Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns these days on FX is an experience delicately poised on the knife edge between pleasure and pain. And not just because my friend recently pointed out that we are now - albeit only strictly, technically, mathematically speaking - closer to her mother’s rather than the heroine’s age.

The pleasure remains, of course, because Joss Whedon’s magnum opus is - and I will brook no riposte here - still the best television series ever made. Distinctly and distinctively witty, allusive, subtle, dramatic, multi-layered, clear-eyed, brutal, beautiful, moody, magnificent, occasionally even musical, clever and true. If daily episodes aren’t enough to convince you, watch them from the box set back-to-back and observe the thing grow, shift and deepen before your very eyes. All this, and David Boreanaz, too.

The pain is there, however, because five years after it ceased production, there is still nothing comparable to its glory days. The best thing on the box for the current Buffy demographic is Gossip Girl. And much as I enjoy Gossip Girl on its own slick, vacuous, venal terms it is thin, thin gruel compared with the feast for the heart, mind and soul that was Buffy.

The dearth of descendants is lamentable. There is nobody smart, nobody funny, nobody who has been fashioned by an intelligence that has given a single passing thought even to the possibility that there might be a larger world, a larger sense of purpose beyond that of mindless consumption and fame-whoring. There is Miley Ray Cyrus jailbaiting it up in Vanity Fair, there are the mewling, pukesome infants on My Super Sweet 16 but no one to give us hope. And the last vestiges of it may just have been staked through the heart by the news that Paris Hilton is trying to launch a new reality show starring herself, Lindsay Lohan and Britney bleedin’ Spears.

Perhaps to every TV generation there is born only one decent heroine, and we’ve had ours. Let’s hope the next can be called soon.