Yes, you heard it here first. Probably not really, but the conservative Parents Television Council rated Buffy the least family-friendly show in prime time because of the sex, the violence and the occult, while SV was cited as an example of what TV ought to be doing. Salon has a link
here. (That's my first added url, so it may or may not work.)
I immediately had the same reaction as Nestra: the irony of the juxtaposition is not light. Set aside the homoeroticism of SV, because that's happened on Buffy along with overt gayness. What I like most is that SV has, as one of three major characters, a genuine bad guy to whom fan reaction has been so amazing as to essentially deny that he's bad and exert lots of energy in justifying the bad stuff he does. (Shades of Spike, actually. But SV *planned* it that way, instead of getting taken over by high cheekbones and sexual charisma.) Now, I'm not saying that Lex is unredeemable; in my mind he's just careless and sets different values on peoples' lives depending on how much he personally likes them. And I love Lex the character, as I'm supposed to. But as a moral example, he's kind of ... not one, and Michael Rosenbaum is playing him so well as to make you give him all sorts of excuses and justifications. Oh, and by the way? Macking on another guy's girlfriend? Not abuse of superpowers, but not exactly Kantian, Clark.
To me, the PTC verdicts show some of the limitations of the crude "images of..." school of media analysis. There's violence on Buffy, so Buffy promotes violence. There's a strict moral order (sort of) on SV: evil always loses at the end of every episode and nobody gets laid but Papa and Mama Kent, so SV is moral and family-oriented.
What this ignores is the viewer's experience, in which the official ending may not be the most emotionally/intellectually relevant part of the program. There's no real extramarital sex on SV (forget Victoria, please; we'd all like to), but we all know what Lex would like to do with Clark. Not to mention the exploitative smarminess of having bad-girl Lana do a striptease for the benefit of Clark and hundreds of other slavering teens. I didn't notice Joss doing that to any of his characters -- until Spike, this past season, and he was at least supposed to be in his right mind, and I'm not all that comfortable with having the gender-reversed whore thing going on, either. The point, to the extent that there is one, is that the PTC analysis looks to topic choice to judge morality, but that's a pretty vapid way to judge a text.
Of course, underneath the discomfort with Buffy's occult and (gay) sex contents -- note that the Salon story and the other reporting I've seen on this don't mention that some of the sex on Buffy is not heterosexual -- I suspect there's a deep distrust of moral ambiguity, which Buffy embraces and SV does not. Part of this is Buffy's ensemble casting, which allows major characters to actually debate what the right thing to do is, as with the wonderful Thanksgiving/syphilis episode. Part of this is that Buffy's character arcs have had more time to develop, so we've seen them coming to terms with imperfectibility and the increasing difficulty of distinguishing good from evil and right from wrong. SV could do that, if it gets the courage to tackle Clark's lies and allows Lex to be sometimes a hero, sometimes a villain.
SV could also use some of Buffy's take on the consequences of violence. I was reading a comic book editorial about an X-Men in which Storm brings down an avalanche on some bad guys, and one of the characters says something to the effect of "Wow! She was so careful bringing those rocks down that all those bad guys are trapped and none killed!" The editorialist thought this was bull, as do I. On Buffy, violence at least occasionally has long-term consequences: killing a human, for example. On Angel, even more so, as when Angel left the lawyers at Wolfram & Hart to die and in the process left behind a chunk of his soul. By contrast, Clark smashes bad guys and, on more than one occasion, Lex, around like they're some combination of frisbees and Weebles. Obligingly, nobody ever dies or even gets a bad concussion at Clark's hands, even though cars blow up in SV if you look at them wrong. I'd love it if SV explicitly dealt with Clark's seriously harming someone, guilty or innocent, by choice or by accident. Power has a price, and that price isn't just responsibility.
The two shows are really so different as to be difficult to compare, even though they share the superstrong teen conceit. But if the PTC wants to put one on Santa's naughty list and the other on his nice list, I've got to disagree with their picks.
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