“Into every generation a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one.” That is the pitch Joss Whedon built a seven-season series on, and it is still the cleanest logline American television has produced. Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran 144 episodes, from March 10, 1997, to May 20, 2003, and it made a teenage girl with a stake the center of the world.
It earns an 8.1 out of 10.
Trailer, via BuffyverseTrailers.
A 1992 Film, Rebuilt for The WB
The show’s concept comes from the 1992 film Whedon wrote. The two are separate productions. Whedon ran the series himself as executive producer and showrunner under his company, Mutant Enemy Productions, and that control is the difference between the film and what aired.
Buffy Summers is played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. She is the latest in a line of young women called Vampire Slayers, chosen by fate to fight vampires, demons and other forces of darkness. She wants a normal life. She learns to accept her destiny instead.
The show aired on The WB from March 10, 1997, to May 22, 2001. It moved to UPN from October 2, 2001, to May 20, 2003. Two networks, one story, no reboot of the premise.
Sunnydale Sits on a Hellmouth
The setting is a fictional Southern California town called Sunnydale. Sunnydale High School sits on top of a “Hellmouth,” a gateway to demon realms and a convergence point of mystical energies. The Hellmouth lies beneath the school library. Evil things are drawn to the town or rise from below ground to threaten it.
Whedon named the Hellmouth and “high school as hell” as two of the primary metaphors behind the series. That is the whole trick of the first three seasons: the monsters are literal, and the dread is ordinary. A girl who wants to go to a dance, a mother who does not know why her daughter is late, a library that doubles as a war room.
Buffy is guided by her Watcher, Rupert Giles, played by Anthony Stewart Head. He belongs to the Watchers’ Council, based in England, which trains and guides Slayers. Giles researches the creatures Buffy faces, explains their origins, advises on how to beat them and keeps her in fighting form. He is rarely called by his first name. Later the show reveals that in his rebellious younger days he went by “Ripper.”
Willow, Xander and the Scoobies
Unlike her predecessors, Buffy surrounds herself with friends. They sometimes call themselves the “Scoobies,” and later the “Scooby Gang.”
She meets two of them at Sunnydale High. Willow Rosenberg, played by Alyson Hannigan, starts as a wallflower who excels at academics, a contrast to Buffy’s outgoing personality and weaker school record. Xander Harris, played by Nicholas Brendon, has no supernatural abilities at all. He supplies comic relief and a grounded perspective.
The friendship is the engine. Buffy and Willow share the social isolation that comes with being different, and especially with being exceptional young women. Willow grows more assertive and becomes a powerful witch, and realizes she is a lesbian. Buffy and Willow appear in all 144 episodes; Xander appears in 143.
The cast grew. Emma Caulfield played Anya, Michelle Trachtenberg played Dawn Summers, and James Marsters played Spike. The first major threat is the Master, an ancient vampire trapped underground in the Hellmouth. He escapes, and Buffy defeats him and saves Sunnydale.
Season two raises the emotional stakes. The vampire couple Spike and Drusilla arrive in town. A new Slayer, Kendra, enters the story. Season one leans hardest on the “high school is hell” idea: Buffy has just moved to Sunnydale after burning down her old school’s gym, hoping to escape her Slayer duties. Giles reminds her that evil does not take a semester off. A mysterious man named Angel warns her of coming danger, and she learns he is a vampire cursed with a soul, which stops him from feeding on living humans.
Torrance High and a Backlot Main Street
Most of Buffy was shot on location in Los Angeles. The high school of the first three seasons is Torrance High School in Torrance, California, the same campus used for Beverly Hills, 90210.
The first season depended heavily on location shooting because the budget allowed for few permanent sets. Those sets were limited to the interior of Sunnydale High, including the library, hallways and classrooms, plus Buffy’s bedroom and the Master’s underground lair.
Season two added permanent sets: the full interior of Buffy’s house, Angel’s mansion, Giles’s apartment, and extensions to the high school including a dining hall and commons area. A driveway near the gated entrance to Fox Studios became a graveyard. In season three, the Sunnydale “Main Street” was built on the backlot and stayed a staple for the rest of the run.
When the show moved to college in season four, the old Sunnydale High hallway sets were remodeled into the interior halls of UC Sunnydale. Some exterior shots of the college were filmed at UCLA, and several episodes include shots from the Oviatt Library at California State University, Northridge.
What the Show Got Right
The premise is a machine for stories, and Whedon built it to run. A Slayer is chosen by fate, so the show can kill her, replace her, and ask what the title costs the girl holding it. Kendra proves the line continues. The Hellmouth proves the town will never run out of reasons to need her.
Gellar carries the title role with a straight face, which is the only way the joke works. Hannigan gets the longest arc in the series and the hardest turn, from the quiet corner of the library to a witch with real power. Brendon plays the one person in the room with nothing magical about him, and the show needs that. Head’s Giles is the adult in a genre that usually writes adults out.
The production history explains the look of the early seasons. Few permanent sets meant more location work, and the show wore that limit well. The graveyard near the Fox gate and the backlot Main Street became as recognizable as the characters, which is not something a modest budget usually buys.
The limits show too. The Hellmouth metaphor does its best work in high school, and the later seasons have to work harder to keep the same charge. The series is often listed among the greatest television series of all time, and that ranking is earned by the whole run, not by every episode in it.
Where the 8.1 Comes From
An 8.1 is a high score with a clear ceiling. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not a perfect show; it is a show with a perfect premise, executed with unusual discipline for seven years and two networks. The first three seasons at Sunnydale High are the strongest argument, because the metaphor and the monster of the week are the same thing. The college years and the later seasons keep the characters and lose some of that pressure.
What matters most is the ensemble. Buffy and Willow appear in all 144 episodes, and Xander in 143, and that continuity is why the emotional stakes land. The show asks a girl to save the world and then asks what it costs her to keep doing it, and it never lets her off that hook.
What is noise: the network change. The WB to UPN move in 2001 is a business detail, and the show does not change shape because of it. What matters is the casting, the Hellmouth, and Whedon’s decision to treat high school as a literal hell and a real one at the same time.
The verdict: Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the defining American series of its era, and it holds up because its best idea was never the vampires. It was the girl who has to fight them, and the friends who show up anyway.
8.1 of 10.
The Numbers
- Title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- Created by: Joss Whedon
- Networks: The WB, UPN
- Run: March 10, 1997 – May 20, 2003
- Seasons: 7
- Episodes: 144
- Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nicholas Brendon, Alyson Hannigan, Emma Caulfield, Michelle Trachtenberg, James Marsters
- Score: 8.1 of 10
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