Buffy The Vampire Slayer blew up genre TV. Club. With so many new series popping up on streaming services and DVD every day, it gets harder and harder to keep up with new shows, much less the all time classics. With TV Club 1. 0, we point you toward the 1. TV series, classic or modern. If you watch those 1. These are not meant to be the 1. When it debuted in the spring, on an out of the way and tiny network still struggling to forge its identity, the idea that Buffy The Vampire Slayer would become one of the most influential TV dramas of all time would have seemed laughable. Based on a little seen movie that garnered bad reviews from most critics, the series arrived with no name stars as a curiosity on The WB, a network best known at the time for a Southern fried soap named Savannah. ZS4X8D2U.jpg' alt='How Many Episodes In Lost Girl Season 1' title='How Many Episodes In Lost Girl Season 1' />Stranger still, the network decided to hand over control of the show to Joss Whedon, the man who wrote the screenplay for the original feature. Whedons career as a script doctorhe did an uncredited rewrite on Speed that screenwriter Graham Yost credits with putting most of the quotable lines into the featurehad been wildly successful, and hed written for TV shows as diverse as Roseanne and the original Parenthood. But hed never been a showrunner, and he was still very youngin his early 3. Yet by the end of its seven seasons, Whedon and Buffy had reinvented the face of television. Buffy wasnt a wildly innovative show that was a bolt of creativity out of the blue, like Twin Peaks. Like Hill Street Blues and The X Files before it, Buffy was really good at synthesis, at pulling together lots and lots of different ideas and strands from the cultural ether and twining them together into something more powerful than its individual elements. Whedon drew on the still popular X Files for the series genre storytelling, particularly in its early days, and he borrowed a structure that had been primarily popular on the cop show Wiseguy, in which the heroes face off against one primary villain per season, though it was Buffy that gave this idea its most popular namethe Big Bad. Then Marvel comics, cheesy horror movies, and feminist studies courses were tossed into the mix, and what emerged was indebted to all of those sources but beholden to none of them. Buffy is perhaps most famous for its adventurousness, on both a plot and stylistic level. The series began as an ultra low budget story of a teenage girl whos a typical high school student by day and a killer of monsters by night. Played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, Buffy goes on a harrowing heros journey over the course of the series, starting out as a cockily confident young woman and coming to realize just how hard it can be to have such great weight placed on her shoulders. Most episodes of the show have a random monster or two pop up in Buffys city of Sunnydale, California, having been drawn there by the towns Hellmouth, a magnet for beasts and demons of all sorts. Usually, these monsters stand in as metaphors for typical teenage problems. Then, Buffy and her friendssweetly dorky nerd Willow Alyson Hannigan, dependably doofy guy pal Xander Nicholas Brendon, and school librarianexposition deliverer Giles Anthony Stewart Headdo their level best to destroy said monster. Showcase poster Season 5. Citing Lost Girl as the Number 1 ranked program on Showcase across multiple key demos including the Top 20 of all Canadian Specialty. Meanwhile, in the background, the seasons Big Bad would be plotting, sending out minions, and building toward whatever scheme he or she would unleash in the season finale. Once the template was established in season one, Whedon and his writersincluding many names who have gone on to acclaim elsewhere, including Marti Noxon, Jane Espenson, and David Furyalmost immediately began picking at it, figuring out how to flip things around to keep the audience on its toes. The show was fond of plot twists, but it almost never used them for their own sake. Instead, the twists were almost always grounded in character, allowing the show to take all of its characters on long, evolution filled journeys. Characters began a season in one place and ended it in another, and while the growth was over the top, it was nearly always organic. If someone turned evil, it wasnt because they stumbled upon a magic spell or something similar. It was because they had suffered or been hurt, because they saw no other way through their pain but to force it on the world around them. That applied to the characters romantic relationships as well, which often shifted and twisted and turned. Characters explored their sexualities, made ill advised hook ups, and destroyed each other via breakups. As the characters grew older, the series concerns matured with them. Plenty of fans found Buffys growing darknessparticularly in its final three seasonsoff putting, but Whedon and his writers used the darkening themes to closely parallel the way Buffy and her friends found a world of uncertain responsibility once they left high school at the end of season three. With so many new series popping up on streaming services and DVD every day, it gets harder and harder to keep up with new shows, much less the alltime classics. Yet even as this was happening, the series stylistic ambitions were expanding. Whedon stepped more and more behind the camera, directing episodes that included one without dialogue, a musical, and a music free art film. The series remained cuttingly funny throughout its run, but the teen soap crammed with gags from the early seasons gave way to something more brooding and operatic, until the final and weakest season posited a battle that was as much for Buffys soul as anything else. Watching just a handful of Buffy episodes isnt the best way to understand what made the show so influential and so special, simply because so much of its influence stems from the way it used serialization so effectively. Yet the shows humor, its blend of dozens of genres, and its episode by episode plotting are possible to grasp in just one hour of the show, and even a lackluster episode displays the way Whedon and company had fun blowing up what their audience thought it knew about genre TV. And the further along a prospective viewer goes, the more likely it becomes that he or she will land on an episode that reveals just how bold the series could be on a visual level, or how thrilling its stylization could be. Latest Stories. Game of Thrones Final Season Might Not Air Until 2019 This is a bummer CancerFree Kassie DePaiva Will Be Returning to Days of Our Lives DePaiva. Photo Melinda Sue GordonKnight Takes King Prod. Chapter 1 You can tell a lot about a character from his or her first three minutes onscreen. Here, then, are 1. Buffy curious, though it seems likely sampling a couple of them will turn those intrigued by the series into devotees, devouring every episode over a few weeks. Prophecy Girl season one, episode 1. The first episode both written and directed by Whedon, the first season finale brings Buffys conflict with ancient vampire The Master to a head, complete with numerous terrific quips, a storyline in which the school dance dovetails nicely with the end of the world, and great moments for all of the series regulars, even stuck up fashion plate Cordelia Charisma Carpenter. The conflict with The Master is simple enough that newbie viewers should be able to grasp it from this episode alone, and the thrilling fun contained within will likely be enough to give a sense of the series at its early best, when it was still relatively pure and before it started unleashing legions of plot twists. Surprise season two, episode 1. The series first great romance was between Buffy and Angel David Boreanaz, a centuries old vampire whod been given back his soul by a gypsy curse that made him lament all of the evil hed done in his vampire days. In a famous two parter in the middle of season two, the series took that relationship to the hilt as it pushed the two into conflict with a bad guy named The Judge, who had world ending aspirations. Aladdin Tv Series Torrent more. The script for this episode is by Noxon, who excelled at the kind of soapy relationship twists that kept the series grounded in broken hearts and human pain, and the closer of this episode is a killer, setting up. Yet Surprise and Innocence are so important to the shows development, and the cliffhanger at the end of Surprise makes it essential to watch both, in order to understand the show and just for the enjoyment of any prospective viewer. ABC TV Shows, Specials Movies.