Ten years ago today, the first episode of a not particularly promising TV show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on a second-rate network. We all know how that worked out.
Buffy had a tremendous influence on pop culture, is an acknowledged inspiration for shows ranging from Alias to Grey's Anatomy, and perhaps most importantly for me at the time, it had a young, strong, capable heroine who could doubt, fear, and even resent her true self, but was no less heroic for it. She was a fully-realized, three-dimensional, action hero. It's still all too rare to see a female character like that on TV, and in fact the chipping away of the character of Buffy herself in the last two years of the show's run suggests how hard it still is to create and maintain a strong female lead in a mainstream media production.
What was also important for me, as I started to realize that academic life wasn't the right path for me, was how rich an interpretative text the show could be. The writing was smart, and funny, and full of dense references outside itself and within its own universe, in ways that I could sink my critical teeth into. (Insert your own vampire joke here, please.) I think in some ways both Buffy and Buffy helped me walk away from who I thought I was going to be, and I'm better for it. (Plus, of course, my blog name's a quote from the show.)
One of the things I think about more now than I did when it was on the air is the extent to which Buffy the Vampire Slayer assumes a certain media-culture literacy shared between its viewers and its characters. Which is to say, it's a sci-fi/fantasy/horror show whose characters are also fans of sci-fi/fantasy/horror shows.
It took a full 30 years of TV before television shows started showing us families sitting around watching TV on The Simpsons and Roseanne. Joss Whedon, a former Roseanne writer, gave us Buffy, trying to convince Giles of supernatural goings-on, exclaiming "I cannot believe that you, of all people, are trying to Scully me!" I don't think this is necessarily better, or worse, than what came before, but a sign of the maturity of the form.
It also serves as a sort of dog-whistle to the fans of the genre, signaling that the people behind a given show share your references and your tastes, and won't let you down. It can be a crutch for poor writing -- have the character recognize the similarity of his or her predicament to the plot of the movie you're ripping off -- but it can also be a way to enrich the plot experience for the viewer, by having the character recognize the same genre cliche she has, and route around it.
I hope that Buffy's truest lasting contribution won't be just this self-awareness, but the vision that especially in the first seasons it held out -- you can get through almost anything with friends, a good mentor, and the willingness to occasionally, when necessary, plunge a stake into Evil's heart. After that, of course, there's the prom.