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What a lot of people complain about is that the show has wandered from its original concept: it used to use creature-feature tropes as metaphors for teenage angst, but now it's just about itself. But I always found the metaphorical stuff (hyena clique, invisible girl, etc.) pretty ham-handed. I also remember rolling my eyes a bit at the uninventive recycling of the usual horror-flick suspects: you had your witch, your mummy, your werewolf, your Frankenstein, etc. And then there was the matter of the tiny cast; you knew that if someone not named in the credits showed up, he or she would turn out to either be that week's monster or that week's victim.
But then, y'know, you can't exactly shove a cast of thousands into the first season. And the banter was certainly witty, and the characters were appealing, and as the second season progressed the scripts got more sophisticated, and priceless characters like Drusilla premiered, and the show grew into one of the best things ever to appear on television... and as far as I'm concerned, the quality hasn't faltered. Quite the opposite: my original reservations have all been addressed. Unsubtle allegory? Haven't seen it in years. Unoriginal plots? Ditto: for the past several seasons they've been building their own mythos instead of just glancing at Lon Chaney's IMDb file for ideas. And as for the cast... minus commercials, the series to date would run almost exactly 100 hours, and in that time several dozen characters have played significant roles. The UPN seasons of "Buffy" have what the first couple of seasons by definition could not: a rich backlog of what in the comics world is called continuity. It's an epic now.
That goes for the storylines too. The early days seem so small-scale and hokey now that every other episode feels like a widescreen event — and not just because of special effects, though it is true that "Whoa, cool" moments like Buffy turning an incoming missile into a trio of doves or occult text flowing up Willow's arms have grown more frequent with each season. Some contend that this has come at the cost of the characters, but I disagree. Sure, they're different now... but I'd certainly hope they'd be different at 22 from at 16. Indeed, that's one of the joys of the series for me — it's like watching the original class at Xavier's grow up to become the faculty of New X-Men (sort of an obvious parallel now that the current arc focuses on the training of the next generation of slayers). Yeah, maybe there are shows where Xander gets one line. But that doesn't make him a cipher; he doesn't have to reestablish himself every episode anymore than characters have to reestablish themselves in every scene of a novel or a film. One of the advantages of having made it past the beginning of the tale.
For this, after all, is the payoff! It's these sorts of arcs that make all the dues-paying worthwhile, where you can have the Chosen One and the recovering black-eyed uberwitch and the repentant vampire and the sentient ball of energy and the dweeby wannabe evil genius and the teleporting vengeance demon wandering around without needing a scorecard to keep track of the players. Where you can cut to a doorframe and get a "wow" by showing any of twenty different returnees standing in it. It's this sort of arc that I'm looking forward to doing in Academy X, and the promise of this sort of arc that makes laying all the groundwork worthwhile. I certainly hope that years from now when there are finally enough issues done to be able to start doing a big epic that the audience doesn't grumble about how much better issue #3 was.
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