How Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed TV
Story of teenage girl battling demonic forces spawned generations of undead shows
Twenty years ago this month, the Hellmouth opened and television hasn’t been the same since.
On March 10 in that long-ago year, an upstart network called WB broadcast the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon’s smart, campy, funny series about a teenage girl who is the world’s best defence against all sorts of demonic forces.
Five years earlier, a movie of the same name written by Whedon hadn’t made much of an impression, but the TV show, with Sarah Michelle Gellar in the title role and a perfectly cast collection of supporting characters, became a phenomenon.
With its girl-power message and its deft mix of horror, humour and romance, Buffy quickly developed a passionate fan base. Teenagers watched it. College students developed drinking games around it. Tweener girls and their mothers made it the kind of bonding ritual later identified with Gilmore Girls.
The series, which ran for seven seasons (the final two on UPN), drew just over five million viewers at its peak, but its influence was far larger than its audience. Here’s a quick look at a few of the branches that sprung from the Buffy tree and continue to shape television: Then came the flood of all those undead
Buffy wasn’t the first TV series to traffic in vampires — just ask fans of Dark Shadows, the 1960s soap opera. But before Buffy, vampires, zombies and other assorted demons were mostly the stuff of formulaic horror movies. After Buffy, TV of the undead not only proliferated, but it was also expected to have a certain level of sophistication.
Buffy used the monsters that crossed into the human world through the Hellmouth as a meta- phor for the horrors of high school, which in turn were a metaphor for the horrors of life in general. As the generation that was the target Buffy audience has grown old enough to be making TV shows, the undead genre has become only more ambitious.
The WB’s successor, CW, has stayed in the game with dramas including The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, while on other networks series like Being Human, Helix, True Blood and The Walking Dead have reached different audiences, allegorically exploring geopolitics, LGBT rights, and the nature of identity and humanity. Chickens, forensics and career boosts Gellar has had a range of TV and film roles since Buffy, including starring opposite Robin Williams in his final TV series, The Crazy Ones, but some of Buffy’s sidekicks have fashioned even more visible careers.
David Boreanaz, who played one of Buffy’s forbidden-love interests, first starred in a spinoff series, Angel, that ran for five seasons, then landed in one of the most successful crime shows of recent years, Bones, which when it concludes later this month will have amassed 246 episodes.
Alyson Hannigan, who played Willow, Buffy’s best friend, had her own run of 200-plus episodes in How I Met Your Mother.
Since his Buffy stint as the werewolf Oz, Seth Green has worked regularly as an actor and voice-over artist. But he is also a creator or producer of some of the most cutting-edge animated TV series out there, including Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken.
Danny Strong, who played troubled student Jonathan on Buffy and later had a tasty story arc on Gilmore Girls, has also been busy. With Lee Daniels, he created the hit series Empire, and his writing credits include the TV movies Recount and Game Change. Don’t cry, it’s only teenage angst land For decades, television’s portrayal of youth had a 1950s sheen to it. Teenage characters were allowed to have car trouble and fret about going steady, but sexual identity, suicide, self-harming and social ostracism usually weren’t on the agenda. All of those subjects and more were addressed head-on in Buffy.
Before the series was through, Willow, who at one point dated Oz the werewolf, was in a lesbian relationship. One episode, “Earshot,” in which a student brought a rifle to school with apparently lethal intent, was accidentally so topical it had to be delayed: the Columbine massacre happened a week before it was to air.
Television has continued to take teenage problems seriously, from Dawson’s Creek, which began the year after Buffy did, right up through Pretty Little Liars, Switched at Birth and other current shows. The fans discover their Internet voices
Buffy appeared early in the Internet age and as viewers, especially young ones, discovered the show, many of them also discovered one another via chat rooms and other emerging forms of social media.
Episodes were intricately dissected by fans on message boards like the Bronze (named for a nightclub on the show), a phenomenon that a few shows, like the Fox series The X-Files, had already experienced but was still relatively new. Whedon and some of the show’s writers and stars would sometimes chime in with posts of their own, a Twitter-like back-andforth long before Twitter existed.
A large body of fan fiction has also been written by Buffy fans over the years, taking the characters in all sorts of directions Whedon may never have envisioned. There’s an entire website of Buffy/NCIS crossover fiction. Currently, the Whedon-authorized Buffyverse lives on in a Dark Horse Comics series, in which it is now Season 11.