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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: September 21, 1999
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Earshot” (season 3, episode 18). [Stream on Netflix.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: It was a sign of the rising cultural importance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that it experienced as much controversy as it did during its third season. Having started out as a little-regarded teen horror series on the little-regarded WB network, Buffy had risen in esteem thanks to great reviews and a steadily growing, obsessively dedicated fanbase. Season 3, the show’s best, saw Buffy and her friends once again navigating Sunnydale High’s treacherous terrain, careering towards graduation while battling a powerful villain. Joss Whedon’s original idea of presenting high school as literal hell was paying off in incredibly compelling ways, and the show was succeeding better than it ever had.
Of course, being the most prominent show on TV featuring the dark side of high school can have its drawbacks, like when a real-life massacre of gun violence grips the country in reactionary fear. The Columbine High School shootings happened on April 20, 1999, one week before the Buffy episode “Earshot” was due to air. In the wake of the massacre, popular culture became the bizarre top culprit — not guns! never guns — so the WB made the command decision to pull “Earshot” and air a rerun. Seeing as “Earshot” was a mostly standalone episode that didn’t have too many implications for the season-long story arc, the episode sat on the shelf for months. By contrast, when the season finale “Graduation Day, Part 2” was pulled for another school shooting (somehow this happened again despite TV’s efforts to censor itself!), it aired later in the summer. So it seemed like “Earshot” was to be the lost Buffy episode. How dangerous must it have been?
When the episode finally made it to air in September, two weeks before season 4 was to begin, viewers saw an episode with some uncomfortable parallels to school violence, but which actually dealt with the feelings and emotions underpinning such an act in a way that was seriously and not at all flippant. When Jonathan (Danny Strong) climbs up into a tower with a gun, it’s an action that deliberately provokes memories of real-life acts of violence. But the solution to the episode, which ends up tying outward and inward violence and features an act of great compassion, is quite lovely and not nearly worth the overreaction by the network. Seventeen years later, the controversy seems silly, but the episode holds up.
[You can stream Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s “Earshot” on Netflix.]
