Can a person fully understand Buffy and Angel and still live a normal life?

Before I even start this post, I want to make it perfectly clear that I do not mean this question in a pejorative way at all. As I have mentioned, I have a dearly held love of mysteries, from the ‘light hearted’ death and bloodshed of Diagnosis Murder to the more gritty realism of CSI, and as such I can completely understand loving a programme and wanting to watch every episode because it’s so good, even though you know in your heart that reality rarely gets a look in through the entire series. However, there is a difference – as far as I am aware, the subject matter and content of your average mystery is only a stone’s throw from reality. I accept that the likelihood of a disgraced detective with OCD being called in to solve a murder committed by someone in a coma by the careful use of long-lasting glue is pretty slim, but in fairness, if someone did want to commit a murder whilst being in a coma, that would be a potentially viable way of doing it, and it is conceivable that an obsessed ex-detective would figure it out. What I cannot fully ‘get into’ about Buffy and Angel is that, as far as I can work out, to understand any more than half of what is going on in any given episode you have to have seen, understood and remembered a large portion of all the other episodes ever made. I understand that the makers want to reward loyal fans with ‘in’ jokes and more in the way of background storylines, but am I the only person who wants to be able to watch a drama where you can just ‘dip in’? I don’t want a two-sided relationship with a TV programme – I want to be able to watch it when it’s on without having to think long and hard in the breaks about why that person is suddenly in the shit, or trying to work out whether this episode happened before another episode which the plot hinges on. I want to call the shots when I watch TV, and, not content to watch an entire show containing an element or plotline that I do not understand, I then have to do homework to find out what’s going on. I don’t want to have to cram just to be able to keep up, and I don’t want to feel excluded because I haven’t remembered the reasoning behind a particular temporal anomaly or mystical short cut to the mouth of hell. I don’t want to have to even think to myself ‘I could go out tonight and spend time with my friends, but then I’ll miss Buffy and be lost for the rest of the season’. I cannot work out whether I have encountered a problem of genre (in that I am just not that fussed about the vampire/slightly sci-fi nature of the show), commitment (I don’t want to waste four hours watching a series only to miss one episode and find myself unable to catch up) or whether it is simply my inability to accept alternate versions of reality when they are clearly supposed to be imparting a message of ‘this kind of thing can happen to anyone’. I suspect it’s a combination of all three, but I still find myself slightly peeved that a programme seems to have been made specifically for those who want to use it as an alternative to life, despite the fact that most hard core fans I know seem normal until you express confusion over a detail, and then reveal an encyclopaedic knowledge of the underworld, the rules of magic and vampirism and a wealth of secondary knowledge which makes me wonder whether I have ever learnt that much about a single topic in my life. Further to this thought, I am adding a comment which may help me answer that question: On Friday night, the Boy Wonder and I went out with two friends and a couple that we had never met before. After only one glass of wine, I was engaged in conversation with a man I had only met an hour previously about a film we believed to be ‘Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn’ (I’m not sure whether it helps to know that neither of us had seen it) whereby I was trying to ascertain whether the man with a chainsaw for an arm uses petrol to power it, or whether it is plumbed in so skilfully that the chain saw part uses up his body’s energy in the manner of a normal limb. I really do find it that hard to suspend disbelief – maybe that’s my problem as I can readily accept that a group of CSIs would turn up to investigate a crime scene with their hair flowing, wearing scanty clothes and no gloves because everyone has moments where they phone their job in from time to time, but I am pathologically unable to accept that a film where a man has his arm replaced with a chain saw wouldn’t make the effort to explain how that worked. Go figure.