Christopher Golden & Nancy Holder: Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Watcher's Guide

A successful TV show means more than just a lucrative syndication deal: It can mean T-shirts, mugs, fan clubs, spin-offs, and, of course, books. These range from a thousand Star Trek novels and episode guides to slapped-together biographies to glossy, full-color, scrapbook-style tributes. Unfortunately, for every thorough, loving resource like The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family, there are a hundred trifles like The Wit And Wisdom Of The Nanny. Not that The Simpsons is immune to weak cash-in products, as a few episodes of the show have been quick to point out. For example, The Simpsons Guide To Springfield, while lovingly researched and rendered in sharp colors, suffers from a major conceptual flaw: It just isn't particularly entertaining. Providing a tourist-guide-style rundown of the many attractions you'll find in The Simpsons' fictional town of Springfield, the book is little more than an interminable series of obscure references to the sights you'll find in the TV show's backgrounds. Editor Bill Morrison and writer Scott Gimple do plenty of extrapolating, adding loads of new, often nicely illustrated jokes, but the tone feels forced. It's all obsessively geeky, and that labor-of-love feel scores a few bonus points, but that's not enough to overcome Guide To Springfield's uneven writing and perfunctory nature. Far from perfunctory, Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Watcher's Guide takes a remarkably thorough approach to its subject, with nearly 300 pages of trivia, inside information, photos, interviews, character and actor profiles, and episode guides for the show's first two seasons. The flaws are easy to anticipate: The book just came out, and it's already more than half a dozen episodes out of date. Worse, the writing often reads like a cheesy compendium of press releases, and is padded with endless dialogue transcriptions that smack of filler. Still, fans of Buffy The Vampire Slayer—arguably the best show on TV right now, its main competition being HBO's Mr. Show—should get a kick out of the book's abundant details and attention to the series' behind-the-scenes players. There are also plenty of details shoehorned into In The House: MTV's The Real World Seattle, but that's not necessarily a selling point. After all, who needs more information about these seven self-absorbed, profoundly uninteresting goobers? All they do on the show is whine about themselves, and here, they reflect on how difficult it was to voluntarily live a life of luxury and celebrity with other self-absorbed, profoundly uninteresting goobers. In case the show hasn't taught you everything you could ever in a billion years want to know about these people, you get lots of trivial factoids about each character's life: Did you know that Van Morrison's Moondance is one of Janet's favorite CDs? That Stephen lost his virginity in 1995? That Nathan really does hope his relationship with Stephanie will last forever? Though impressively and colorfully packaged, In The House is a great big bore that's almost as dull as its subjects, but with an $18 price tag attached. A far more worthwhile MTV outing—amazingly, considering the network's track record, it's got a smart protagonist and sharp scripts—is the animated series Daria, about a cynical teenager, her caustic friend, and the insipid people and places surrounding them. The Daria Database isn't an essential companion piece; it's little more than a square-bound $14 comic book, with the characters' photo albums, diary entries, correspondence, artwork, and more scattered throughout. But unlike the more informative and generous Buffy guide, it seems to have been compiled by the show's writers, not PR flacks. It comes up short in the quantity department, but of all these books, it sticks closest to the spirit of its subject matter.