Today is the 20th anniversary of Joss Whedon’s landmark TV series, Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The hit television show starred Sarah Michelle Gellar as the titular “slayer,” a descendent from a long lineage of vampire hunters destined to fight evil. She was sixteen and tasked with saving the world by fighting off the demons of hell in addition to dealing with the everyday woes of highschool.
Buffy Summers was one of the first strong female leads in genre television, which was revolutionary at the time. Buffy loved and celebrated weirdness in a way unlike any other show. The series routinely celebrated strange, underrepresented teenagers and portrayed their weirdness as awesome supernatural gifts. It was a concerted effort by showrunner Joss Whedon to show that being different was cool.
And difference was what Buffy did best. The show featured one of the first on-screen lesbian romances, it dealt with death in a very real way, and experimented with storytelling as often as it could. It was a truly revolutionary series that continues to inspire women twenty years later and paved the way for shows like Orphan Black, Supergirl, and Jessica Jones. So take the day to celebrate the slayer and all her weird friends.
