PSA: Buffy slays her last (for me)

I’ve watched the entire run of BtVS as of yesterday, when I saw the last two episodes with a sporadically attendant Prince C. (He punctuated his watching of Buffy with fixing Betty’s passenger-side seatbelt and door armrest, so I’m certainly not complaining.)

It’s taken me three years, or thirteen years, depending on whether you count from the time I started watching my DVD collection from episode one or from the first time I ever saw Buffy on TV, and there’s a preternatural, intuitive sense to how it’s gone. As a teen, I loved the first two and a half seasons of Buffy – very clear moral imperatives with jokes and the undead will get every teen, I think – but I stopped watching when the morals got complex.

And so as an adult, I rewatched the first two seasons of Buffy with a bit more than the respect I had for Dawson’s Creek (which after all was a watercooler show when it first started, and for similar reasons; smart, snappy dialogue and will-they-won’t-they tensions [which is also, I would say, why X-files worked so well those first few years]). I watched season 3, recalling more than I’d thought I would (apparently I watched the whole thing in high school), and left a long blank before trying out 4. Last year I picked up 5 and was struck by its moral complexity and the way it dealt with death in particular – in the past month, I’ve watched seasons 6 and 7, all but the last two episodes of 7 over two Buffyrific days.

This is a formidable show, despite its reputation as a teenagery, vampirey melodrama.

I suspect that the main reason it didn’t stay on the air is its evolution. If it took me 13 years to get from season 1 to season 7, it probably took all the 14-year-olds that long. Buffy grew up too quickly for her first audience and would have had to pick up another one on the way. Many of her original fans would likely have died out. Not many shows require a complete changeover (or maturing) of audience halfway through.

I suppose as the Slayer, Buffy should have been used to needing to grow up too fast and being left alone in the end, though.