![]() Were there teen shows before Buffy? Undoubtedly. 1) Buffy put The WB - and the smart teen soap - on the map ![]() Here are the five biggest ways Buffy changed TV. So, in honor of the series’ 20th anniversary, let’s celebrate everything Buffy brought to television. Listing every showrunner who’s named Buffy as an influence would quadruple the length of this piece. And those are just three names pulled essentially at random. Showrunners across the spectrum of the medium - from Shonda Rhimes to The Vampire Diaries’ Julie Plec to Supernatural’s Eric Kripke - have talked about how it influenced them. But Buffy is a genuine TV watershed, a landmark that deserves serious attention.įor as much as The Sopranos changed how TV is made, Buffy changed how its stories are told, and its influence is everywhere. Yeah, the show’s title is a little goofy, and its cheesy effects haven’t aged particularly well, and it’s based on a truly regrettable movie, and some of Whedon’s pop culture references have been lost to the mists of time. They blew up established formats and made the people who made TV rethink how they approached the medium.īut even now - two decades later, long after the show established itself as a TV classic - Buffy has yet to entirely get its due. The Sopranos and Buffy didn’t just change television. You could say that essentially all of TV drama in 2017 is thanks to one of those two shows. Every week, I watched The Sopranos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer I was an avid fan of both, convinced that David Chase and 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. 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. It was also because 1999 was when Buffy, starring plucky ’90s darling Sarah Michelle Gellar, was at the height of its powers during its excellent third season. So when TV critic Emily Nussbaum declared, in 2014, that 1999 had marked a turning point for television, it wasn’t just because 1999 was the year The Sopranos debuted. But since the launch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer 20 years ago, TV has never been quite the same. ![]() When The WB debuted a low-budget comedy about a teen girl vampire slayer in the spring of 1997, no one expected it to make much of an impression - let alone become a bona fide pop culture force.
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