The original post: /r/television by /u/Cailly_Brard7 on 2025-01-01 13:52:31.
There’s no denial that the show Buffy The Vampire Slayer shaped television in a way that few shows did. In the incoming days, I’m planning on reviewing a lot of groundbreaking creation of television (such as The Sopranos, The X-Files or Twin Peaks). Today, I’m gonna try to breaking down the effects of Buffy and Joss Whedon on pop culture.
For starting, I’d like to precise that despite the fact that I admire a LOT of his works, doesn’t mean I’m okay with all the horrible things he’s done.
So, in 2014, Emily Nussbaum wrote for the New Yorker : [1999] was a year when I was not yet a professional TV critic, just a woman, standing in front of a television show, begging everyone to love it. Every week, I watched The Sopranos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I was an avid fan of both, convinced that [Sopranos creator] David Chase and [Buffy creator] Joss Whedon were turning television into something radical and groundbreaking, the former by deconstructing the mob genre (as well as capitalism and psychotherapy), the latter by forging a mythic, feminist-inflected meld of horror, comedy, and teen drama.
Buffy has one of the greatest exemples of characterizations ever shown on TV and most of it’s characters cimented their places in pop culture as icons : Buffy Summers (a.i Veronica Mars, Hope Mikaelson…), Xander Harris ( Seth Cohen, Stiles Stilinski…), Willow Rosenberg opended a whole door for the LGBT characters to express themself. The character of Willow Rosenberg was her own person and even after her coming out (which was very well handled for a 90s show), she stayed her own person and we continue to follow her trough her journey about magic and identity. Her turn to Dark Willow (turned that Brett on Legacies tried very hard to replicate with a similar character, Josie Saltzman), was turn foreshadow by years of self-hatred, thirst for power and inner darkness. Nowdays, teen dramas (or shows i general ) will include LGBT character and their whole personality and storylines will revolve around their sexuality while the other characters (straight) are allowed to have fleshed out storylines for their developpment as characters. Cordelia Chase was the original mean girl with a heart of gold and give birth to a lot to follow such as Brooke Davis, Summer Roberts, Blair Waldorf… Spike and Angel are without a doubt the greatest vampires in television and exemples on the theme of redemption. Also their romance with Buffy give life to a lot of future romances.
Russell T. Davis clearly stated that Whedon and his team put the bar really high for any showrunners by proving that supernatural could also be read as metaphors for real-life situations. The show was also very experimental like with the episode Hush, an episode almost only silent. This episode was created because some people were saying that Buffy was only successful because of the dialogue (because apparently it’s a bad thing for them) and Joss decided to make this episode for proving them wrong, which was a success since the episode is still considered as one of the greatest TV episodes. It’s undeniable that The Body is the most realistic and amazingly portrayal of death and grief ever written. And then there is Once More With Feeling. As someone put it in a comment a read a long time ago " Joss Whedon took the premise of a demon who warps reality into a musical and causes people to dance until they spontaneously combust and turned it into the most emotionally charged discussion about depression and existentialism I’ve ever seen."
Let’s take some shows as exemple, such as Supernatural : Supernatural is, I think most evidently, the love child of Buffy and The X-Files. The influences of both were largely aknowledged by the creative team(s) behind Supernatural and the three shows, plus Angel, have many, many people in common both behind and before the camera.
Case in point, Ben Edlund, writer and producer of Supernatural season 2 to 8, worked on Angel beforehand (most notably, he wrote and directed Smile Time), and Supernatural features dozens of Buffyverse alumni, including Amy Acker, Julie Benz, Amber Benson, Mercedes McNab (as a vampire, no less), Charisma Carpenter and James Marsters (as two immortal warlocks in dire need of a couple therapy), or Felicia Day.
While the visual aesthetics of Supernatural owes much more to The X-Files than to Buffy, on a more fundamental level the similarities with Buffy are striking. Both shows start with a deceptively simple (a bit silly, even) premise, but gradually grow in complexity, nuance and depth, as well as in worldbuilding. The very way the dialogue is written (with a tendency to create its own slang) and the formula mixing “monsters of the week” and story arcs also are common points.
Pretty much all the CW superhero shows were copying the template that was established with buffy.
They all have the monster of the week format. They all have a main hero that forms a team of friends/helpers that assist them, while also providing opportunities for interpersonal drama that often mirror the drama unfolding with that weeks monster/villain.
I think it’s why the CW superhero shows tend to grow stale after awhile, they’re to afraid to break the template and there stifle true character growth. I think any teen-skewing show after Buffy had to wrestle with that intimidating legacy. Veronica Mars is a great example with obvious Buffy connections:
- Teenager balancing high school with their “special calling.” Veronica had detective skills, a taser and a protective pit bull instead of superpowers, but she still had that same differentiation and isolation from her classmates because of what she could do that was special. There’s even a moment that echoes Buffy’s Class Protector Umbrella: when Veronica graduates, the whole school applauds and cheers and Veronica is shocked and moved.
- Single parent doing the best they can in a small town. Keith mostly has things a bit more on lock than Joyce, but it serves the same narrative purpose: home life for the lead character is a simple 1-1 interaction.
- Monster (case) of the week balanced against a season-long big bad (at least for the first two seasons).
They had to really innovate to make it different enough from Buffy to avoid being too overshadowed. They were considerably less prudish about sexuality. There were the awful rape and abuse storylines, but also young characters with active and relatively normal sex lives. They put heavy focus on class – rich vs. poor is probably the most consistent through-line for the show. And they innovated structurally, constantly putting their lead into separate A, B and C plots in a single episode, instead of giving the sub-plots to supporting cast. I’d contend they wouldn’t have felt the need to do those things if Buffy hadn’t already set the bar for prime-time teen drama so incredibly high. Just having a cute girl detective with hot rich castmates in a seaside town would have been enough of a draw. Post-Buffy, a show had to mean something, and do something new, to really stand out. It’s similar to the impact The Sopranos had on cable drama: suddenly, everyone was excited to try and do something great because Buffy had shown what great could be.
The dialogue in itself became iconic. Hell, there’s a book explaining the impact of “SlayerSlang”, “Buffyspeak” or “Whedonspeak” on pop culture. So, in a publication in this sub, I saw someone posting why the “Whdeonspeak”, that has been spread in the last decade, was bad of TV because after that all the characters sound the same. The response in the comments were all different, some were agree and others disagree. I disagree because the characters are meant to be different in their characterization. All Buffy characters have their own insecurities, strenght and so forth… Also, the show invented the term Big Bad.
Now, let’s talk about Joss Whedon and for that you can watch the video essay about Xander Harris, where he take a few minutes to talk about the influence of Joss Whdeon on TV and why TV has changed because of him : www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRz46mXvUEI&t=697s
Feel free to had in the comments, some stuff I missed or did wrong.