Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season (1997) + Friends: The Complete First Season (1994-1995) – DVDs

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
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"Welcome to Hellmouth," "The Harvest," "The Witch," "Teacher's Pet," "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date," "The Pack," "Angel," "I Robot – You Jane," "The Puppet Show," "Nightmares," "Out of Mind, Out of Sight," "Prophecy Girl"

FRIENDS: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
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"Pilot," "The One With the Sonogram at the End," "The One With the Thumb," "The One With George Stephanopoulos," "The One With the East German Laundry Detergent," "The One With the Butt," "The One With the Blackout," "The One Where Nana Dies Twice," "The One Where Underdog Gets Away," "The One With the Monkey," "The One With Mrs. Bing," "The One With the Dozen Lasagnas," "The One With the Boobies," "The One With the Candy Hearts," "The One With the Stoned Guy," "The One With Two Parts," "The One With All the Poker," "The One Where the Monkey Gets Away," "The One with the Evil Orthodontist," "The One with Fake Monica," "The One with the Ick Factor," "The One with the Birth," "The One Where Rachel Finds Out"

by Bill Chambers Like a child experiencing puberty, the first season of a television series hopes you don't notice that it hasn't settled into its voice yet, that it has no sense of style, that it's unprepared for the microscope of society. The pressures are great for a teenager, but the stakes for a TV show are similarly high: While going through its growing pains, it has a limited number of chances to catch ratings lightning in a bottle. Imagine saying to a gawky adolescent, "Impress me." With the near-simultaneous DVD releases of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season" and "Friends: The Complete First Season", there's an occasion to reflect on how a series becomes popular (although the zeitgeist is always such a mystery we can't ever hope for a demonstrable hypothesis) and, for fun's sake, to retrace the evolution of these unique TV-watching experiences.

Week after week, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" proffers the formula for an emotionally fickle, concentration-deficient nation. Steering between lowbrow silliness and teary crescendos at breakneck speed, it couldn't be less done in by genre while remaining as faithful to its gothic origins as it does. Creator Joss Whedon isn't merely Anne Rice with a sense of humour–he's Anne Rice with the ability to separate drama from fetishism. Abandoning its cinematic roots (Whedon wrote the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, and his dissatisfaction with the final product led him to re-imagine the concept for television), the show–the flagship for start-up netlet The WB–begins with Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) already aware of but also resistant to her slaying instincts, having been expelled from one high school for letting her super-strength get out of hand.

Transferred to Sunnydale High, which happens to be situated atop "the Hellmouth" (making the town vulnerable to supernatural phenomena), Buffy is appointed a "Watcher" named Giles (Anthony Head, from those serialized Taster's Choice commercials). A British expert in the occult, Giles does double-duty as the school librarian, overseeing a facility that becomes a pointedly empty clubhouse for Buffy and her small circle of friends: Willow (Alyson Hannigan), a bookwormish yet garrulous redhead, and Xander (Nicholas Brendon), one of those wiseacres who falls through the cracks of the school hegemony. The self-proclaimed "Scooby Gang" (ironic that Gellar went on to play Daphne in the live-action Scooby-Doo) would expand in seasons of "Buffy" to come, but for these first 12 episodes it's a trio assigned missions by stammering Luddite Giles.

Each year of "Buffy" follows a thread involving a different supervillain's plan to claim the world for his kingdom. Buffy's nemesis in Season One, The Master (no relation to Doctor Who's archenemy), isn't much of a contender, though on the bright side, this leaves the creators nowhere to go but up. Dispatching loyal subjects with a Vader-in-Empire callousness, his threat to Buffy and co. nevertheless lacks urgency because he's trapped underground. Whedon errs, too, in harping on Xander's secret attraction to Buffy–Ross and Rachel they're not. (Brendon frankly has a hostile, Ducky-in-Pretty-in-Pink edge that both the actor and the show managed to sand down in subsequent seasons.) Buffy's early love interests suck in general, actually, no pun intended. One was glad to see her relationship with Angel (David Boreanaz) go into overdrive the following year, sparing us further mismatched suitors like "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date"'s (episode 1.5) wide-eyed Owen (Christopher Weihl), a fascinatingly failed experiment in flipping the damsel-in-distress archetype.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" can be rough-going in its debut season: jokes fall flat; the cast hadn't quite gelled (Gellar, Hannigan, and Head were all marvellous off the bat, just not always in sync); and many of its best, creepiest plants suffer from weak pay-offs down the line, such as the identity of the "Anointed One." (Click here to visit the most thoroughly detailed "Buffy" episode guide on the web.) One hour, "I Robot–You Jane" (1.8), suggests a third-rate "X File." (The series didn't figure out how to do sci-fi properly until Season Four, wherein the heavy is a cyborg.) All in all, however, the show "hit the ground running," as ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY wrote in a 2000 guide-to-"Buffy" issue, spoiling us with sharp, intuitive, eminently quotable writing that successfully modernized (and replaced–"Buffy" has since spawned its own imitators) a musty literary mythos.

"Friends" likewise hit the ground running and is in its own way innovative. Sometimes it's the simplest concepts that prove the nimblest: the chronicle of six twentysomething friends (three guys, three gals) who convene daily at the fictitious New York café Central Perk exhibits few signs of exhaustion as it prepares for its ninth and final (?) season on NBC. I wondered if it might be a bit regressive to start back at square one with the knowledge of Chandler and Monica's marriage, Rachel's pregnancy, Joey's "Days of Our Lives" gig, and so on, but "Friends" works as a sitcom first and a soap opera second.

The ensemble clicked almost instantly. Matthew Perry (sarcastic Chandler), Courtney Cox (control freak Monica), and Matt Le Blanc (dense Joey) were veteran industry floaters who'd murdered multiple shows between them; it took some kind of genius to put them in a room together, where they could lift each other's curse. Rounded out by Lisa Kudrow (flighty Phoebe), Jennifer Aniston (neurotic Rachel), and David Schwimmer (geeky Ross), the players are such easily distinguishable archetypes that it's clear co-creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane took a page out of "Cheers" book: load your ensemble with main characters who could carry a show by themselves.

The relatively engrossing arc of season one is established from the jump: Ross's growing affection for Rachel, the daddy's little rich girl who ditched her fiancée at the altar only to move in with Monica, Ross's sister. Stumble-free for the most part, the pilot doesn't quite justify Monica's lack of discomfort when Rachel claims the spare room of her apartment, and it ends on a peculiarly sour note that's meant as a Mary Tyler Moore, we're-gonna-make-it-after-all baptism–the gang forces Rachel to cut her credit cards in half–but plays as hectoring and inappropriate. (When Monica's credit cards are later used by an impersonator in "The One with Fake Monica" (1.21), it feels like karmic retribution.) The writing tightened up thereafter, the occasional visits from exes like Ross's pregnant, lesbian wife, Carol (first Anita Barone, then Jane Sibbett), mainly proving the showrunners had built a perfect ecosystem that doesn't easily abide interlopers. Not even when they're a monkey named Marcel, or a Fake Monica, whose crunchy granola likes were blessedly never seen again.

THE DVDs
Fox DVD's box set "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season" spreads 12 episodes (the program launched mid-season) out over three dual-layer platters. Video quality is across-the-board mediocre. Bear in mind that the series was initially shot in 16mm–a grainy, soft image is about the best one could hope for. Colours–lawn-green, in particular–are bold but garishly oversaturated, perhaps to exaggerate visual interest. The Dolby Surround sound does not vastly improve on the broadcast audio, although the dialogue is generally fuller and easier to understand on these DVDs. LFE info is undetectable except during the climactic shenanigans of "The Harvest" (1.2).

Extras are scant but not without merit. For starters, there are three separate interview segments with Joss Whedon (3 mins. apiece) pertaining to the episodes "Welcome to Hellmouth" & "The Harvest," "The Witch" & "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date," and "Angel" & "The Puppet Show." These originally introduced VHS twofers, and spill such beans as the origin of Whedon's cute "Mutant Enemy" logo. (Whedon's talking head returns in a superfluous 4-minute piece also featuring Boreanaz.) Whedon also contributes informative commentary tracks to "Welcome to Hellmouth" and "The Harvest" (a two-parter), drilling it into our heads that his and the other producers' inexperience in the medium had them defying standard practice at every turn. A photo gallery, a section of character/actor biographies, a trailer for the first season, ROM links to "Buffy" websites and screensavers, and the script for the two-part pilot (reproduced on-screen as white text on black) finish off the set.

Warner's 4-disc "Friends: The Complete First Season" boasts of good-looking fullscreen transfers of the season's 24 episodes, a number of which contain previously unseen footage. (I noticed a couple of additions to the pilot's introductory scenes but don't know "Friends" obsessively enough to clue you in on the rest of the new material; it's a purchase incentive, in any case.) Audio is remastered Dolby Digital 5.1, and if it sounds a little tinny, I became quite accustomed to hearing the laugh track over my shoulders and found subsequent cable airings of "Friends" disappointing in this regard. Some light bass is present during the percussive transitional music.

There is bonus material on discs 1 and 4 of the "Friends" collection. An excellent audio commentary from creators Kevin S. Bright, Kauffman, and Crane supplements the pilot. Separately recorded, they cover everything from fights with NBC over the opening title sequence and Monica's one-night stand with "Paul the Wine Guy" to on-again/off-again director James Burrows's alterations to Monica's apartment. On the final DVD, you'll find an interactive tour of Central Perk (with commentary snippets from a handful of crew members and links to relevant clips), a "Friends of Friends" list of Season One's guest stars (with opportunity to sample their individual cameos), a "How Well Do You Know Your Friends?" trivia game, and a trailer for the second season ("The One with the Trailer for Season 2"). Note that one can view a 30-second preview of an episode prior to selecting it, a nice touch.

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season
  42 minutes/episode; NR; 1.33:1; English Dolby Surround, French Dolby Surround; CC; English, Dutch subtitles; 3 DVD-9s; Region One; Fox
• Friends: The Complete First Season
  24 minutes/episode; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 5.1; CC; English, French, Spanish, Chinese subtitles; 4 DVD-9s; Region One; Warner