Buffy's big idea: high school really is hell, with an actual Hellmouth
Joss Whedon built Buffy the Vampire Slayer on one joke taken seriously. Sunnydale High sits directly above a Hellmouth, a portal to demon worlds under the library, so the horrors of being a teenager turn into literal monsters. Sarah Michelle Gellar called it the ultimate metaphor for adolescence.
The series grew out of Whedon's script for a 1992 film but was a separate production, run by him through his company Mutant Enemy. It ran on The WB from March 10, 1997, until May 2001, then moved to UPN for two final seasons ending on May 20, 2003. Gellar played Buffy Summers, the newest in a line of young women fated to fight vampires and demons, who longs for an ordinary life yet gradually accepts her calling.
Earlier Slayers had worked alone with a Watcher. Buffy has one too, the librarian Rupert Giles, but she also gathers a circle of friends who nickname themselves the Scoobies. Willow begins as a shy academic star and grows into a formidable witch who comes to realise she is a lesbian; Xander, with no powers at all, supplies comedy and common sense. Buffy and Willow are the only characters in all 144 episodes, with Xander missing just one. The vampire Angel, cursed with a soul, left after three seasons for his own spin-off.
A tight budget shaped the look. Few permanent sets could be built at first, so the show relied on locations around Los Angeles. Torrance High School, also used for Beverly Hills, 90210, played Sunnydale High, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House stood in for a vampire mansion. Episodes paired a monster of the week with season-long arcs, each ending with the defeat of a Big Bad, and mixed horror, romance, farce and martial arts; one episode is a full musical.
Four to six million viewers per episode would have been modest on the big networks but counted as a hit for the young WB. The Emmys largely overlooked it, yet Gellar earned a Golden Globe nomination and the show won the Television Critics Association Heritage Award in 2003. It spawned hundreds of novels, comics and games, attracted serious academic study and sits alongside Xena and Alias in a wave of series led by strong women.
Source: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
