which has the potential to add to me as a human being. Watching something I have already seen can never achieve that -- I have already seen it, I already know what is going to happen.

That being said, I also oppose going back to watch I show that I missed when it aired that is anything less than an absolute classic. What would I gain from going back to watch triple (or was it quintuple?) agent Sydney Bristow and the various stuff she did which was no doubt a bit sexy (though less sexy than just watching porn) and full of action (though less action than watching an early Jackie Chan movie)? The answer, I am afraid, is absolutely nothing. Whatever would be the point? There are hundreds of shows soon to air as the ratings season starts back in the US and I have no chance of keeping up with them. I will struggle to fit more than a few into my life as it is, why would I go back and watch something (and watch out for the key word here) OLD?

Because ultimately I think this is the problem. Stuff that is old is automatically less interesting than stuff that is new. Why is this? Because watching something old is, always in some respect, an act of nostalgia. And nostalgia is the single most pointless of human self-indulgences. I could be watching Season 3 of Buffy right now thinking about who I was then and how I have changed in the intervening decade and you know what? I would gain absolutely nothing from the process. For two main reasons. First is that nothing about re-watching a show can change how I was then and reflection on who I am now is not aided by the old as much as it is by my reaction to the new. Second is that Joss Whedon is not Aristotle or James Joyce. Close re-reading of his texts do not reveal a nuanced and insightful commentary on human nature -- his work is not the study of fields like philosophy or social theory. Study of Whedon is relegated to the “mongrel domain” of cultural studies (to quote Pierre Bourdieu) which has made an academic discipline of everything. Thus studies of Buffy detailing “depictions of teenagers in 90’s pop culture” are a far cry from studies of social justice or philosophical meaning.

You really wouldn't rather be watching Firefly?

This is not to say that one should prohibited from engaging with popular culture. This entire magazine and most of my work for it are an attempt to do so. There are even some movies which I like enough that I have seen them three or four times. But if a person chooses to re-watch a television season of somewhere between 12 and 24 episodes they cannot pretend that doing so is akin to re-reading the Nicomachean Ethics. And if it is not a study then what does re-watching amount to? In short, a waste of precious time. Time which could be spent learning or watching something new. Being human is a restless search for the novel, the undiscovered. Re-watching TV is its antithesis. Re-watching a TV show treats life like an endless expanse of time to kill; as if there is nothing better to do than sit down and wait for your life to slowly end.

Soon enough we will all be dust and our beloved, oft-watched boxed set of Firefly is going to be sitting forlorn in the $3 bin of a second-hand shop. And every hour we wasted re-watching that episode where we almost thought that Mal and Inara were going to kiss is an hour less we were doing anything even remotely worthwhile, useful or… gasp!… entertaining.

-- Brad Crammond

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