Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Are you weeping at the ending of the most seminal TV show of recent years? Have you already seen the final episodes but are counting down with the last few to be shown on terrestrial television for that authentic end-of-your-world feeling? Have your grammar and speech patterns already been so altered by Buffy-verse that you have trouble working out whether ‘helpful’ or ‘helpy’ is the correct form of the word? No? Liar.

Few people under 30 in the Western world can claim to have never heard of the Slayer and her weekly adventures battling the forces of darkness. Buffy the Vampire Slayer has risen astonishingly from unlikely beginnings - as a TV spin-off of a terrible movie based on the simplistic premise of the usual perky blonde in horror films actually being the one to kick ass for a change, to being a massively popular cult hit. Who would have thought that the show, characterised in its first series by fear-inspiring fashion choices, an absence of ‘cool’ characters and a love interest over 240 years old, would end up doing more to acquaint the public with vampires than Dracula?

Well here we are, seven series later, watching the show reach an ending more final than any of Buffy’s deaths have been so far. The original and newer members of the Scooby Gang have been thinned out due to spin-off show Angel, quitting when the show seemed to be losing its originality (like diminutive werewolf Oz), or more conventionally, through character death. Some die-hard aficionados would complain that Buffy ceased to be a groundbreaking, witty and unusual show a few series back, instead generating into repetition (the Chosen One, more like the Chosen Two if you count Faith, another vampire with a soul, and exactly how many times has Buffy died?). But what alternative do we have?

BBC2 seems to be rushing through the remaining episodes of Buffy at an alarming rate (up to three per week) to get it over and done with. The most obvious contender to take its place is the darker, more grown-up and surprisingly more comedic older sibling Angel. Unfortunately, it is not currently airing on UK terrestrial television, only Sky One. Channel 4 and BBC2’s usual 6pm American teen programming import slot is sadly bereft of any serious successors, showing only reruns of The Simpsons, The Fresh Prince and Friends. Even that other staple of US teen drama Dawson’s Creek has been axed, with the final episodes playing out on E4. The only vaguely plausible heir is Channel 4’s Smallville. A bit of a rip-off of the Buffy template with the added unoriginality of the characters being appropriated from the Superman comics, it comes across as saccharine and trite instead of imitating Buffy’s depth and freshness, and isn’t even being shown currently.

Sadly, in the post-Buffy world there seems to be very little to look forward to (aside from collecting all the DVDs) so in the words of Xander: “Why am I surprised by how comforting you’re not?”