Buffy The Vampire Slayer

The series "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" is being cancelled after seven seasons. PNS commentator, Pedro Paulo Viegas De Sa, is mourning its demise. The show has been a small comfort to him throughout the US War in Iraq.

After seven years, the TV show "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" is going off the air. With all this country’s problems — Iraq, terrorism, budget cuts — the show’s cancellation should be the last of my concerns. But no more "Buffy" on TV is bugging me, a lot.

I’m from a generation that was totally raised on television. From Speed Racer and Looney Tunes to Transformers and X-Files, I can mark the passages of my life with the TV shows I’ve watched. I’ll always associate this period with the end of the Buffy era.

I like to come home from school or work and waste time in front of the tube. I watch sitcoms just for the sake of it. I like the fact that there are times in my life when I don’t have to try to be serious or profound. To be honest, all this past season I’ve been watching Buffy more than the news on the war on Iraq. Between "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Bush the Freedom Fighter," I preferred Buffy.

Buffy is the kind of show you wouldn’t be caught dead watching, if you’re a guy, until you actually do sit down and watch it. It’s actually a well-written suspense, and Joss Whedon, the lead producer, is great at keeping you wondering what’s going to happen from one episode to the next.

What worries me is that the end of Buffy wasn’t programmed. Sarah Michele Gellar, the star who plays Buffy, decided to leave the show, and now they’re just wrapping it up any way they can. The problem is that I’ve seen this happen before with another one of my favorite shows, Xena: The Warrior Princess. When Lucy Lawless, the actress playing Xena, decided to leave the show because she was pregnant, the series just ended. The finale was awful.

That can’t happen to Buffy.

Some of my activist friends say that watching a show like Buffy goes against my progressive principles. But none of them have seen it — none of them know how strong the women characters are, how they don’t take flak from anyone. I wonder what’s so progressive about watching the war - watching big boys using big toys to kill women and kids.

It’s not that I don’t care about the war, the doubling of my tuition fees at community college, or other pressing issues of our time. I’m a committed youth activist but I also care whether my sports team wins or loses, whether I can beat the new game I downloaded, and whether or how Buffy will bow out of my life. In fact, I have Buffy to thank for reminding me that I have a human side.