Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer leaves the air this week, and I haven’t felt so sad to see a series end since my childhood, when the finales of MASH and The Mary Tyler Moore Show had my friends and me weeping our farewells. The only good thing about the demise of Buffy (and the likely cancellation of its nearly as endearing spin-off Angel) is that I’ll no longer feel compelled to convince nonbelievers of its virtues. I understand why people wrote it off as a cult geek-show: low-budget sets, B-movie ghouls, and hot teenage chicks kung-fu fighting in graveyards do not usually signify top-notch drama. Despite the cheesy trappings, Buffy was not only one of the funniest, smartest, and sassiest shows on television in the last decade-it was also the most mournful.

From the beginning, Buffy was gripped by loneliness. Surrounded by a faithful band of friends, she remained a fundamentally solitary character. "Being the Slayer made me different, but it’s my fault I stayed that way," she admitted to her hapless paramour Spike in a recent episode. "People are always trying to connect to me, and I just slip away." Over its seven-year run, the show has exquisitely teased out this theme-how much can friendship and community lessen the feeling of being ill at ease in the world? Sometimes it did so in narratives that paralleled ordinary experiences: One season dealt with the transition from adolescence to adulthood, as the gang watched one another mature and grow apart. Other times the storyline took on a more supernatural tinge, like the time Willow’s grief for a lost love turned her into a vengeful witch, or when Buffy’s pals yanked her out of Heaven; for months afterward she walked the earth like a failed suicide, her every look and gesture conveying horror and estrangement from the world.

What made all this bearable was Buffy’s effervescence-the show was accessorized with cartoony monsters that looked like Star Trek rejects and was bathed in irony and pop-culture references. (Oxford University Press is even publishing a lexicon of Buffy slang this summer.) Underneath all the wit and slayage, though, human emotions whirred and shuddered. Buffy struck a chord that’s incredibly rare on TV, and it will be missed.