Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Your next box set: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy was thrilling, snappy and kept you laughing right up to the moment it staked you through the heart: seven seasons of pure genius

I’d like to pretend that I brought out the Buffy box set to commemorate the centenary, recently, of Bram Stoker’s death. But I can’t. I watch and re-watch Buffy because it remains the best. I keep waiting for it to become comically dated, for my adult self to laugh wryly at what I once held so dear. But no. Quality endures and Buffy remains unmatched.

It was Joss Whedon, of course, who reinvented the vampire story for the modern age. He inverted the traditional horror movie trope. The pretty blonde high-school student turns out to be the vampire-slaying, apocalypse-averting heroine – instead of the popsy who is punctured and dead before the end of the opening credits. As the Chosen One, Buffy (the unfeasibly talented Sarah Michelle Gellar, with her butterfly-light touch enabling her to flit from light to dark and back again, as Whedon required) is a perennial outsider, a walking metaphor for teenage alienation.

Whedon was able to explore, well, just about everything through Buffy and her cadre of fellow misfits: there was geeky Willow (Alyson Hannigan, a hero to hesitants everywhere), hopelessly uncool Xander (so brilliantly brought to life by Nicholas Brendon that is still remains incredible to me that this was his first acting job), silent Oz (Seth Green, drier than a martini), former demon Anya (played by Emma Caulfield with pitch and timing so perfect it seemed itself otherworldly) and of course lover and vampire-with-on-a-good-day-a-soul Angel (David Boreanaz).

Buffy grows into her slayer role as ordinary teen mortals grow into adulthood, negotiating the new complexities, resenting the new responsibilities and eventually – if only in the absence of an alternative – accepting them. She "comes out" as a slayer to her mother, who asks her if there is any way she could stop being one. In later series, the gay subtext is made text via a relationship between Willow and Tara, still one of the most positive, remarkable-in-its-unremarkability depictions of young lesbian love around.

Elsewhere, hate fights with love and desire, hope with reality, individual with collective desire and responsibility, betrayals abound and nothing is ever black and white. And that’s just Spike’s narrative arc. Grief in all its dreadful aspects is laid bare, most famously in The Body, when Buffy’s mother dies – of, most cruelly, natural causes, leaving Buffy, for all her special strengths, powerless to right this single most terrible wrong.

Throughout the seven series, the first of which aired in 1997, the writing is dense, snappy, hilarious, without a missed beat or wasted word. It generally has you laughing right up to the moment it stakes you through the heart, leaving you for dust.

Now SMG is deploying a thimbleful of her talent in Ringer and the rest of the Scooby gang (as her friends dubbed themselves, in one of the intertextual pop references that made the series almost as beloved by cultural critics as it was by viewers) has vanished virtually without trace. At least Whedon, after several years of being repeatedly screwed over by imbecilic network execs for whom seven seasons of proven genius counts for naught, is now enjoying rave reviews for his Avengers movie. But on TV, the Buffyverse still stands alone. I don’t know when – or if – we’ll see its thrilling, clever, moving, funny, feminist like again.