Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The cheerleader who was also the chosen one. Sarah Michelle Gellar's Buffy Summers staked vampires over the Hellmouth beneath her high school, and the show's mix of monster-of-the-week horror, teen angst, and quippy dialogue made it a genre-defining WB touchstone.
Created by Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on The WB on March 10, 1997. Whedon rebuilt it from his 1992 film of the same name, whose comedic tone he had disowned — same premise, new show. Gellar played Buffy Summers, a California teen destined to slay the vampires and demons pouring out of the Hellmouth under Sunnydale High, backed by her "Scooby Gang": Willow, Xander, and her watcher Giles.
The blend of supernatural action and sharp, funny teen drama made it a WB flagship and a critical darling, with seasons two and three often cited as its creative peak and the doomed Buffy–Angel romance as its emotional core. It never pulled huge numbers — original airings often reached four to six million viewers — but its cultural footprint was enormous, and experimental episodes like the near-silent "Hush" and the musical "Once More, with Feeling" became legendary. It spawned the spin-off Angel in 1999.
The show moved to UPN for its final two seasons and ended on May 20, 2003, after seven seasons and 144 episodes. It's routinely ranked among the greatest TV series ever made, launched an entire field of academic "Buffy studies," and generated hundreds of tie-in novels, comics, and games — the definitive teen-supernatural show of its era.
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