Opinion: Buffy the Vampire Slayer & It's Relevance Today

As the year begins to unwind I find myself, like many others, feeling a bit nostalgic for simpler times. So as I do often, I’m turning to some old faves to get me through the holiday/seasonal blues. Being an older millennial, it's hard to believe that my favorite tv show growing up is already nearly thirty years old, but alas, time doesn’t lie. But how much does this old fav stand up to today's standard? 

When the relatively new network, WB, premiered it’s newest show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer on March 7th, 1997, no one could have anticipated that nearly thirty years later, it would still be drawing in new viewers daily. With BtVS still spawning off new works like the recent Audible hit Slayers: A Buffyverse Story and all sorts of fan led podcasts. 

BtVS came on my screen twenty-seven years ago, when there weren’t many butt kicking ladies, taking down bad guys. Outside of Xena and the occasional contestants on American Gladiator, I can’t really recall any live action shows where the main character was female and taking down men twice her size. To see a high school girl, kick DEMON butt? Now that got my attention. It started a wave of female led shows, where the main character wasn’t just hanging around trying to get some guy to date her, or hiding in the shadows of her family. BtVS paved the way for shows like Veronica Mars, Alias and Charmed, which all featured strong female characters, solving crimes and fighting evil.

I recently rewatched the show and although there are some pretty cringy parts, (like when Cordelia asks a black student if her hair is real, while trying to touch it!), you can see the growth of society and the way we’ve grown a bit more aware. Things like Xander’s toxic behavior whenever Buffy gets a new man, or Cordelia’s overall obliviousness to the world around her, probably wouldn’t go unchecked by audiences now, if it were to air as is in 2024. 

However, some of the problems Buffy and her friends faced, still ring true today. 

How many of us haven’t felt invisible either at work or school, heck even within our own families? Episodes like season one’s Out of Sight, Out of Mind deals with just that, while also exploring the flip side of that coin and discussing what it feels like to be “popular” and having “friends” but still feeling lonely. In an age where access to human interaction/contact is at our fingertips, many in society still feel very isolated and alone, unseen and unheard. They may not be turning into invisible people like poor ole Marcy did, but that doesn’t mean the feeling isn’t similar or relatable. 

In The Body, a season five standout, it showed us that even a slayer isn’t immune to grief, when Buffy and the gang grapple with the loss of Buffy’s mother, Joyce, due to normal human medical issues. Grief is a familiar feeling for most people so the theme isn’t completely unrelatable. Due to Joyce’s place within the show, she had her own interactions/relationships with the other characters, which allowed the  writers to show grief from many different aspects. The grief of Buffy and Dawn (the daughters) is completely different from not only each other, but that of Spike’s grief, who saw Joyce as a sudo mother figure and friend. Willow’s struggle with her own grief in losing a woman who’d been in her life for 5 years at that point, but also trying to figure out how to support her friends, are completely relatable. Cause everyone knows someone, who's lost someone. 

Season seven’s Get It Done taught us how the SLAYER was first created. How a young woman was chained by these men who summoned a demon and then, well the best way I can describe it was they forced the demon essence inside her. Changing her and all future generations of women through the centuries and forcing them to fight demons. All while a council of men decide where she goes, what she learns and what she does. Sadly for women in America and all across the world, this hits very close to home. As we watch men around the world make decisions on what we do with our bodies and where we can go and when, the very HISTORY of the slayer, is still VERY MUCH relevant today.

As we grow up, especially as our society is growing and becoming more inclusive, many shows I grew up with aren't all that rewatchable but Buffy the Vampire Slayer tells many stories that are still connecting with old and new fans alike. This is one of the shows where it allows you to critique the old ways, see the growth throughout but you can still enjoy it because the overall themes still matter, still resonate with audiences today. And in a world that's constantly changing, I’m grateful my “old reliable” is still “reliable”. At the very heart of it, BtVS is a show about a young woman, stepping into a dangerous world and not letting it break her. Everyday, women and femme folk around the globe are waking up to violence, poverty, antiquated gender roles and a loss of body anatomy. Buffy the Vampire Slayer gives us all a reminder, that we are strong, we are fierce and we are capable of extraordinary things when we band together. So when in doubt of your own strength, or when toxic masculinity starts to chaff, just think, WWBD- What Would Buffy Do?