A TV milestone

Into every generation a girl is born. She alone must stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is THE SLAYER.

March 10, 1997

That was the day that so many things changed for me. I was visiting my grandparents in Florida and was lying in bed and this show happened to come on some network called The WB. The show had the same name as a terrible movie that came out a couple of years earlier so I almost didn't watch. Thank god I did.

The show was Buffy The Vampire Slayer and it forever changed the landscape of female driven shows on television. Without Buffy, there would be no Alias or Veronica Mars. And as one of the first shows to embrace the sci-fi serial format, it was also the granddaddy to Lost and Heroes.

But more importantly it finally felt like there was a show on TV that didn’t pander. Creator Joss Whedon and Co treated the viewers like the intellectuals they were. Crackling dialogue leapt off the screen and became part of many viewers daily vernacular. BTVS deftly jumped between comedy, drama, horror, romance, sci-fi and slapstick with nary a loose thread.

And if it weren’t for the show, I would have never met one of the most important people in my life (you know who you are).

On the tenth anniversary of the premiere, I say thank you to Joss, Marti, Sarah, Alyson, Brendan, Nicholas, Anthony, Charisma, Emma, James, Eliza, Juliette, Mark, and people like me, who kept the show on for seven years and never cared that we were often more concerned with the trials and tribulations of The Scooby Gang and their featured creature of the week than we were with our own lives.