Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Because I was so honored to be a part of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reunion, wanted to share my opening remarks in text form with the fans who weren’t there. (Our crew was busy catching late arrivals on the red carpet, so we don’t have video.) Imagine moments when the hyped audience burst into spontaneous applause: not so much at my words (heartfelt as they were), but at the shared love for the magic that was Buffy. At times, I felt I was giving a state-of-the-Buffy-union address. What a rush. Here goes:

My name is Matt, and I’m a Buffy-holic.

Have been since 1997, when Joss Whedon’s odd and completely disarming Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit the WB. Trying to find a point of reference when writing about it at the time at USA TODAY, I likened it to “Clueless meets Carrie by way of Salem’s Lot” and described it as “90210 with a 666 suffix.”

We had no idea.

What Buffy really was, was My So-Called Life as a Vampire Slayer, a show that used fantasy to get to some very real and disturbing places. It was so ingeniously entertaining, so scary and so funny, but also so emotionally evocative. A coming-of-age allegory where high school really was hell, where the wrong decision truly could herald the end of the world, where adolescent anxieties often took demonic form, and where even after graduation (a truly explosive event) the life lessons—and afterlife lessons—never stopped coming. With all of the pain and joy and sex, and friendship and betrayal and sex, and consequences and death and sex, that all of that implies.

Yes, Buffy was also a very hot show. And yes, it was very good for me.

In fact, the new issue of TV GUIDE ranks the scene of Buffy and Spike bringing down the house as they do the hot nasty the #1 hottest scene ever. (Even outranked The Thorn Birds. Imagine.) But what really set this show apart, and why we’re still talking and obsessing about it five years after it left the air, is what it represented. Buffy took genre conventions and flipped them upside down, starting with a title that was too easy to regard as a joke. As we all know, Buffy was no joke.

Like its title, it mixed comedy, horror and action as it took the horror-movie cliché of the pretty blonde girl who always got killed in the first reel and turned her into a kickass icon of feminist empowerment. Although her power always came with a price, and like everyone else on the show (living or living dead) she was far from perfect, she juggled duty, incredible sacrifice and responsibility for the world along with friendship, family and love.

The tone could range from a stark episode without music in which Buffy’s mother died suddenly of natural causes to a full-fledged musical comedy episode complete with dancing demons. Buffy was known for its clever, quippy, pop-culture-obsessed dialogue, but earned its one Emmy nomination for writing for what was basically a silent horror movie. As the Scooby gang might say: Ironic much?

In its seven years—first on the WB, then on UPN (making it sort of the first actual CW show), it became a true cult phenomenon, adored by fans and endlessly dissected by academics. We are all "Buffy-ologists."

And the show lives on, currently in Season 8 in comic book form, but also in its influence in such shows that came later, like Alias and the current Heroes.

And now, let’s get this party started.

And what a party it was.