Last weekend Buffy the Vampire Slayer got more attention online than I can ever remember. It’s the 20^th anniversary of the show’s first air date and my week was emphatically improved by reading so many love letters to a show that means everything to me. Seeing article after article from authors who adored the show and revelling in the fact that quite often it was something entirely different that drew them to it has inevitably led me to start yet another binge watching session. These articles have done better justice to the cultural importance of the show than I could, so I’ll focus on the personal instead.

I’ve tried to write about Buffy many times. I usually end up losing myself in the rabbit hole of how to explain why this show matters without feeling like I’m straying a long way off of the reservation. How do I write about a show like Buffy without losing my flimsy grip on objectivity? For as long as I’ve been obsessing over essentially unanswerable questions, two of my old favourites to return to are these: Can a TV show/film/song change your life? And if so, could it ever be argued it saved it?

Even with an honorary PhD in hyperbole and a tendency to overthink things, the question of where to draw the line on the influence of media on a (my) life has always fascinated me above and beyond any other.

There are individual films that make a strong argument that it can happen but it’s the form as a whole that I struggle to imagine life without. When I look at music there are stronger arguments for life changing interventions, with Frank Turner responsible for getting me through more days than most, but that’s a separate argument for another blog. I also owe more of my degree from De Montfort University to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” than I’m entirely comfortable with.

TV has offered me plenty of great options and probably consumed more of my time than either of the two former media. However while I frequently crumble into a bumbling mess when asked what my favourite band or film is, if the same question is posed about television there’s only one answer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Reading a lot of the responses to the anniversary I’ve been struck by a whole bunch of thoughts.

Many describe the show as a feminist awakening for them. That’d be a stretch for me, but it was certainly an essential part of my education. A strong woman kicking every arse that had the temerity to do anything other than respect her was perhaps less revelatory to me than some simply because I had the utterly blind luck to be raised in a household where strength and influence weren’t framed by gender. My mum was always the primary bread winner, my go to guide for how to face the world and as I grew up a continuous reminder of how utterly fucked so many of the default structures of our society are. My dad might argue over whether he is a feminist (mostly because he’s never been presented with a claim he won’t try and dispute for the sheer joy he experiences from being on the opposite side of an argument) but I learnt from him how to be a man utterly un-reliant on outdated stereotypes. I was introduced to the show by them both and we still regularly end up talking about it. In honour of the anniversary we watched “Once More With Feeling” together.

Buffy may not have taught me something entirely new but it delivered the most emphatic argument for my budding and formative world view I could have hoped for. The central female characters were my heroes (and, let’s be honest, crushes) for what they represented. Buffy and her vulnerable strength. Willow and her genius. Joyce and her compassion and aspiration. Faith’s ferocity and self-reliance. Cordelia’s willingness to fight the entire world if it got in her way. Anya’s ability to embrace the changes in her life.  Tara’s integrity. And as crazy as she was, even Drusilla had two of the most powerful characters in the show wrapped around her little finger most of the time.

This was the company I spent my teenage years with and one of the main reasons I tried my best to surround myself with female friends. I’d already been insanely lucky with the circle of friends I had, but the idea of forming my own wonderfully diverse Scooby gang was inevitably part of my thinking as I went through my A-Levels and tried to work out what on earth I was doing with my life.

In amongst the multitude of angry male leads (and for balance I loved 24 far more than my lefty politics should have let me) not just Buffy herself, but the entire cast provided expression for dozens of different concepts of strength, whether it was individual or collective, selfish or selfless, calm or angry.

Staring out at the world with perhaps even more uncertainty than the average teenager, I was constantly aware of one of the abiding messages of BTVS: the family you choose is as important as the one you’re born with. So I surrounded myself with the best and the brightest, the kindest and the most fascinating people I could, both during 6^th form and Uni. It’s not an overstatement to say I owe an awful lot of my happiest memories from that time to the influence of Buffy and Joss.

I don’t know if I’d have believed that a constantly awkward and self-doubt filled teenager could befriend the kind of people I did without having grown up on a diet of Buffy.

And I don’t know if I’d have made it through the days when that support network couldn’t offset my depression anymore without a few key moments that kept echoing around in my head long after most rational arguments had retreated in the face of the stubborn self-destructiveness that defines those utterly bleak days.

Buffy was a show that managed to combine wit, drama and a hefty emotional punch, always reluctant to sacrifice any of the above to the other. Its most heartbreaking episodes have some great one liners (other than “The Body” in season 5 which is an exquisite exploration of grief and you should never watch it expecting anything other than a rush in demand for tissues). It did a better job of capturing the joys, traumas and uncertainties of being a teenager and trying to become an adult better than most “grounded” dramas I’d seen. It is also a show that revels in language to a degree few other shows manage, no small factor in my enduring love for it.

It was a show about defiance. About accepting who you are and fighting every single day to try and make the world a little bit better. It’s a twin message I frequently fall short of both halves of but keep coming back to. On shitty nights when I’m starting to wallow in my self-pity I can escape into an episode that never shames a character for feeling lost but reminds you of how essential it is that they fight. On good nights where I want that elusive boost to keep me going there are episodes to fire me up with righteous passion that the world can be better if you have the will to fight for it.

It’s been difficult to write this piece without throwing out too many spoilers, but it’s a challenge that is now two decades old. How do you get reluctant audiences past a silly sounding name and concept without giving the game away? How do you hint at how much this show can mean without taking the joy out of its highs and stings out of its lows? I might write a separate, spoiler heavy, piece soon about my favourite moments from the series, but for now I’ll draw to a close.

I was always going to want to finish this post with a quote from the show. There’s plenty to choose from, but there was one that maybe comes closest to providing an answer to the question I posed earlier: Can a TV show save your life?

It would be a stretch to say Buffy saved my life, but not a sizable one. Without the constant reminder of what I could be, of what the fight can be worth or of why fighting for lost causes is worth more than fighting for a thousand sure things, I can’t guarantee I’d be sitting here writing this.

Of all the quotes I could have chosen, all the words Joss put on scripts that shaped the majority of my life, there is one line I keep coming back to. A line that has echoed around my head in the darkest of hours and fired me up in those all too rare moments of defiance, a line that to a neutral observer I suspect might seem lightweight and innocuous.

It’s not possible to give the full context for the line without straying into spoilers, but I’ll frame it as well as I can. Faced with moving on from an almost unbearable sacrifice by a loved one, they reflect on the final words of the fallen. It’s a line I return to over and over again. A line that I rely on to remind myself that no matter how dark it gets there is always hope, so long as you accept that everything in this life that is worth having is worth fighting for. A sentiment that has become even more relevant in the face of recent political developments. A line that works whether I’m just barely holding on or facing a day head on. In good times and bad, Buffy has been there for me and I suspect it still will be when the 40^th anniversary rolls around.

“The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live.”

Buffy is 20 years old today.  That is, for those to whom those words are meaningless (where have you been??  what is wrong with you??), it is now twenty years since the first episode of TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer was broadcast.

Twenty years ago I was far too old for a show with a daft name like that.  So I caught it more or less accidentally, and realised that the daft name belied a drama with depth, intelligence, wit and invention.  A few years back, pondering more generally on why I care about fantasy as a genre, I wrote this about Buffy:

It all goes back to Buffy.  Not, for me,  to Dracula, or the George Romero zombie films, or Hammer Horror.   Joss Whedon‘s show overwhelmed all of the assumptions I’d made on the basis of a silly title (Sabrina the Teenage Witch, anyone?) – just as The Stand disposed of my prejudices against Stephen King.    Buffy had some seriously naff special effects, but it was never about that.  The scripts were so sharp, so funny, so packed with layers of references that throwaway lines are often key to a more weighty subtext and the characters never lose their plausibility however bonkers the storyline.    Through the medium of this fantasy with vampires, demons and all kinds of inhuman creatures, we’re exploring human relationships – teenagers and parents, sibling rivalries, sexual discovery and betrayal, bereavement and loss – in a fantastic context that allows these things to be explored in fresh and unexpected ways, that jolt us with their familiarity whilst we accept a narrative involving an ensouled vampire or a mayor turning into a giant snake.   For all the scary stuff (and there are some real shiver down the spine moments) the things that stay with you are the human elements – what Heritage calls ‘the fat streak of humanity’.

I quote Buffy all the time.  In daily life, and in this blog.  When I write about death, and how we deal with it, I go back again and again to this:

Which takes me back to Buffy, and the extraordinary words that Joss Whedon puts into the mouth of Anya (she’s a thousand-year-old vengeance demon, but don’t worry about that, the point is that she says the stuff that we feel, and think, but don’t say):

“I don’t understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she’s – There’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead anymore. It’s stupid. It’s mortal and stupid. And – and Xander’s crying and not talking, and – and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch ever, and she’ll never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why.” (‘The Body’, season 5)

And there are other moments that come back to me, inspire me.

There’s a cracking body-swap episode where Buffy and Faith swap places.  Faith, as Buffy, begins by mocking what she sees as Buffy’s humourless puritanism, practising in front of the mirror saying ‘Because it’s wrong’, po-facedly. And then later, confronted with the reality of evil, and knowing that she could walk away, instead asserts that she will stop that evil from killing its intended victims, ‘Because it’s wrong’.

And then there’s the finale.

MONTAGE

That montage was really important to me.  I wrote this, a couple of years back:

That bit where the potentials become actuals – that beautiful sequence of young women taking that power on, without understanding it but knowing that its theirs, and standing up, literally or figuratively… Lord, that moves me so much, I can’t even speak about it without choking up. Over the last, very tough, year, it has played in my head at so many moments when I’ve felt powerless and defeated, and made me stand up straighter too.

Buffy fans will argue endlessly about which episode or which series is best, or worst.  Each series has its advocates, even if there’s a pretty powerful consensus about episodes (‘Beer Bad’ is unlikely to feature as anyone’s favourite, though I could be proved wrong…) – any ‘best of’ list would have to include ‘The Body’, cited above.  And ‘Hush’, and ‘Once More with Feeling’.  And those three episodes illustrate the sheer variety of the series.

The first is a viscerally powerful portrayal of death and grief.   It nods briefly to the vampire slayer role but fundamentally it’s about humanity, and mortality.  It’s known as ‘the one without music’. ‘Once More with Feeling’ is of course the one with music, and ‘Hush’ is the one without dialogue (virtually).  In ‘The Body’ the ‘big bad’ is death itself.  In ‘Once More…’ and ‘Hush’ both the compulsion to sing and dance, and the inability to speak, are demonic, but their outworkings emphasise humanity – our failure to communicate, the way in which our fear of losing those we love leads us to hide part of ourselves from them.

And whilst Series 7 is not many people’s favourite, I think that one of the reasons why it stays with me, has become part of me, that it allows us to see these characters that we’ve followed through multiple apocalypses, many of whom we love,  so damaged and scarred.   Not bouncing back with a merry quip, not any more.   We used to mock so many TV series in the 70s in which, whatever happened in the episode, whatever traumas, terrors, dangers and disasters were visited upon the characters, at the end they got to go home and have tea, and have a bit of a chuckle.  Buffy never did that – if there was a gag at the end it was tightly tied in with the preceding narrative, and had a bit of a kick to it, or a poignancy that stopped it being trite.  But here over a whole series (and going back to S6) we see these battered veterans, hanging on as best they can to their loyalties and loves and to whatever humour they can find, but unable to be what they were, carrying the weight of so many losses.  It’s right we left them there, but I’m glad we got to go that far.

There are so many aspects to Buffy that I haven’t even touched upon.  Cos what I really want to do right now is to dust down those DVDs and go back to Series 1, Episode 1.  Back to the Hellmouth.

Buffy – the best bits: Harvest, Innocence, The Wish, Doppelgangland, Hush, The Body, The Gift, Tabula Rasa, Once More with Feeling, Chosen.

Lucy Mangan’s Guardian tribute