When I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I was a little skeptical. The show premiered in March of 1997, and it finally ended in 2003 after seven seasons. It’s a high school drama with supernatural elements, complete with an affable gang of friends, strange monsters that are just people in costumes and terrible CGI effects. I initially thought it would be campy and boring, but the show is anything but typical and will be one of my favorite things to watch for years to come.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which stars a young Sarah Michelle Gueller, is based off of a movie by the same name that came out in 1992. The movie is about a girl named Buffy who finds out that she is a vampire slayer, a mythical girl endowed with special powers who is chosen when the previous slayer dies. In the movie- which you don’t really need to watch in order to understand the show- Buffy defeats the vampires in her hometown of Los Angeles, CA burning down her school gym in the process.
She’s expelled, and she and her mother move to the small town of Sunnydale, CA, for a fresh start. There, she enrolls in Sunnydale high, looking to put her days of vampire slaying behind her and be a normal, fifteen-year-old high school student. Little does she know; Sunnydale is actually the hellmouth- the place where the line between the underworld and the human world is blurred.
Buffy follows the typical nineties TV show format popularized by cable television. It boasts a shocking number of episodes per season, 147 in total, all of them around 40 minutes long. What this means is that for one, there is so much to watch and you’re able to delight in this show for months. It also means that you get to know the characters very well, and the actors’ chemistry by the end of it is unmatched. Each season follows a larger plot, characterized by their own “big bad” character, but the individual episodes tend to follow a smaller, more easily defeated threat, and it usually has a mystery-drama feel as they struggle to figure out the culprit of strange happenings around town.
There are so many things I love about this show. It’s fun, lighthearted take on demons and monsters, the hilarious writing style, the developed characters and their realistic struggles in life, the creative and divergent storylines of each season and even the intro music. Still, I think that even through all of that the show manages to break boundaries and challenge the typical dynamics of the time, as well as remaining an intellectual study on human nature and the process of growing up.
This might sound a little dramatic, but here’s an example.
Throughout the show, there’s a bit of an underlying joke about how many extras end up dying to an assortment of demons and freak accidents without anyone really taking notice. Even though a few more important characters die over the course of the seven seasons, it always feels like a part of the plot- something that happened just to raise the stakes of whatever fight the group was a part of. During one of the later seasons, though, there is a character that dies from an aneurysm, without any meddling from any evil forces or revenge-bent monsters. The episode that follows this is heavy, cinematic and an extremely powerful acknowledgment of the true imminence and reality of death. This is something that I would have never expected from this kind of show, and this sort of thoughtfulness on the part of the writers really made me appreciate it so much more.
Because of all these reasons, I would highly recommend Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is true that like many long TV shows, it tends to fluctuate in terms of the quality of each episode and it falls off a bit towards the end, but the third, fourth, and fifth seasons are definitely worth it. I think that anyone who gives this show a try will be pleasantly surprised and will find an entertaining- albeit time consuming- new pastime.
