The original post: /r/television by /u/Cailly_Brard7 on 2024-06-08 12:00:51.
Buffy is an American series that came out in 1997 and ended in 2003, but having watched the entire series many times now, I’ve come to realize just how much it has aged. The series is considered, alongside The Sopranos, to be the show that paved the way for “The Golden Age Of TV”, “[1999] was a year when I wasn’t yet a professional TV critic, just a woman, standing in front of a TV show, begging everyone to like it. Every week, I watched The Sopranos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I was a die-hard fan of both, convinced that David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, and Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, were making something radical and revolutionary out of television, the former by deconstructing the mobster genre (as well as capitalism and psychotherapy), the latter by forging a mythic, feminist blend of horror, comedy and teen drama. "says Emily Nussbaum in 2014. 1999 saw the television debut of The Sopranos and the broadcast of the wonderful Buffy season 3. Watching the series now, it still seems to retain its originality. Many teen series mixed with the supernatural have tried to achieve the same level of writing without ever really succeeding.
While the series is often cited as having created the TV “tropes” often seen in teen series, Buffy creates brilliant character developments, subduing its own tropes. As for the special effects, sure they’re a bit out of date, but some of them are precisely what make the series so charming, especially if you can find a way to watch them in 4:3. The dialogue is intelligent and magnetic. Seasons 2, 3 and 5 are among the best seasons ever seen on television, with innovative episodes and concepts. For example, some series have tried to reproduce the Angelus arc (e.g. Legacies features the character Hope sleeping with her first love, Landon, for the first time, and he disappears because the two aren’t meant to be together due to the Malivore thing or in The Secret Circle when the protagonist Cassie sleeps with her lover but a curse hangs over their families or something like that) despite all these attempts, none of these storylines have reached the level of genius of the last arc of season 2. It’s also hard to find a female protagonist as well-written as Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy Summers these days. If you take a look at the Youtube reactions to this series, you’ll see that many things about it are still original and innovative.
If Buffy The Vampire Slayer were released on Netflix these days, it would surely be in the Top 10 after 2 days.