by Emily Maesar, Associate Editor, TVJawn

One of the easiest decisions for a studio, especially for the risk adverse ones (aka all of them), is to create a television series based off of already existing idea. From an adaptation of a book, to an already existing film, if there’s a fan base inherently built into it, then it might just be worth expanding on. No matter how big that fandom is. And that’s what this rotating column will be about. Specifically, we’ll be focusing on stories that went from the big screen to the little screen. What makes them work, what makes them fail, and if their legacies can stand the test of time. 

So, since I’m kicking everything off, I have no choice but to talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not only is it one of the most influential stories to me, but it’s also vitally important to popular culture at large, in the modern era. I talked about it very lightly in my first column of You Can’t Sit With Us, from all the way back in January, and I still stand by it. What’s interesting about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however, is that while the film is fun… the adaptation of that story into a television series, almost five years later, is what’s historical.

Released in 1992, the film version of Buffy was written by Joss Whedon and directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui. Kristy Swanson was cast as Buffy (our vampire slayer) and Donald Sutherland as Merrick (our watcher). Luke Perry played the love interest, Rutger Hauer was the antagonist, and, in one of the most fun turns of his career, Paul Rubens played a hentchmen vampire.

The film kicks off when Merrick finds Buffy, a cheerleader in Los Angeles, to inform her that she’s the Slayer. She’s the chosen one, meant to fight and kill vampires, and he’s to train her and be her guide to saving the world. She doesn’t believe him, until she does, at which point vampires start attacking her classmates and terrorizing her school. Extremely classic hero’s journey stuff. 

The film… wasn’t a great success. At least not financially. It was made for around $7 million, opened to $4.5 million, before it wrapped up around $16 million. Certainly not the worst box office in history, but a success it was not. It wasn’t without it’s fans, though. Or at least Whedon’s original script wasn’t. See, the film you see wasn’t as Whedon wrote it. His script was seemingly too dark with things like Merrick’s suicide were replaced with him being killed and Buffy brurning down the gym to kill all the vampires was simply cut from the story. Not to mention that the jokes in Whedon’s version were seen as being too niche and specific. Which, given that it’s Joss Whedon, seems pretty accurate. 

Now, I don’t think the film is bad by any means. I actually quite like how campy and fun it is. It’s certainly broader than Whedon would have liked, but it fits in well with the tone, pacing, and character building of teen films like it at the time. Regardless of genre. But Whedon’s script was still praised in the industry, aided by him denouncing the final version of the film.

Enter Gail Berman. 

At the time, she was the president and CEO of Sandollar Television. So, a fun side note is that Sandollar Productions was Dolly Parton’s company and they’d bought the original film script in 1991 from Whedon. Because of that they still owned the rights, so Gail Berman reapproached Whedon about potentially writing Buffy as a pilot, instead, based on his original ideas. 

Which is exactly what happened in 1997, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered a two-part pilot on The WB. The show took elements from the original script (like Buffy burning the gym down) and set itself after the events of the original feature script. Buffy Summers, now played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, moves with her mother to the fictional town of Sunnydale. She already knows she’s The Slayer, but is trying to make a new life for herself. In fact, Buffy would love to leave all the vampire slaying in Los Angeles thank you very much! Except she’s got a new watcher, Rupert Giles (played by Anthony Head, originally credited as Anthony Steward Head for the run of the series) and something extremely bad is happening in Sunnydale.

Even compared to the way the film ended up, I think that the series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer really works as an adaptation. It’s a great reimagining of the pitch of the story, that’s manipulated well to fit inside of the “monster-of-the-week” and “we’d like to be syndicated” parameters of television in the mid-1990s. In the film, for instance, the slayer and the watcher are both (seemingly) reincarnated generation to generation. In the show, however, there’s a Council of Watchers who train to keep an eye on supernatural comings and goings, including looking after the current Slayer. And while there is only one Slayer, when she dies a new Slayer is called upon. She is not a reincarnation of the one before, but the spirit of The Slayer lives on inside her for as long as she breathes. Oh, and Sunnydale is on a Hellmouth - which is what keeps the monsters coming week after week. That, plus the addition of magic, demons, and ultimate evil allowed the series to run for seven years and become a cultural phenomenon. 

And there’s really no way to express quite the chokehold Buffy had, and continues to have, on popular culture. The largest audience the series ever had was slightly less than 8 million, but that was a rare surge in viewership, all things considered. (ER was the highest viewed show that same year, clocking in with an average audience of over 17 million.) So, despite not having a huge audience, Buffy ended up being an incubator for writers who would go on to write in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (from Whedon himself doing features and shaping the initial few phases, to the Netflix and ABC shows). Writers also went on to work on Game of Thrones, Battlestar Galactica, and Once Upon a Time. Not to mention those who would do things like Drew Goddard, who wrote Cloverfield, World War Z, and The Martian, on top creating Marvel’s Daredevil series for Netflix and directing episodes of The Good Place. You also have Marti Noxon, who was an EP for Buffy at the end of its run, who would go on to create Lifetime’s UnREAL and HBO’s Sharp Objects. 

And it’s easy to look at all those properties and see the influence that Buffy had on them. Not just anecdotally in the way that writers’ rooms were run, or the types of people who were hired, but also in how the stories were plotted, how characters spoke, and the types of fans who flocked to them. It’s a straight line, and it’s beyond interesting to be able to trace so many elements of popular culture and media back to this weird little show. 

However, as influential as Buffy the Vampire Slayer ultimately was… it also remains as this beacon of the very vocal white feminism of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some elements are still empowering and culturally significant moments, but I often wonder what a modern, first watch would be like. Gotta say, I don’t think it would fare too well. Like, Buffy is my favorite show of all time, but fucking yikes for a lot of the series. I take no offense to people not liking it, especially if they’re not coming at it with any nostalgia. A lot of which I think can be tied to the era it was made in, but I also think so much of what makes the series messy ends up coming from the showrunner, himself.

Which brings us to the Joss Whedon of it all. Whedon is… messy. To literally say the least. I’m not really here to completely annihilate the man. The men and women who were most affected by his choices, behaviors, and general self have done that well enough in the last five plus years. From his ex-wife Kai Cole, to Charisma Carpenter who played Cordelia on Buffy, to multiple cast members of The Justice League. There’s no shortage of people who can talk, at length, about the harm Joss Whedon has caused. But I think it’s important to mention here because of the cultural impact Buffy the Vampire Slayer continues to have.

For a lot of the film to TV adaptations that will get covered in this column, I think that Buffy the Vampire Slayer might be one of the most successful. However, I think it’s legacy leaves much to be desired. I think the generation of women and girls who found emotional catharsis in the series, myself among them, took what we needed from Whedon’s second wave feminist ideals and moved swiftly onward. To look back on the series and not recognize the racism, homophobia, and general misogyny that exists (and persists), is a disservice to the parts of the show that were genuinely good and that changed things for the better - or at least for the more interesting. 

I think in its own way, Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be a model for how we, and a learning and growing audience, can re-engage with things that are important to us (and culture at large), but that are also disappointingly messy. I think often of the way we engage with Harry Potter and JK Rowling, specifically, with this conversation. Like, it’s a bit of a different beast because while Joss Whedon was the architect of Buffy, a lot of people are involved in film and television. Buffy isn’t really his, at least not in the same way Harry Potter is JKR’s. But I feel like, at least on the whole, Buffy fans are much more willing to push Whedon off the pedestal they allowed him to climb onto in the first place. 

And, really, I hope that ends up being the ultimate legacy of the series, because I think it’s a pretty healthy one.