But Buffy had another destiny as well – as the harbinger of the current ‘Golden Age of Television’. When the show premiered in 1997, it seemed at worst a joke, at best a novelty destined for a short life. Instead it contained the seeds of a startling number of trends to come for the medium. Of course, Buffy was a watershed moment for the portrayal of young women on television, giving us a witty, smart heroine uniquely equipped to do no less than save the world. And it brought vampires back well before the age of Twilight. But it also innovated in more artful ways: combining fantasy and grounded realism in a way that prefigured everything from Alias and Lost to Jane the Virgin and the many superhero shows we have today; displaying a postmodern self-consciousness that’s ubiquitous in current programming; and experimenting with the form of television itself via a silent episode and a musical episode. In short, Buffy showed us what television could do, and was about to do.

Buffy’s maiden run in pop culture came in a 1992 film starring Kristy Swanson and written by Joss Whedon. The writer had envisioned a movie that would subvert horror clichés: he told Time magazine that he’d thought, "I would love to see a movie in which a blonde wanders into a dark alley, takes care of herself and deploys her powers." But director Fran Ruben Kuzui turned Whedon’s script into “a broad comedy,” as Whedon later said, instead of adhering to his original vision of a “scary film about an empowered woman”. The result was a poorly reviewed flop. A few years later, Whedon brought his original vision to television, which turned out to suit it better, allowing an unfolding mythology and a coming-of-age story that could develop over a number of years.

Girl power

The two-hour series premiere first aired in the United States on The WB network on 10 March 1997. In it Buffy, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, tried to start her life fresh at a new school only to find herself pulled back into the slayer duties she thought she’d left behind when she moved. Critics loved its genre-mashing from the start; Time magazine called it “the most talked-about show to have debuted in the past months”. The magazine added, “Buffy churns a wry, ongoing parable of the modern woman's greatest conflict: the challenge to balance personal and professional life.” Throughout the first season, the show followed a fairly linear progression, with each episode featuring a monster-of-the-week for Buffy to vanquish with the help of her friends Xander and Willow and ‘Watcher’-turned-school librarian Giles, played by English actor Anthony Head.