‘Buffy’ Turns 20: Looking Back on the Great First Episode
On March 10, 1997, the WB — your TV destination for 7th Heaven and Dawson’s Creek — debuted a new show. In its opening moments, two high schoolers, a boy and a girl, sneak into a classroom late at night. You get the distinct impression they’re looking for a place to make out. There’s a crash and a thud, and the girl, alarmed, cries out, “What’s that?” but the guy, all swagger, calms her fears. He leans in for a kiss and … the girl bites him on the neck and starts slurping his blood. Fade to black, and then the opening credits.
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Right from the start, before we’ve even seen the title character of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there’s ample suggestion that this is not going to be your usual supernatural show. (Fun fact: Supernatural premiered on the WB eight years later, in 2005.) In that opening scene, by having the girl — she’s the vampire Darla, by the way, played by Julie Benz — feign a swoon and then easily overpower the boy, writer-creator Joss Whedon pulled a then-unusual switcheroo: The “helpless” girl got the better of the cocky guy. Girl power would continue to be Whedon’s overriding theme for a total of seven seasons, establishing Buffy as one of the most influential, admired, and culturally predictive shows in the history of television.
Watching again today, the pilot episode for Buffy the Vampire Slayer — titled “Welcome to the Hellmouth” — remains a hot-blooded pleasure. It rarely feels dated, unless you count a joke that name-checks John Tesh and a comment about how dreamy James Spader is to high schoolers. Part of the reason for the Buffy pilot’s timelessness is that Whedon was inventing a new way of TV-talking — a certain speech cadence (“Morbid much?”), a certain way of constructing pop culture references — that would be quickly adopted in writers’ rooms both then and on to the present day. It’s safe to say that nearly every character in shows ranging from The OC to Veronica Mars to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is fluent in Buffy-speak, on a conscious or subconscious level.
Countless heroes have warned villains that they’re about to get an ass-whupping, but when Buffy warned Darla by saying, “This isn’t going to be pretty: We’re talking violence, strong language, adult content” — well, no one had phrased a threat with such TV-savvy self-consciousness, yet with such a light touch. Whedon had a way of tucking laugh lines into the simplest phrases — as when Alyson Hannigan’s Willow tells a puzzled Nicholas Brendon’s Xander to meet her at “the library, where the books live” — that was novel and exciting. You wanted to laugh out loud when Buffy describes David Boreanaz’s Angel as being “gorgeous, in an annoying sort of way” but you didn’t dare, lest you miss her quick assertion to the tweedy British librarian and vampire “watcher” Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) that, yes, she’d be willing to kill a few vampires, but, “It’s just that I’m not gonna get all extracurricular about it.”
It was Whedon’s brilliant idea to make a high school the site of a “hellmouth” — a “center of mystical energy,” a throbbing locus of evil, which was, if you thought about it for a second, exactly the way you thought about high school when you were of high school age. It was his further brilliance to make vampirism a metaphor for young love. The way the slayer Buffy and the vampire Angel fed off each other, hungrily and insatiably — Whedon was able to get away with a degree of sexual tension that would have been otherwise forbidden on network television.
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Everything the series would become is all there in the pilot, right from the start. Buffy is forever the lonely outsider who can’t tell most of her classmates how much power she really possesses. The opening hour is Buffy’s first day at her new school in Sunnydale; she and her single mom (Kristine Sutherland) have just moved in. Why? Because Buffy burned down the gym in her previous school — she did it because it was vampire-infested, but to whom could she confide that? Not even dear old Mom.
We meet Buffy’s soon-to-be best buds, Willow and Xander, the stuffy but solicitous Giles, the initially elusive and flirty Angel (he actually says to Buffy, “Don’t worry, I don’t bite”), and Charisma Carpenter’s vain mean girl, Cordelia. We’re taken to the Bronze — the only suitably seedy music club in what Cordelia describes as “a one-Starbucks town” — to hear some of that pop-grunge music that was all the rage back then.
The hour moves swiftly, peaking with the reveal of the Master (Mark Metcalf), a powerful demon who would prove to be the first season’s primary villain — or in Buffy-speak, the show’s first “Big Bad,” soon to be a universal term among the TV-savvy. Actually, on that night in 1997, the WB aired the second episode right after the pilot, and Whedon’s second script was as tight as the first, further fleshing out the characters and giving Giles a couple of long swatches of dialogue to explain Buffy’s unique status as “the Chosen One,” the once-in-a-generation vampire slayer, with tips on vamp-killing and how to tiptoe around the perimeter of a hellmouth.
Sarah Michelle Gellar, a virtual unknown cast in the title role, is both heartbreakingly fragile (so small-boned, her hair wispy and flyaway) and yet startlingly tough (so cleverly sarcastic, so precise with a wooden stake through the hearts of bad guys). At the time, TV critics had to beg adult viewers to watch a show with such a ludicrous-seeming title. Soon enough, the growing cult for the show was sure they’d found something they hadn’t known they’d needed: a reservoir of feminist empowerment filled with blood and wit.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is available to stream on Netflix.
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