Buffy The Vampire Slayer

You can admit it without shame: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a work of genius. Your oh-so-sophisticated friends might scoff, but the broadcast of Buffy’s final episode in the US last week (it airs on Sky One in Britain next month) marked the end of a televisual era. To those lazy enough to trot out the line that the show’s sole admirable feature was its having a female hero, quote Laura Miller, writing at Salon.com: "It’s commonplace by now to rave about the liberating effect of Buffy’s heroism on girlhood ... But if what Buffy’s heroism has done to girlhood gets talked about all the time, what her girlishness has done for heroism is even more revolutionary, if less well sung." In fact, Buffy created a new heroic trope because "from the very beginning, she could not keep her mission to herself".

Those who feel challenging TV must involve a Jeremy (Paxman or Isaacs) are probably laughing. Put them in their place. "With astonishing bravura, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has succeeded in blending the conventions of teenage soap opera with smart, dialogue-driven comedy, a phantasmagoria of supernatural motifs - and even knotty theological debate," you remark, quoting Boyd Tonkin in the Independent. And it goes without saying that the programme’s "supernatural structure also triggered metaphysical discussion on a level that left British telly’s God slots in the shade".

There will be sceptics who try to tell you Buffy was only a TV show about vampires for teenagers. Don’t listen to them. "What should concern any TV fan is the end of a daring work of love and imagination, something born of passion instead of a fleeting, this-year’s-flavour fame," you say, like the Miami Herald. "And those monsters Buffy battles ... are the demons we wrestle throughout our lives: the desire to fit in, the need to be your own person, the emotional risks of love and sex." The world the show inhabited, too was a cut above, as the Toronto Star noted. It was "a multi-dimensional, deeply recessed and densely layered mythology ... that could engage both supernatural escapism and earthly social constructs such as friendship, love, power, religion and free will".

Oh well, you reflect, remembering the words of New York Newsday: "All great epics come to an end. The Iliad. The Odyssey. War and Peace. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Just kidding. The Tolstoy book is a ringer. Doesn’t belong on this list. Too literal. Not enough monsters."