“If I had the Slayer’s power … I’d be punning right about now.”
The year was 1997 and a new series debuted on the WB network with the unlikely and unpromising title Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Based on the critically reviled 1992 film of the same name, few would have anticipated that the series would soon become one of the most beloved television series of all time and pave the way for a succession of empowered female protagonists on television, including Sydney Bristow on Alias, the titular Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica’s cigar-chomping Kara Thrace, and later Gwendoline Christie’s noble Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones—not to mention The Walking Dead's badass katana-wielding Michonne, among others.
In the wake of the jingoistic, testosterone-fueled action fantasies of the ’80s with Sylvester Stallone refighting and winning the Vietnam War in Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger mowing down hundreds if not thousands of adversaries, female heroes were few and far between. It’s ironic given the dominance of such smart-mouthed and capable women like Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, Katharine Hepburn, and Greta Garbo in the screwball comedies of the 1930s like It Happened One Night, The Thin Man, Bringing Up Baby, and Ninotchka, which paved the way for the powerful Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner in noirs of the ’40s like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. But women had rarely been considered action heroines; more often, they were the damsel in distress or, more likely, the scantily clad love interest for Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Norris, who seemed more interested in stroking their weapons than their women. But that was all about to change. Ridley Scott introduced a new kind of female protagonist in 1979’s Alien with Sigourney Weaver’s smart, savvy, and sexy Ripley, and James Cameron took her matriarchal (and Xenomorph-slaying) power to a whole new level in Aliens a few years later.
By 1993 there was Johnnie To’s The Heroic Trio, a kick-ass Hong Kong chopsocky in which a trio of female superheroes defeats an evil master who is raising kidnapped children into a superarmy. Sound vaguely familiar?
But it was in the year 1997 that a new and thoroughly unexpected female superhero debuted on television, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As in the great Stan Lee comics of the ’60s, this was a superhero who knew that with great power comes great responsibility (even if Buffy was more X-Men’s Kitty Pryde than Spider-Man’s Peter Parker) and who also found that her everyday problems as a student at Sunnydale High School often far exceeded the challenges created by her birthright as a vampire slayer.
It is a show that changed the small screen forever, and, while it’d be hard to consider television an auteurist medium, Buffy is one of the few shows whose success and tone can be almost entirely credited to one man, Joss Whedon, the visionary writer/director/producer who brought the Slayer to life … death … and life again.
JOSS WHEDON
(creator/executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Buffy came from watching a horror movie and seeing the typical ditzy blonde walk into a dark alley and getting killed. I just thought that I would love to see a scene where the ditzy blonde walks into a dark alley, a monster attacks her, and she kicks its ass. So the concept was real simple. After all those times of seeing the poor girl who had sex and got killed, I just wanted to give her the power back.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
(actress, Buffy Summers)
For a long time I think there was a lack of strong female characters on television, especially for young people, and it’s so hard because that’s the age you really want to identify with someone. You want to have a hero and the thing I liked about Buffy, and Willow as well as Cordelia, is that they are OK with who they are. They’re not the most popular or the most beautiful at school. Willow is the smartest, but they’re OK with who they are and there’s a comfort in their individuality.
SARAH LEMELMAN
(author, "It’s About Power": Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was revolutionary for its time as it created fresh images of females, and demonstrated this to an important demographic—young teenage girls—who are fed all sorts of conflicting and dispiriting representations of women. The show established that girls no longer had to adhere to the standards for females in society. Buffy showed that it was not acceptable for girls and women alike to degrade themselves in order to fit into society, as society should accept all versions of females—ladylike or virile, timid or outgoing, polite or crass, and even heterosexual or homosexual, among many other conflicting personalities and characteristics for women and girls.
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
(director, Sharknado)
Whereas in most horror movies, the female lead became a “survivor,” Buffy’s female lead became a “hero.” She didn’t need to become ripped like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 or Sigourney Weaver in Aliens. She was able to be feminine and tough at the same time. The magic of Buffy is that you could relate to her. She still had insecurities, needs, and desires, but at her core she also had to be a hero and a fighter to save herself and the ones she loved.
SARAH LEMELMAN
The world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a refreshing escape for the female sex. Women were seen enacting change on their own accord, and were equalized to—if not stronger than—men. Buffy asserted that women could, in fact, be valued in society. Unlike its predecessors in Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer showed that young teenage girls could be powerful, too. The members of its cast became role models for girls to escape demeaning female stereotypes that had been laid down for so long and instead showed girls that it was perfectly acceptable to define themselves.
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
Ripley [in Alien] started out a lot like Buffy. She was the everyperson on that ship. The unlikely survivor and hero. She learned to become a badass and a hero, while not sacrificing being herself in the process. Could Buffy have existed without Ripley in Alien? Probably, but Whedon has great taste and, again, understood what he appreciated about great horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s and did his spin on it, taking the best qualities from the best movies and making it into its own.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Before Alien, movies that showed female empowerment focused on sex appeal—Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman—which is not the case in Alien. Obviously, Buffy focuses on the title character’s sex appeal, but the point of that is to undermine stereotypes. You can be beautiful and not in need of saving. Sigourney Weaver is this tireless fighter, which is something that is seen in Buffy.
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
Buffy really paved the way for more empowered female characters in the genre. Slasher films always had the strong female lead who was the “final girl,” but in some ways it was the process of elimination that made them the final survivor. In Buffy, it was less about a survivor and more about becoming a hero. In many vampire movies, women were under the thrall of a vampire and the victim in many instances, who needed to be saved by a Van Helsing–like character. Buffy, on the other hand, looked like the victim but was Van Helsing instead—but with a healthy sense of fashion and pop culture smarts.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
She was just a normal kid and she just wants to be a girl. My worldview at that age is not the same as it is now. I was twenty-four at the time. We weren’t going through what we’re going through right now. There wasn’t an Internet, there wasn’t empowerment, there wasn’t a female presidential candidate. I don’t think woman power came into my consciousness until Buffy. I guess when you feel empowered in general you aren’t really propagating it because you don’t really need to. I never felt held down or held back or anything like that, but I learned discrimination did exist for a lot of women. I didn’t go to college, so I didn’t have the experience with civil rights. I was a little bit naive.
SARAH LEMELMAN
It may seem like a laughable idea that a show made up of vampires and young high school girls could possibly help pave the way for the future of women in television, but it in fact did just that, and became a popular culture phenomenon in the process. The program’s heroines are presented as feminist role models to its largely teenage-girl-based audience, showing that women should fight for what they want and not be discouraged by the limits that a patriarchal society places on women. Buffy the Vampire Slayer constantly pushed the boundaries of how the female form was represented on television and showed its audience that feminism can be a normal part of everyday lives.
JOSS WHEDON
I was watching a lot of horror movies and seeing blondes going into dark alleys to get killed and I thought it would be interesting to see the blonde go into the dark alley and be the one who kills instead. So that became Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I wrote and was promptly rejected by everyone in Hollywood till Fran [Rubel Kuzui] came along and found it and produced and directed the movie. Then a couple of years later, Fran and Gail Berman, who was working with Sandy Gallin who had the rights, came and asked if I’d be interested in doing a TV series of it. I thought about it a while and said, “Gee, that would be cool.” High school as a horror movie pretty much sums up my life. I thought there was a whole series there.
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
I really enjoyed the original Buffy movie, but the TV show lived up to the potential of the concept. Joss Whedon decided to use all the tropes of high school and growing up and then mask it with a vampire-show template.
GAIL BERMAN
(executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
One of the things we did when we went to see Joss, Fran [Kuzui] and I, was to talk about this character and see that we were simpatico about her being a young empowered woman. Probably the most important thing we went to talk about originally. There weren’t any young empowered women on television and it struck us that this was a real vacuum that could be filled. Not only creatively, but it was important for women to see someone empowered on television.
JOSS WHEDON
Everything I write is about power and helplessness. And somebody being helpless and their journey to power is the narrative that sustains me. A lot of it has to do with being very helpless and tiny and I had two terrifying older brothers and a terrifying father and a withholding mother and, generally speaking, I knew I was on my own and I had no fucking skills. I was like, I don’t know how to survive. I got mugged every time I left the house. Just like people were waiting in line. I’m pretty sure one in six New Yorkers has in their lifetime mugged me. I would just be walking around in my head creating these narratives where these little tiny people that nobody paid attention to kicked everybody’s ass in one way or another. Why they are always female I’m still not sure, but I’m not uncomfortable with it.
SARAH LEMELMAN
It may seem odd that a man, rather than a woman, had a passion to write and produce a show with a strong female lead, but Whedon—who was clearly ahead of his time—wanted to show that powerful and captivating young women can be a part of everyday life. As a graduate at Wesleyan University, he studied both film and feminist theory, and is a self-proclaimed feminist, stating that he has always found strong women interesting because they are not overly represented in the cinema [and] that there are a lot of ways to break new ground without having original thoughts. Perhaps one of the most important projects he worked on prior to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie was Roseanne, which starred a housewife who showed the world a new type of independence, while still relying on, and embracing, her femininity. This seems to have inspired and influenced Whedon, and with the success of Roseanne, he continued to hold on to Buffy.
JOSS WHEDON
It took a while, actually, to figure it out. I wanted to do this girl who was different and had powers. Plus I love vampires; they’re so cool. But it started with Buffy. Before the vampires became part of it, I knew that I wanted to make her this special person. Someone who wanted desperately to fit in, but had a higher calling. That’s how the idea of her being a vampire slayer first came to me.
STEVE BIODROWSKI
(editor in chief, Cinefantastique)
The evolution of vampires on page, stage, and screen paved the way for Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the sense that, as the depiction of the undead changed, something was lost. To coin a phrase, the bat had been thrown out with the bloody bathwater. Old-fashioned, frightening vampires became passé if not outright cornball while literature and cinema focused on sexy, romantic immortals suffering existential angst.
A serious depiction of a life-and-death battle between good and evil risked being laughed off the screen. Joss Whedon found a way to give us evil vampires again and undercut the risk of unintentional laughter by affecting a droll tone, somewhat akin to the 1960s spy series The Avengers: treat the important stuff in an offhand way; treat the trivial stuff as if it were really important. So Buffy may have been averting a vampire apocalypse, but she really would have preferred to focus on fitting in at school and making friends.
JOSS WHEDON
The title is one of the things I fought for. The only disagreement I ever really had with the network was I would not let go of the title. A lot of people said, “But it’s stupid, and it’s the title of a comedy movie, and people won’t take it seriously.” I’m sure there are some people who still don’t.
DAN VEBBER
(co–executive producer, The Simpsons)
I was a huge fan of the show. You hear the stories all the time about how hard it was for him to keep the name Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead of just calling it “Slayer” because people wouldn’t watch a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As a fan I found that to be the case, too; it was hard to convince people how good it was, because it just had a silly name.
I agree with Joss, though, that he absolutely should’ve kept the name, because it’s essential to the mood and the tone of the show; that’s what the show is called and it says everything you need to know.
STEVE BIODROWSKI
One interesting thing about Buffy is the appellation “vampire hunter.” The notion of a vampire hunter is pretty much a cinematic invention. Stoker’s Van Helsing was a professor called in to consult on an unusual medical case, who recognized the signs and then read up everything he could find; in other words, he was not a professional vampire hunter. The same could be said of Kolchak, at least in The Night Stalker telefilm. The main difference between Buffy and these examples is that Buffy has a normal life—or tries to, anyway. None of us really knows what Van Helsing or Kolchak would like to do in their spare time; in fact, the very notion of them relaxing and hanging out is almost comical.
But Buffy would love to go to a club and just enjoy a night out with friends. Which brings us to probably the main reason for the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: it gave high school girls a protagonist they could relate to, who lives in a world that, at least on the surface, resembled theirs. For high-school-age people, everything seems to be of life-or-death importance; every failure is the end of the world. The series’ little joke is that, for Buffy, this is not a metaphor but literal reality: her life is in continual danger, and she is trying to prevent the end of the world.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Women have historically been subjugated to men in both the home and workplace and I think that has permeated into literature and the media. In terms of the “girl in peril” trope, essentially, women are not capable of saving themselves. They are typically young and beautiful and need the big, strong, brave man to offer help and protection against some foe, or to get the girl out of a distressing situation.
Whenever I think of the modern girl-in-peril trope for television, I think of Marissa Cooper from The O.C., who is this beautiful girl, who always seems to get herself in the worst situations, and has another character, Ryan Atwood, who saves her. In recent times we’ve connected the damsel to blond girls, because of the stereotype that blond girls are dumb/ditzy/incapable of making decisions for themselves, so therefore they’re the most likely in need of saving.
The beauty of Buffy is that Joss purposely plays to these stereotypes—Buffy is blond, beautiful, petite, and a cheerleader. Also, let’s be honest, the name “Buffy” doesn’t sound very threatening. Instead, Joss shows that Buffy can do the saving, despite looking the part of the typical “girl in peril” trope. Moreover, he plays on this with inserting Xander as someone who needs constant protection. In earlier seasons, Xander is seen bullied in school and becomes the “damsel” in distress, who is saved by Buffy, the new hero.
HOWARD GORDON
(executive producer, Homeland)
Adults can love it and kids can see themselves in it. It just had that voice that makes you sit up and pay attention. I would say that its cult status was burnished because it really was the crucible of adolescence; particularly, being a strong, powerful young woman really resonated with a certain portion of the population that elevated it to cult status.
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
Buffy is surprisingly responsible for how a majority of television has been reinvented. It took some of its cues from The X-Files in the sense of having an overall mythology mixed throughout, but it also deviated from what X-Files did to evolve the television genre itself. The first season of Buffy featured a “Big Bad,” a concept most TV series use as a buzz word during development, even though it came from Buffy, while doing stand-alone episodes as well.
SARAH LEMELMAN
The use of long story arcs was not the only tactic that was used which influenced modern television. As the title Buffy the Vampire Slayer suggests, vampires were a crucial component to the success of the show. While vampires have always captured the minds of readers and viewers alike, Buffy has revitalized the vampire genre. Angel is depicted as a romantic hero—with the catch-22 that he can never truly be happy or fulfilled, otherwise he will revert back to his soulless self, Angelus.
In the first three seasons of Buffy, he is essential to the story line in helping Buffy fight the forces of evil. Angel is despised by other vampires and demons, as he is expected to be torturing defenseless victims, not helping them. His heroic acts and inner sufferings create the image of the “sympathetic” vampire, which the viewer loves and approves of.
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
(actor, Principal Snyder)
Buffy fell in love with a vampire. If she let herself get too close to him she could get hurt. And yet with the growing love for that vampire, she wanted to be closer to that person. You don’t have to go very far to see that as a metaphor for young people’s sexuality. That a young girl is in love with a young man whom she’s frightened of. I assume she hasn’t had a sexual experience yet and that’s what he’s going to want and that she could get hurt by that. And yet, because of her growing love for that person, she wants to but she’s terrified because of how she might get hurt. She might say yes and then the guy may leave her. All kinds of decisions and fears that I, as a man, have no understanding of. But the writers on Buffy did.
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
The characters grew up on Buffy, they graduated, they fell in love with different people. The downfall of many shows is doing the same thing all the time. Buffy took a lead heroic character, Angel, and in season two turned him into the “Big Bad” halfway through. It was a ballsy move, and paid dividends. Buffy explored same-sex relationships in a way that didn’t feel jaded or a ploy for shock value. And Buffy had shocking deaths of major characters throughout its run—something most shows do almost too ritualistically today.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Typically vampire films—and shows—are meant to represent the marginalized groups in society. The most obvious and blatant in-your-face example is the use of vampires in True Blood to represent the LGBTQ community and civil rights in general. It’s set in an unaccepting southern community where people know that vampires exist, but [the vampires] are largely frowned upon.
In its title sequence, there’s a sign to a store that says “God Hates Fangs,” and the phrase “coming out of the coffin” is used in multiple episodes. In its concluding seasons, the government creates “Hep-V” which is fatal to vampires, and it is clearly meant to be an allegory for HIV/AIDS. We also see this idea of movies representing marginalized groups, in X-Men, where mutants are seen as freaks, and not deserving of equal rights. On a broader level, vampire films are used to represent more straightforward, abstract things, like fear, or the “other.”
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
Buffy spoke to the fears, neuroses, of young people. Primarily to young women who were just learning about their own sexuality, about their own emergence as adults. A great deal of the episodes were metaphors for that emergence. I remember one episode, in particular, where there was a girl who had been neglected, overlooked by all of her classmates and she became invisible and took out her revenge by using that invisibility. Well, I can imagine there were hundreds of thousands of young girls who felt that they were neglected in school and would like to be invisible.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
I remember Joss saying the basic principle of the show is you take all that is horrible about youth and all that is scary, and we literally made them into monsters. But I think anyone can relate to what high school is like and how that is the worst monster for you and the worst nightmare, and it was something that was so relatable.
MARTI NOXON
(executive producer, UnReal)
These people—Buffy, Oz, Xander, Willow, Cordelia—they are teenagers. They make mistakes—and they should, for emotional reasons. They do stuff that isn’t very smart just as most of us do when we are that age. When I was trying to decide if I wanted to take the job, which wasn’t a very hard decision, but I hadn’t seen the show, so I was watching the episode “Angel,” when Buffy is fighting Angel at the very end and then she bares her neck to him, and says “Go ahead, take me, if you can, go ahead and kill me, if you can.” I thought, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, because she’s the hero, but she’s an adolescent, and she’s going to make decisions sometimes out of total emotion, out of passion, as opposed to her head, which makes it that much more interesting. That’s one of the things I loved about these characters: they’re fighting evil, but they were still teenagers.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
(director, Pacific Rim 2: Uprising)
All the writers were giant fans of this genre and if I have one big complaint about other genre shows I see on TV, it’s hearing about people who work on them and getting the sense that the creators, the people who run these other shows, don’t have the love of the genre. If you don’t really have the love of it, you don’t understand it. That’s where you get things that seem creaky and a little too earnest and clumsy. It’s because that’s what they think the genre is. And it’s not. You go back to the original Star Trek. It’s the beautiful metaphor that you can tell a story about gay marriage, you can tell a story about terrorism, you can tell a story about racism, under the guise of flights of fancy. By God, we need another Rod Serling!
THOMAS P. VITALE
(executive vice president, Programming and Original Movies, Syfy and Chiller)
Unfortunately, aside from the notably great sci-fi and supernatural shows we all know and love, most genre television series before the 1990s weren’t made with the fan in mind … and probably most of them weren’t made by fans. In fact, there are too many mediocre genre shows in television history in which the sci-fi or supernatural elements are just used as a “setting,” but not much more. In other words, if you removed the genre elements from the show, the story would still work.
Conversely, in the best science fiction and supernatural literature, the genre elements are critical to the stories and those elements work as metaphor in addition to being used as part of the plot. But Buffy was important in the history of genre shows, because the genre elements are crucial to the story. Most important, Buffy was made by fans for fans. Buffy succeeded on every level—great characters, great stories, great metaphor and symbols, great homages, and great buzz among its target audience.
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
So, why is it endearing? Because it speaks to universal problems that young people have. And then of course it spoke to other things as well. It was a very powerful cast, with very good directors, and of course incredibly good writers.
TIM MINEAR
(executive producer, American Horror Story)
It also had a sense of humor, but because it was called Buffy, I don’t think that the network or some of the executives ever really understood what it was. I think they all thought that it was John Waters on some level, that it was camp. In fact, this was as far from camp as can be. It was serious hero drama … with some funny.
DAN VEBBER
For me, it was always about the characters. They were the smartest and funniest written characters that I’d seen at that point on a television show. That’s just Joss’s character voice that he writes in. It’s very quick banter and very pop culture savvy driven by goals which are heightened compared to real world characters. At first, it was the dialogue that appealed to me. Plus, being a genre fan I did enjoy the horror stories. I immediately latched onto the metaphor of the show: that high school is hell. I saw it as a place I could really pitch some stories that I thought would be really funny.
DAVID FURY
(executive producer, 24)
When I met Joss, he was specifically looking for comedy writers. He kind of knew what the tone of the show was and he was also aware that a lot of drama writers can’t do comedy and so when the show was initially in development, he had a lot to figure out, but he knew he wanted comedy writers.
DAN VEBBER
At that point I was exclusively a comedy writer, so I only thought in terms of, “Will this be funny or not?” That was always my first thing. And that was a detriment to me working on a show like Buffy, because emotion on Buffy is such a huge part of it. That’s something I did not have a lot of experience in and I was learning from Joss about the basic things involved in constructing a dramatic story for a one-hour TV show, because I had never done it before.
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
Like any genre, the vampire genre itself had been run into the ground right before Buffy arrived. There had been clever deviations on the formula. There were horror comedies like Love at First Bite, Vampire’s Kiss, Fright Night, and Vamp that had fun with the vampire concept and you had groundbreaking reinventions like The Hunger and Martin. But what was brilliant about Joss Whedon is that he has a unique voice that looks at the world and genre in a different way. That allowed him to approach Buffy from a different vantage point, first with the original movie and then later with the TV series. He appreciated the conventions that came with the genre, but he wanted to find a way to subvert it by grounding it in metaphor as well.
STEVE BIODROWSKI
I’m not sure any vampire films in particular had a big effect on Joss Whedon. The impression I get is that he caught bits and pieces on the late show and mashed them together for an audience that wouldn’t know the difference. I suppose the Hammer vampire films were influential, at least indirectly, in that they tended to feature action. Count Dracula was never staked in his coffin—at least not successfully—there was usually some kind of struggle or fight scene, the most memorable being the one in Horror of Dracula, with Christopher Lee’s Dracula and Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing fighting to the death. And, of course, Hammer gave us Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (aka The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula), which combined vampires with martial arts.
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
I also think Buffy owes a huge debt to [the] Kolchak: The Night Stalker series as well. The Buffy movie felt a bit broader than the TV show, which is more in line with Whedon’s quirky sensibilities. And as he gained more of a footing as a show runner, and later director, the show’s identity really came to the fore. Whedon is a great storyteller who understands why great genre movies work—they were about something more than just the monsters. Strip away the vampires and monsters from Buffy and it’s about a high school girl coming of age. Look at George A. Romero’s Dead movies, and those films are allegories for other things.
HARRY GROENER
(actor, Mayor Richard Wilkins)
Part of its success is not just the vampire myth. It’s the sense of humor of it. It’s funny. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and it has a moral. It teaches something. It can be about abuse or it can be about bullying or it can be about whatever it is. And the monsters are actually monsters.
JOSE MOLINA
(co–executive producer, Agent Carter)
What resonated with me and what probably resonated with a lot of people was that it was a high school story, first and foremost. The monsters she was battling were all metaphors for the travails that a high school student goes through while they’re in school. The other thing that I found really unique about Buffy is that here she is, this beautiful former cheerleader, all the boys think she’s cute and want to date her. But the people that she chooses to hang out with are these couple of misfits. And she’s a bit of a dork herself. I had never seen that before. I’d never seen a girl who looked like Sarah Michelle Gellar being one of us. One of the nerdy, geeky, high school losers. She was a relatable action hero who you kind of identified with. You either wanted to hang out with her or be part of her gang.
SARAH LEMELMAN
One of the major reasons that Buffy was able to garner such interest from fans and scholars alike is the fact that the program’s main characters are marginalized and considered outsiders, which … was not a typical formula for television in the 1990s, and even today. Rather than most teenage television series that showcase “popular” high schoolers, such as jocks and cheerleaders, Catherine Siemann calls Buffy’s protagonist the “ex-cheerleader who fell from grace,” who is paired with two other outsiders, the shy Willow considered a “brainiac,” and the awkward Xander, who uses humor to deflect derision from his classmates. Joss Whedon stood firmly behind the idea that “the show is about disenfranchisement, about the people nobody takes seriously” and [consulting producer] David Greenwalt stated that “if Joss Whedon had one good day in high school we wouldn’t be here.”
STEVE BIODROWSKI
Xander, to me, seems to be in the tradition of sidekicks like Harry Sullivan, from the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who: Harry looked like he should be the archetypal male hero, but since that role was already taken, Harry was a bit of a third wheel, who had to settle for providing comic relief, though his assistance did come in handy from time to time. The only difference is that Xander was playing second fiddle to a woman.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Obviously, Whedon himself faced struggles that the average, day-to-day teenager faces in high school, and not many television shows have been keen on portraying this. The Scoobies, ignoring their involvement with the supernatural, do not fit into the mainstream, and Whedon wanted to embrace this, hoping that it would provide a connection for viewers who were not always accepted by their high school peers.
HARRY GROENER
Everything has been pretty much said about how talented Joss is. He was just incredibly perceptive, and in tune and in touch with those kids. He knew how to write for them. He knew how to characterize the angst that was going on in these kids and he’s fast on his feet.
JOSE MOLINA
There was a sense of inclusiveness, which is a word we use a lot nowadays. But even back then I felt like the Scooby Gang was open to anybody who wasn’t an asshole. And even if someone was an asshole like Cordelia, if her heart was in the right place, she was still welcome.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Whedon’s portrayal of high school “rejects,” aside from the Scooby Gang, is especially shown in the earlier seasons, most notably in the episodes “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” and “Earshot,” which depict a girl who feels ignored by the rest of the world—and turns invisible—and a bullied boy who attempts to commit suicide, respectively. Buffy addresses these struggles to any ostracized students and sends the message to viewers that “belonging” does not mean a person has to be “cool” or popular but that having a supportive network of friends and family is more important than fitting into mainstream society.
JOSS WHEDON
It was about four years after the end of the run of Buffy that I really just went “Oh, I was Buffy! The whole time.” I always thought I was Xander before he started getting laid. I’m the wacky sidekick. Then I had this shocking moment of idiotic revelation that I’d been writing about myself that whole time.