Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an American cult television series that aired from March 10, 1997, until May 20, 2003. Writer-director Joss Whedon created the series under his production tag, Mutant Enemy. more...

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The series follows Buffy Anne Summers (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar), the latest in a line of young women chosen by fate to battle against vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness. Like previous slayers, Buffy is aided by a Watcher, who guides and trains her. Unlike her predecessors, Buffy surrounds herself with a circle of loyal friends who become known as the "Scooby Gang".

The series usually reached between two and four million viewers on original airings. Although such ratings are lower than successful shows on the "big four" networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox), they were a success for the relatively new and smaller Warner Brothers Network. Reviews for the show were overwhelmingly positive, and it was ranked #41 on the list of TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. The WB network closed on September 17, 2006, after airing an "homage" to their "most memorable series", including the pilot episodes of Buffy and its spin-off, Angel.

Buffy's success has led to hundreds of tie-in products, including novels, comics and video games. The series has received attention in fandom, parody and academia, and has influenced the direction of other television series.

Production

Origins

Writer Joss Whedon developed Buffy to invert the Hollywood formula of "the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie." Whedon wanted "to subvert that idea and create someone who was a hero." He explained:

The concept was first visited through Whedon's script for the 1992 movie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which featured Kristy Swanson in the title role. The director saw it as a "pop culture comedy about what people think about vampires." Whedon disagreed: "I had written this scary film about an empowered woman, and they turned it into a broad comedy. It was crushing." The script was praised within the industry, but the movie was not.

Several years later, Gail Berman, a Sandollar Productions executive, approached Joss Whedon to develop his Buffy concept into a television series. Whedon explained that "They said, ‘Do you want to do a show?’ And I thought, ‘High school as a horror movie.’ And so the metaphor became the central concept behind Buffy, and that’s how I sold it." The supernatural elements in the series stood as metaphors for personal anxieties associated with adolescence and young adulthood. Whedon went on to write and partly fund a 25-minute unaired Buffy pilot that was shown to networks and eventually sold to the WB Network. The latter promoted the premiere with a series of History of the Slayer clips, and the first episode aired on March 10, 1997.

Read more at Wikipedia.org