“It sucks on ass.”
-Joss Whedon, on the original pilot
Between the original pitch to the networks and the time that they air on TV, pilots almost always undergo some sort of change. Sometimes the changes are larger – like those pilots that will be covered here – but often times they’re much smaller, like recasting a role, or re-filming a few scenes in order to change the tone slightly. Not all pilots get changed, mind you – especially at the cable level – but it happens enough that it should be considered a general rule of thumb. Knowing what changes happen between the original and aired versions of a pilot is something of interest to many TV critics, as it plays into this discussion of the art vs. business dialectic within the television industry. But what are we to make of a pilot that’s not meant to air, that is only meant to sell the series to the network, with the implication that the first episode aired will vary greatly from what’s in the pilot? Enter the unaired pilot for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
As most people already know, Buffy originally appeared as a 1992 movie, starring Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry, written by Joss Whedon, directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui and produced in part by her husband Kaz Kuzui. It was, by all accounts, a fairly awful film, though most of the blame should be placed on the direction over the screenplay. The pacing is off, characterization is shallow, and it often feels as if a great deal of information was left out. (At around 86 minutes, it’s quite short, which most likely meant that a good deal of the script was cut out.) But the biggest offense against Whedon’s script, at least from his perspective, was that he “had written this scary film about an empowered woman, and they turned it into a broad comedy.” Kuzui herself saw the script as a "pop culture comedy about what people think about vampires", which is much different from Whedon’s original feminist inversion of "the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie", a change that it quite evident in the film’s trailer, which seems to tell the story from the perspective of Perry’s character Pike, and not Buffy:
And for good deal of time after, Buffy, which had seen little commercial or critical success, wasn’t touched again. But some time in the mid-90s, Whedon was approached by Gail Berman, then an executive at Fox Television, who asked him if he would like to develop the movie into a series; Whedon soon agreed. In 1996 he wrote, directed, and partially funded a pilot to pitch the show to various networks, and according to some sectors of the internet, this pilot was meant to serve as a sequel of sort to the original film, a way to transition the character of Buffy forward.
All of this history is important in understanding what does and does not work about the original pilot. First off, I have to agree with Whedon: It really does suck on ass. Perhaps it is the consequence of its short running time, but everything here plays out just a little too quickly, as the pilot clips along in order to fit all the basics in, and not much else. Likewise, all of the characters here outside of Buffy are just sketches of what they will become; all the pilot is interested in is these characters very basic motivations. And as far as the standalone story, Buffy fighting just some random gang of vampires provides very little incentive to keep watching, and from that standpoint, there’s very little about the story that feels original.
Yet as awful as this pilot is from a storytelling perspective, it is important to remember that this (most likely) wasn’t meant to be some great work of television, but rather a convenient shorthand for what the show could be, at least on the most superficial level. Fighting vampires? That’s in there. Quippy banter? Check. Teen angst? Thanks, Cordelia.
But what about those famous Whedon feminist undertones? Well, that’s a bit trickier. The pilot’s opening scene, which plays on our standard gender assumptions by having the girl, not the boy, be the vampire, obviously sets the tone of the show right off the bat, and it echoed the inversion that Whedon tried to accomplish with 1992 film. (The scene was so successful in fact, that it was reshot and used to open the first official episode of the series.) As for Buffy herself, you just feel Whedon working out how to shake Swanson’s valley girl performance off of the character. Whedon may have received great praise for his ability to write women (as evidenced by his work in Rosanne’s third season), but he seems to struggle at times with writing Buffy as both a strong woman and a typical high school girl. This is never more noticeable than here in the pilot, as the first shot of Buffy is her blowing a bubble with her gum, the trite shorthand for the valley girl that Buffy just isn’t.
In fact, many of the characters here lack the nuance that they would come to embody in the series proper. Buffy is too much of a valley girl. Giles comes across as an authoritarian dick. Xander lacks the rejected sadness that made his character work, and here his ‘cool’ attitude doesn’t seem to fit his stature. Willow, here played by Riff Reagan as opposed to series star Alyson Hannigan, plays the character as a similar sad sack, but without the self-awareness that made Hannigan’s portrayal so endearing. It’s hard to say whether the fault lies with Reagan or the script, and though many fans decry the presence of someone other than Hannigan, I have to believe that it’s some combination of the two, given the shallowness of the other characters n this script. As far as Cordelia, well not much was different between her character in the pilot and that of the early episodes, but that’s only because the show didn’t figure out what to do with the character until sometime during the second season.
Probably the only advantage that the pilot held over the series was the casting of the Principal Flutie, here played by Stephen Tobolowsky. Though the show eventually went with the more emotionally overt Ken Lerner, for reasons that I can understand, I can’t help but think that Tobolowsky’s hilariously unaware principal might have been fun for a few episodes, especially as the Hellmouth began upping the evil quotient around the high school.
In order to understand how Buffy went from this creaky presentation to the show that became so critically lauded, it helps to compare this pilot to the episode(s) that it morphed into, the two hour premiere “Welcome to the Hellmouth”/"The Harvest”. Though “Welcome to the Hellmouth” lifts much of the dialogue from the pilot, there is also a great deal added in, and some of the more egregious dialogue is written out. (For example, Xander’s clichéd breakdown of the student populace is left out, though it is replaced with the equally stilted ‘coolness test’ to which Cordelia subjects Buffy.) That episode also does most of the heavy lifting in terms of character development, as those lifted passages, along with a great helping of new dialogue, seeks to make sure that the characters become real people. We learn of Buffy’s past school life and her complicated relationship with her mother. Giles goes from authoritative to just over-eager. We learn that Willow has feelings for Xander, and Xander himself becomes far more socially awkward. Cordelia…gets a few more preppy-girl zingers. (Hey, they can’t all be winners.)
The other major thing that the double premiere accomplished was that, unlike the pilot, it gives us some actual story to sink our teeth into, as well as a reason to keep watching. These two episodes go about introducing The Master, the first season’s Big Bad, an arc that would appear in three to four of the next ten episodes. (“Hellmouth” also introduced Angel, whose original scene was cut from the pilot for some reason.) Yet the Master plot is one of the lesser liked season arcs among the Buffy fan base, and while it at least pointed a way forward for the show, it wasn’t until the third episode, “Witch”, that the show really began to hit its stride. It was here – and in future episodes – that the show would begin to use its monster-of-the-week format to serve as metaphors for common teenage problems. So opposed to the pilot, where it’s just a random bunch of vampires, most of the episodes in the series would strive for a deeper meaning, something that would make the encounter less random, and more meaningful.
Many people hail Buffy for its feminist leanings, for finally giving the television landscape its first strong, well-rounded female lead. Yet as true as this statement is, I think that Whedon’s greater accomplishment was managing to turn a middling film and a subpar pilot into a show that works, a show with enough potential that it would soon enter the echelon as one of the greatest TV series ever made. There tends to a learning curve for most ne shows, as the first few episodes are used to work out various kinks in storytelling, casting, etc. Buffy luckily was able to solve most of its problems before the first episode aired, which meant it could quickly start to develop into the great series that it would become. Whedon used his two chances to remake the Buffy world very wisely, which shows that sometimes, original pilots are made to be scrapped, provided they are done so in the name of artistic progress.
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