“Isaac’s been telling me to watch Buffy since freshman fall,” my friend Eug laughs. We’re hanging out with someone they know from growing up who’s touring Penn.
“I love television,” I say.
“He loves bad television.”
“I love good television, and I love bad television, and I really love when television is mostly good but sometimes the worst thing you’ve ever seen in your life,” I clarify.
“And that’s Buffy?” asks this kid, small and blinking, backlit by the sunlight filtering through the door of Metropolitan Bakery, where I’ve spent the past three years getting coffee before Street meetings.
When I was in his position, 17 and terrified and more terrified than anything that I was showing it, it had been a year since I finished watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’d started it at 13 with my mom (she was too old for it when it was airing; I wasn’t born yet), and it took us ages to get through it together. We’re busy people—I’ve had a Google Calendar exploding with all the color blocks of the rainbow for as long as I can remember—and we weren’t particularly consistent about our watch, but shortly after I turned 16, we finished the project we’d embarked on three years prior.
Standing in Metro, hungover from my last–ever theater kid party (eight years of lighting design done just like that), looking down on someone about to start what I’m finishing, I find that the only thing I can think about is Buffy.
It’s been on my mind a lot recently, between the passing of Michelle Trachtenberg and my friend Kayli’s frequent texts to me about David Boreanaz on Bones, and as I slog through the slopfest procedural that is 9-1-1 and engross myself in medical dramas like Grey’s Anatomy and The Pitt, remembering how much I like a monster–of–the–week format. It’s with me when I feel the first real rays of sun of the year hit my skin, and I remember that, despite what I’ve spent the past three years thinking, I am not going to move to California.
Before I thought I’d get lost on the West Coast, I grew up on the East. I started Buffy when I was 13 years old in the heart of New York City. You’re a lot of things when you’re 13. Mostly, I was scared. I was young and unready for high school in a year and dreading summer camp as I inched towards it, day by day. I was an avid reader, and I’d never watched much television (I wasn’t allowed before then, before I started this ritual with my mom). And I loved my mom, and I was excited to spend more time with her.
I don’t think either of us were expecting Buffy to have one of the most touching, heartfelt, and real depictions of a complicated relationship between a mother and her child that I’ve ever seen. It’s a not insignificant part of the show, the relationship between the titular Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her mom Joyce (Kristine Sutherland). When Joyce died unexpectedly in the middle of season five, I remember my mom crying. I remember hugging her tight, tight, tight. I remember having a moment of gratitude, for her, for this show, for us getting to experience this moment together.
The show does what any good teenage–supernatural–drama does: make metaphors. Buffy fights vampires, yeah, but they’re representative of something more. It’s easier to deal with your problems when you can put a wooden stake in them.
Joyce’s death is different. The point of Joyce’s death, sudden and brutal and due to entirely non–supernatural causes, is that there are some things you can’t fight with fists or weapons. Grief hits you like a truck; depression upends your life. Buffy sinks.
But she doesn’t drown. I grew up with Buffy, and I grew up with Buffy. I went to high school and had a pretty terrible time. Buffy went to high school and slew literal demons. I held her with me, and I got through it.
I moved to Beijing right after I finished the show, 16 and still terrified but a lot more sure of myself than I’d been when I started. Buffy was going onto a new chapter of her life, following the end of the series, and so was I. I watched Community and fell further in love with television, fell further in love with all the weird and wondrous things it could be. I thought to myself—maybe there’s a future for me in this. Maybe I can take Buffy with me forever. Maybe I can make something, someday, that some scared kid will feel brave watching, too.
COVID–19, fleeing back to America, a shitty shitty senior year. It’s kind of a blur. I rewatched a lot of Season 6 that year, letting it course through me like magic–as–a–metaphor–for–struggle coursed through the veins of Buffy’s best friend, Willow (Alyson Hannigan). Cutting class and wishing something would happen, that I’d get bit by a vampire, or magic would become real, or anything. For better or for worse, it’s still my favorite season. It let me be unhappy. It didn’t judge.
Next phase. In Season 4, Buffy heads off to college. So do I. I sticker my laptop with purpose the way season one Buffy dresses with intention before her first day at a new school. Who am I? Nice Jewish Boy. Truss of lights. A quote from Almost Famous. MTA stickers, what a New Yorker. A TV set that I’d end up getting tattooed on my thigh two years later in the sunny summer heat of LA, solidifying a future I’d run away from one year after that. Veronica Mars, of course (I love getting into shows 20 years too late, it seems). And, in the corner, a small square of Willow and Buffy at Sunnydale High, smiling at me.
College was different from high school. More television, more friends, less Buffy, though it’s still central enough to me that everyone knows it’s my capital–t Thing. Splashy chromatic poster above my bed, along with eight different X–Men comics, oh yeah, I’m cool.
After sophomore year, I follow through on those urges I felt back in Beijing. I chase Buffy to her birthplace, Los Angeles, where I spend two summers working at three production companies, hoping that I’ll find that way I wanted to give back to her by making Something Big.
Coverage is fun. Assistant work is … less fun, but it comes naturally to me. I tell myself that I’m doing this for a reason. I’m going to sell a pilot. I’m going to make—well, I’m not going to make Buffy, but I’ll make something worthwhile. Something that some other kid will carry with them for eight years of growth. Something that will be inspirational. Aren’t I grand?
On my 21st birthday in my second (and last) summer in LA, I watch I Saw The TV Glow. It’s a love letter to Buffy. I am 21 and swimming in a show I miraculously found so long ago, revived after its lifetime, what a vampire. It has sunk its teeth fully into me. I’ve chased Buffy’s summer sun and her confidence and my love of television, and I’m trying to convince myself that it’s worth it, even though there’s not much here that I think is worth sticking around for. I’ve found myself three thousand miles away from home, and I’m happy. I think I’m happy. This can’t be happy.
I do a legal shot. Hooray!
I decide that I’m never going to California again.
Senior year’s better, season–7–Buffy–er, in the sense that I’m more secure, more hardened, making new friends and reconciling with old enemies. Street isn’t a half–bad place to work, I have to say, and neither is the WXPN radio station at 6:30 in the morning. I watch a lot of vampire movies. I write a lot of articles. I turn down a job I would have killed to get a year ago because I just don’t want to do it anymore, and when I tell my mom, she accepts it and supports it with her usual love and kindness. I can feel Joyce Summers’ hands on Buffy’s shoulders as my mom sits with me on the phone, calming me down, reminding me that, despite my best efforts, I don’t actually have to go it alone.
People pivot. Buffy becomes a guidance counselor, I become an editor. It’s fulfilling, for both of us. Who knew?
It gets better. It gets a whole lot worse, too, and I’ve felt that as well; I’m no stranger to bad feelings, even though I’m nowhere near as miserable as I was in high school. But like Buffy does time and time again, I get through it. I stake a beast in the heart.
You can’t fight fate, and that doesn’t mean any depressing predestined bullshit—it just means that sometimes bad things happen, and you roll with the punches as best you can. Buffy has superhuman strength, and superhuman healing. I have reruns of a '90s show and a couple thousand words I’ve written about it. I have a magazine to write for and a new path, one that has me writing less TV and writing more about it. I have a feeling that I’m going to be okay, in the end, even if I’m unsure now; I won’t write the next Buffy, but when the next Buffy comes around, I’ll be the first to write about it.
I’m about to turn 22, the age that Buffy and her friends were when the show came to a close after seven seasons. I’m about to turn 22, and I’m standing in fucking Metropolitan Bakery hungover as hell looking down at a kid who’s looking up to me, and I can’t help but think about the first TV show I ever loved.
“What are we gonna do now?” asks Buffy’s little sister in the final line of the final episode of the final season of this show that has gotten me through almost half of my life.
Buffy smiles. I shrug. We’ll both figure it out.
