25 Years Ago, Buffy Broke The Rules To Deliver One Of Its Best Episodes

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was produced on Fox but first aired on the WB network on March 10, 1997, was a smash success. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit the silver screen on July 31, 1992, it was a moderate commercial success, but it wasn’t enough to warrant cinematic sequels. However, that didn’t mean its horror-comedy premise didn’t resonate with audiences.

VHS sales and cable TV broadcasts helped Buffy the Vampire Slayer garner a cult audience following. Consequently, Fox wanted to further explore the idea of creating more content in the Buffy universe, albeit in a different medium. Joss Whedon, who was dissatisfied with the way his screenplay was handled for the big screen, was given the opportunity to turn the concept into a series, with a greater level of creative control.

The rest is history, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer went on to run for seven seasons. Out of its tenure on the small screen, there’s one entry that stands out as an exercise of Whedon’s creative freedom above all others: Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 6, episode 7, “Once More, With Feeling.”

“Once More, With Feeling” Was A Bold Buffy Episode

A large part of Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s success was attributed to its genre-blending style. While it’s technically labeled as a supernatural horror drama, it’s really an amalgam of comedy, fantasy, satire, action, and teen drama. Even with Whedon’s willingness to merge such seemingly disparate elements, “Once More, With Feeling” was a daring premise. It’s the only entry in the show’s 144-episode run that’s a full-blown musical, but getting to that point required a monumental amount of effort.

Although Whedon had dreamed of producing an all-out song-and-dance, hour-long Buffy episode since the show’s inception, he wasn’t exactly a composer. By the show’s sixth season, showrunning duties were offloaded to Buffy executive producer Marti Noxon, which freed Whedon up to practice piano and compose songs for the cast. Whedon said in a snippet from the show’s DVD commentary: “I never had the time, the wherewithal, or the guts to do it before.”

Despite only having a few months to learn how to compose music, Whedon’s deep personal connection to the characters he created and the cast he worked with for years culminated in one of the show’s most memorable episodes. Whedon created the framework for the musical episode while vacationing with his wife at the time, Kai-Cole, in Cape Cod. The couple recorded their entire performance of the episode and its songs to a cassette and handed it to series producer David Solomon, who had this to say about Buffy’s musical episode (via The Ringer):

“The entire thing was him and his wife singing the entire score, and they both played all of the parts. He played all of the male parts, she played all of the female parts. It was brilliant. Brilliant. It’s one of the craziest, best things I’ve ever heard in my life. And once I heard it, I knew everything was going to change.”

Why “Once More, With Feeling” Is One Of Buffy’s Best Episodes

Long-running TV series can sometimes resort to tropes or filler episodes that don’t contribute to a show’s overall narrative. Take clip shows or recap episodes, for instance. Like when cast members get stuck in an elevator and recall memories from previous seasons. Or when there’s a radical departure from a show’s longstanding tone to offer up variety to viewers.

The same isn’t true for Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Once More, With Feeling.” That’s because there were a number of narrative bombshells served up to viewers throughout the episode’s musical numbers. This chapter in Buffy‘s seven-season run wasn’t just a novel excuse for fans to see characters they loved act like they were on Broadway; it moved the plot in intriguing new directions.

Chief among them is a revelation about Buffy’s fate at the end of season 5. Convinced that Buffy had gone to hell after her death, Willow revived her, but this wasn’t the case: the young vampire slayer actually crossed through the pearly gates and was enjoying eternal paradise before coming back down to earth. This shocking revelation arrives at the climax of the episode, leaving Willow to deal with the emotional weight of wrestling Buffy from everlasting happiness.

In “Once More, With Feeling,” audiences also learned about Xander and Anya’s reservations about their upcoming marriage through the song “I’ll Never Tell.” In the track, they rattled off a litany of secret irritations they’ve never divulged to one another. Later in the episode, Tara discovered that Willow had been using magic to influence their relationship in another musical number.

What’s more, is that Whedon built in a compelling narrative impetus as to why everyone’s singing and dancing in the first place. Buffy noticed early on in the episode that folks in Sunnydale weren’t acting normally and were expressing their innermost thoughts and desires through song. This sudden bout of widespread theater-kid-ism was thanks to Sweet, a song-loving demon who was summoned by Xander in the hopes of enjoying a picture-perfect crescendo to his marriage, before he knew the havoc that would be wrought by the entity’s arrival.

The fact that Whedon was able to blend such strong, character-driven progressions in an episode that could’ve easily devolved into an entertainment ruse is still impressive 25 years after the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode first debuted.

Release Date

1997 – 2003-00-00

Network

The WB