In 2003, Joss Whedon sat down with Salon and explained why Buffy Summers was never going to have a functional relationship. Not because of the monsters, or the chosen-one mythology, or the sheer inconvenience of dying twice. Because of narrative theory. Because of Moonlighting.
Whedon’s argument — and it’s a real one, not entirely without merit — goes roughly like this: television runs on unresolved tension. The moment Sam and Diane got together on Cheers, the audience started looking for the door. So you never resolve it. You keep the longing permanent and the satisfaction out of reach. “What people want,” Whedon said, “is not what they need.”
As justification for Angel losing his soul the moment he and Buffy slept together, this has a certain logic. As a governing philosophy for an entire series, it’s exhausting. And it produced some genuinely strange results.
Riley Finn. There is no polite way to say this: Riley Finn was a wet sock. Marc Blucas gave him everything he had, and what he had was a man so straightforwardly decent that the show could find nothing to do with him except make him boring, then self-destructive, then gone. Whedon acknowledged that people “didn’t want” the healthy relationship Riley represented. But I’d gently suggest the audience wasn’t the problem. The writing was. A character with no particular history, no reason to fascinate — and the conclusion drawn was that audiences simply cannot tolerate happiness.
Then there’s Angel himself. Whedon cited Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man as an example of a happy couple nobody wants to watch. The Thin Man ran for six sequels, a radio series, and a television adaptation. It’s a somewhat self-defeating example.
Dr Travis Langley, psychologist and editor of Stranger Things Psychology, put it rather well when he suggested Whedon’s view sounded like “the reasoning of someone who does not understand relationship success himself.” Chandler and Monica got together at the end of Friends’ fourth season. They were still together in the finale. The show found ways to create conflict that didn’t require either character to be destroyed.
Willow and Tara remain the sharpest wound. There was something extraordinary building there — a relationship that was genuinely happy, genuinely equal, and queer at a time when that was still relatively rare on mainstream television. The show killed Tara to break Willow, and we are still talking about it twenty years later. Not in admiration.
Buffy deserved better than being the protagonist of a series philosophically committed to her misery. She died twice. She was ripped from heaven. She faced the weight of being the only one in all the world. The least the writing could have done was let her be loved properly, by someone who deserved her. The world was going to throw enough at her regardless.
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