Buffy: The Chosen Collection

To quote Larry Hosken circa 1993, "Who says money can't buy happiness?"

Buffy was what changed my mind about American TV. I'd grown up watching shows like Macross and Escaflowne. Shows with long story arcs that required you to remember characters from previous episodes, and that expected you to understand that people change because of events that happen to them. In other words, TV that required that you had an attention span, attention to detail, and a good memory. When I had to watch TV shows like Starsky & Hutch, or "CHiPs", I was extremely disappointed at how characters seemed to stay static from week to week.

Joss Wheldon makes use of every narrative trick in the book. And to top it off, just when you think that he's going to run out of ideas, he pulls another rabbit out of the hat and makes you rethink your assumptions. He's done episodes where for 30 minutes nobody says anything (just when you thought that what made Buffy great was the incredibly witty dialogue). He did an entire episode of Buffy as a musical, without breaking continuity, and while making the episode a keystone in the plot development. You can't watch Buffy with your brain turned off.

I've watched every episode of Buffy through Karl Pflegler's Buffy library from work, and the Santa Clara County Library, but when the entire collection came out I knew I had to buy it for myself.