My favorite season of Buffy is the 6th. In it, her friends bring her back from the dead, because they think she is in a hell dimension.Actually she was in heaven and now feels like she's in hell because the world is so "hard and bright and violent."
Her struggles are not against demons and vampires for the most part. They are struggles to maintain, to deal with living. She has to pay bills and take care of her sister. And the whole time she has to remember what it felt like before she was brought back.
For me this season is all about depression and how hard it is to maintain in the face of it.
When I first saw this season, I was at the end of a depression. Things were looking up. I was hopeful, but it was still sometimes hard to get through the day. Buffy helped me with that, both by being a world I could escape into for a few hours, but more by being a good example.
By reminding me I wasn't the only one that ever felt like just existing is hard.
It's been a while since I was depressed, but I still struggle with the fear that life is nothing more than maintainance. Go to work. Earn money to pay the bills. Clean the house over and over again just so it won't be dirty.
But it never stops getting dirty. Just like Evil never stops coming in the Buffyverse. Like Buffy, sometimes I wonder why I fight at all when I know I can never win. But as Spike says to Buffy in "Once More with Feeling": "Life isn't bliss. Life is just this. It's living." Somehow that makes it seem more worth it.
So yeah, I've definitely related to the pain of many a T.V. character, but I don't think any so much as on Six Feet Under. I feel like I related to the pain experienced by almost every character in the show. They were just so flawed and human. Watching the last episode I just sobbed and sobbed. T.V. had never had that effect on me before. I think observing the intensity of the losses experienced by characters I felt I truly knew, and who didn't know how to cope either, allowed me to grieve for my own recent loss of my grandma. Plus, that show just made me all crazy existential anyway.
O.k. well, I am always moved by TV shows (even some commercials). One that stands out in my mind is the "Graduation" episode of Beverly Hills 90210. Here these people were graduating from high school, which is a milestone in a young person's life. They were close friends that had been with each other every day for the past four years and had shared so many life changing experiences over that period of time. And I had shared those times with them...they were MY friends, too. I felt connected to each of them in some way...related to their personality or something they had been through. I was so sad that we were all moving on to this next step in our lives. Brenda was moving to Europe and Dillon rode off to who knows where on his bike...the group was breaking up. There was this scene where they all got in their cars and drove along this long winding road to see the Hollywood sign that they had altered to show their school name. This cheesy song came on and I just balled like this was really happening to me. I had some good friends in high school, but don't keep in touch with them much now, and I guess I have always really wanted to have this close "group" of friends that always stays together or at least in touch. A "group" of people that have been with me since I was young and know everything about me and that are my family. Brenda, Brandon, Dillon, Kelly, Donna, Steve and David will always be a part of my family.
I started tearing up when Carrie Bradshaw screams at Mr. Big: "I don't live here anymore." Never has a goofy TV sitcom made me as emotional as "An American Girl in Paris" episode of Sex and the City. No doubt the episode was all the more moving because so many scenes echoed what the last six months of my life had been like. Having just recently moved to France from New York , I too was off on a great French adventure. I'll never forget the scene when Carrie finally steps out onto the hotel room balcony and squeals with delight at the sight of the Eiffel tower. I know exactly how she felt. I too had had that exact moment, and in that moment, I was laughing and squealing along with her. From there it was all downhill. A few hours later I found myself sobbing in my car, in a McDonalds parking lot, trying to explain to my poor sweet French husband that like Carrie said "It's hard. It's harder than I thought." I missed my girlfriends, I missed my apartment, and I missed New York ! All this between ice-less lukewarm gulps of "Coca light." All sobbing aside, the reason that episode got to me was because for that 20 minutes I was invested in the characterís life because I felt like in some way it was my own. If Carrie could somehow have a happy ending then hell, maybe I could too.
My husband and I had separated, and I was sad, sad, sad. I didn't have a new roommate yet, so I just wandered around my weird empty apartment, crying all the time. I cried while performing the whole range of human activities. I cried while cooking and while showering. I cried brushing my teeth, I cried on the toilet. I would cry while doing crossword puzzles. In perhaps the dumbest move, I watched Midnight Cowboy alone on Valentine's Day, and cried and cried and cried. I was devastated about my broken relationship and the world seemed very dark indeed. But suffering like this also made me very attuned to other's pain. Because of this, I was also able to appreciate the small moments when people's pain lifted, even briefly. Which brings me to TV, my only real contact with other people at the time. During this period of self-imposed house arrest, I watched a ton of TV and cried. Mostly, I cried because things on TV were very sad. But more than once, I caught myself sobbing to "What Not To Wear," which is actually sort of a horrible show, with pushy hosts and sad people with ugly wardrobes. But to compare their shrinking, embarrassed posture in the beginning with their spinny confidence in the end, when they show off their new wardrobe? Stacy and Clinton helped these people OUT, finding them new clothes. These clothes might have been bland and preppy, but they looked way better. With a professional haircut and makeup job, these people left looking confident, sunny, and ready for anything. That two thin and catty New Yorkers could do this for them? For whatever reason, this got to me. After looking in the mirror every day and seeing the same brown sweater I had slept in for weeks, my poor bloated, puffy eyes and my set-in grief wrinkles, Stacy and Clinton provided me with the smallest, shallowest hope: no matter how bad things get, a new pair of pants will always make me feel one iota better. And under the circumstances, this was no small solace.
Okay, this is embarassing. I didn't like Dawson's Creek. It's a stupid soap opera most of the time. But I lived with this girl for a while who thought it was the bomb. She was always watching it and most of the time I just avoided the living room when it was on. But once, I was exhausted from work and sat down to eat my Micky Ds. I just forgot to leave when I was done. It was the episode when Pacey sits on the beach next to his passed-out drunk dad, talking out loud about how he could never please his dad. How he can never do anything right. And how his dad only ever makes him feel crappy. He cries, because he just wants his dad to be proud of him. Of course I didn't cry in front of my roommate. But later, as I tried to fall asleep, I remembered the scene and fell asleep crying myself.