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Buffy the Vampire Slayer
1997 · TV series · 7 seasons
Created by Joss Whedon
ComedyDramaScience FictionFantasy
Into every generation a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their number. She is the Slayer.
16 positive4 negative18 neutralfrom 38 commenters
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44 comments on Hacker News
I agree about the difference between "great episodes with gimmicks" and "episodes with great gimmicks" and I'd put the SNW musical episode into the latter - it was them having fun with the whole premise and probably shouldn't be considered canon.
Personally, I enjoy it when writers/producers try out an experiment and have particular episodes that don't really fit in with the themes and expectations of the series as a whole, but they do tend to polarise people.
The classic example that I think of with regards to musical episodes is the Buffy The Vampire Slayer epsiode "Once More, With Feeling". Joss Whedon had been experimenting with different concepts, such as "Hush" (the opposite of a musical episode) and "The Body" (stunning piece of television in my view), so throwing in a musical episode wasn't completely unexpected, but that particular episode pushed forwards and resolving some major plot points with characters revealing deep secrets.
(It's interesting that the three Buffy episodes I mentioned are considered the best episodes despite them having dramatically different styles).
It’s really amazing how some Blu-ray do in fact manage to be net-worse than early dvd or even vhs, but it’s true.
An infamous case is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv show. The Blu-ray (edit: and streaming copies) went back to the film source, which is good, but… that meant losing the color grading and digital effects, because the final show wasn’t printed to film. Not only did they get lazy recreating the effects, they don’t seem to have done scene-by-scene color grading at all. This radically alters the color-mood of many scenes, but worse, it harms the legibility of the show, because lots of scenes were shot day-for-night and fixed in post, but now those just look like they’re daytime, so it’s often hard to tell when a scene is supposed to be taking place, which matters a lot in any show or film but kinda extra-matters in one with fucking vampires.
The result is that even a recorded-from-broadcast VHS is arguably far superior to the blu ray for its colors, which is an astounding level of failure.
(There are other problems with things like some kind of ill-advised auto-cropping seeming to have been applied and turning some wide shots into close-ups, removing context the viewer is intended to have and making scenes confusing, but the colors alone are such a failure that a poor VHS broadcast recording is still arguably better just on those grounds)
I assume you mean it's not really worth watching if it's currently on broadcast TV?
Surely there's a huge list of old broadcast TV network shows that are worth watching, and that still suffer from the ad-break problem to various degrees.
Obviously I'm pulling from a wide time-period, and I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide, but off the top of my head, I think these are/were all worth watching: Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Community, Schitt's Creek, The Office, The X-Files, various Star Trek series, Cheers
That list could be easily improved on, but I assume it's missing your point anyway if you were only talking about current broadcast network TV (if it exists :) )
You jest, but that's already a pretty decent Buffy the vampire slayer episode
I lived through that time as well by 1999 it was pretty clear Google was "the best" search engine site. Alternatives like Lycos, Infoseek, Altavista etc. were on the downswing.
I can remember the characters in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer talking about Google (not sure if that counts as household awareness but it was getting there).
1999 was the time of Napster, it was a completely different internet it really felt like a Wild West.
Indeed, all post-processing will need to be done again, and sometimes they do a questionable job, like in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So there is a lot of challenges with a remaster.
Still, the possibility to extract more information is there, which is a plus for film. With AI, I feel the opposite. I like it that it's fun, but I dislike it that AI creates new information. What's again exciting for me is the possibility of extracting information from a moving picture from movements, and over time. I think these two angles are currently under-utilized, but hold much potential, once we discover more techniques and throw more processing power over the problem.
What about shows set in USA with heroes who are vulnerable to gunfire? There’s a good half hour in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where a vampire lays in wait for Buffy, with a rifle loaded and ready. The show didn’t end on that episode. At least one of Buffy’s friends knew what could be done with computers, and researched floor plans and “ancient lore” online.
Can writers plot a story in any given milieu? Yes. Sometimes they do seem lazy.
This article immediately brought to mind a particular conversation in season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...
Jenny: "Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?"
Giles: "The smell."
Jenny: "Computers don't smell, Rupert."
Giles: "I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a - it, uh, it has no no texture, no-no context. It's-it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly."
Quote from the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 6, episode 7, Once More, With Feeling (2001):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_More,_with_Feeling_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer)
Reminds of a certain Buffy episode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_More,_with_Feeling_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer)
I just checked it with a random query while watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns, and it wasn't great. (Spoiler alerts)
"How did Buffy the Vampire Slayer die?"
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer died in the Season One finale when she threw herself into a portal to save her sister Dawn[1]. This was the first time Buffy had died, occurring on June 2, 1997[2]. She died again in the Season Five finale while fighting off Glory's demons[3]. Other characters such as Anya and Kevin Benedict also died during the series[4][5]."
Okay, so it was a trick question, because Buffy definitely died more than once, but it's conflated the fact that she died in Season 1 with the cause of her Season 5 death. Also, I had to Google Kevin Benedict to remember that he was Cordelia's sometimes boyfriend, and an extremely minor character, which makes me question how that death is more notable than Buffy's mom, or Tara, or Jenny Calendar, etc.
I like that this seems to have been more lexical confusion than how ChatGPT seems to enjoy filling empty spaces with abject lies, but perhaps it's worth exploring what you're asking it that has left it with such a great batting average?
This is somewhat anecdotal, but the immigrants I know who have made the most successful linguistic transition to America did so by watching a ton of American media: watching TV + movies and listening to music. See how English-speaking people speak and practice imitating them. Practice imitating some of the most well-known movie quotes. And try and talk to people if you can.
Offhand, it might sound dumb and a little dated now, but a show that I think shows off a lot of interesting speech patterns to check out is Buffy the Vampire Slayer: there all kinds of English-speaking accents and very interesting colloquial style speech patterns there.
I remember living in the UK 20 years ago when my friend had got into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He insisted I watch some episodes. But because the target demographic was 'nerdy night owls' on a non-prestige TV channel, they cheaped out on the conversion and by the end of each 45 minute episode the dialog had gone badly out of sync.
My friend insisted I was just imagining it, but only one of us went on to have a career doing post-production in the US market. To be completely frank I've looked down on UK/EU broadcast techs a little ever since because being able to set everything to 25fps and forget about it is easy street.
They did a fabulous job of the Star Trek transfers (I’m currently watching the original series).
However, some studios put very little effort into their film to HD transfers. Last year, I watched Buffy, the Vampire Slayer on Disney+ and its transfer from film is woefully bad. For certain scenes, the picture quality looked like upscaled standard definition and these transitions were very jarring. Also, whatever filter they used for grain removal made the flesh tones and facial features look “wrong”.
Even worse was the wholly unnecessary conversion from 4:3 to 16:9. The resulting composition of many scenes was distractingly bad. At one stage, they the second camera unit can be seen filming the action from the side!
Edit: Fortunately, Disney+ have made The Simpsons (another transfer from film) available in 4:3 – as well as the default 16:9. There’s a setting in the UI to play it in 4:3.
It seems like strong shows can go up to about 7 seasons and remain good. Three does seem short for a very strong show.
Maybe personal bias, but it seems to hold up pretty well in my viewing history. Seinfeld definitely felt stretched at 9. Star Trek TNG's seventh season definitely felt like about time to wrap it up. Simpsons went kind of wonky around season 8. Buffy the Vampire Slayer seemed good for a 7 season run.
Not some immutable law, but really good shows ending after 5 seasons seems a bit disappointing as well, like Babylon 5. Writers run out of ideas and the original concept seems explored pretty thoroughly after going through 7 seasons.
Three is way too short. Seven seems like the sweet spot. Maybe everyone just gets bored and they don't do stuff as well after seven seasons, but shows really start to change after season 7.
Those suicides happened about the time Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV Show came out.
I was in LA at the time. Buffy billboards everywhere. And then bam - mass suicide.
Ever since I’ve always connnected the two.
They used that a whole bunch for the mirror scenes in Quantum Leap where Sam would look in the mirror and see himself as whoever he leaped into and there was someone else in the scene. That series was a boon for actors who had identical twins.
The other identical twin thing I remember was an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Xander was split into two, one of him all his strengths and the other all his weaknesses. Nicholas Brendon's twin brother was used in the scenes where there were two Xanders in one shot.
I love this guide to the key Buffy episodes. There's no way I could re-watch the whole show, but this looks achievable. I wish there were more guides like this.
https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-an-episode-roadmap-for-beginners/
I watched the first season of Arrow but it was a bit of a slog towards the end, and never got anywhere with season 2. It showed a lot of promise it almost delivered on. Maybe I should give it another go, but a guide like this would be invaluable.
Comedy is extremely situational — first scene in first episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer made somebody dying funny — so if OP says someone was witty when they did something, they almost certainly were.
The 13th floor. I liked it better than Matrix because it touched upon the ethical issues dealing with AR and potentially sentient simulated beings.
12 Monkeys. Probably my favorite time travel movie, and the trouble with fate.
Grave of the Fireflies. Probably the saddest movie ever made, touching on so many aspects of human suffering.
Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run). It's been done so many times, but not as well as here.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "The Body". The show itself was basically mindless entertainment that I almost stopped watching, UNTIL this episode. I've never been thrown so much. If you're going to experience it, you MUST watch the entire series up to and including that episode to understand why it's so powerful, and you must not read anything about that episode beforehand.
> So...you're upset to see space opera played straight in your space opera?
No, I like space opera too. I'm upset that ST has become Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Space. (Don't get the wrong idea, I like Buffy too.)
> Have you forgotten entirely about S1 of TNG, or just chosen to ignore it?
You'll have to clue me in to what specifically you're referring to, I re-watched it last year but I don't want to guess at what you mean.
> DS9 is "not Roddenberry"
I agree. DS9 was, in part, created specifically to explore "not Roddenberry" directions in the ST universe.
There's a book, I can't find it at the moment, and I don't remember the title, but it's all excerpts from interviews with cast and crew. That's it. It's amazing.
Anyhow, I bring it up because, reading it, it became clear what, for me anyway, is the crucial defining aspect of ST that differentiates it from other sci-fi franchises: In ST, people in the future have gotten over their bullshit. They are emotionally mature, guided by reason and rationality and their higher values. That's the key difference (from say, Star Wars or Farscape or Firefly...) People in the future pretty much have their shit together.
Now this is something that some of the writers don't get. You find them complaining in their own words that Gene won't let them write an episode involving interpersonal drama between bridge crew. (Apparently this is really hard for some writers. No judgement intended.) It wasn't until after he died that Berman/Braga started to relax that.
Now to me, this is wrong (for ST) for two reasons:
First, it makes sense to me that these folks who fly around the galaxy in machines that can destroy worlds would have to be level-headed to use them w/o destroying themselves.
Second, and more importantly, that's a huge part of what made ST so endearing and appealing in the first place: the deep and abiding love that Kirk/Spock/McCoy (most obviously) and the rest of the crew (less obviously) feel for each other.
I mean, when Spock tells McCoy that he would also wish him to be present at his Pon farr, oh man, my eyes well up with tears.
When it comes down to it, the characters in the "real" ST (if I may) treat each other like members of a healthy family do, and that's wonderful to see (in any context, not just space operatic sci-fi.)
That's also the source of the "moral" superiority of Star Fleet: they actually are good guys. (And Vulcans don't lie.) You erode that and you've got Spaceballs.
> To be honest, I don't get the mockery angle at all. I mean, you're talking about a show whose first season not only has antimilitarism as a major through-line in the way Lorca's story plays out, but concludes with a war being ended by a couple of people having a conversation about why more fighting sucks for everyone, and implementing a clever technobabble-driven plan to bring about peace. There's a lot I don't love about Discovery - most of its second season, for a start - but come on, what could possibly be more Star Trek than that?
I've only seen ~4 minutes so I can't speak to the good things about the show, feeling mocked was my subjective response (I don't think the ST:D folks sat down and twirled their mustaches while contemplating how much they despise ST fans, hey?)
It was things like how the Klingons are space orcs; the Romulan guy looks like space Legolas the elf. The people wearing hoodies (why does everyone in space wear hoodies these days?) The gay guys are the only ones married? Why does the female lead have a masculine name? It seems like they're trying to tick the diversity boxes without actually rattling anybody's cages (and I say that as a SJW, pro-diversity.) The rolling spaceship is ridiculous, the flash illuminating the nebula was just idiotic. The whole thing feels superficial and lazy despite obviously being the result of a lot of hard work by a lot of skilled, talented people. Maybe they're just pandering to the tastes of a younger audience (with whom I am out of touch.)
Let me see if I can sum it up... Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones seem similar, yeah? But LotR is about Good vs. Evil whereas GoT is about aristocrats being really really shitty to each other. They are both entertaining, but I wouldn't let my kids watch the latter.
Cheers!
I remember one looking through the rule book for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG which had an interesting concept: players had a certain number of "plot points" (I forget exactly what they called them) which allowed them to overturn an unfortunate die roll. It was based on the idea that in the TV show, the main characters would often manage to get out of a tight spot through well-timed luck.
It makes good things I watch and enjoy. (Net value to me >> 0 )
It makes bad niche things I watch and mostly enjoy. ( Net value to me > 0)
It makes bad other-niche things I never have watched and rarely show up in my recommendations. (Net value to me = 0, +/- the tiny negative of rarely having to /browse past it/).
You’re arguing the negative of 3 is so large that it overwhelms 2, so much so that it subtracts from the value of 1, if I’ve understood you correctly.
I don’t find 3 that big a problem. What I find problematic is /how it identifies 2/.
“Oh, you watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Here’s a list of every shitty movie we ever found that had a teenage girl OR a vampire in it.”
It seems to have a very rough idea of tags, and then just show me everything with similar tags. Except the tags only rarely capture what I found attractive in the first place, and “shitty vampire movie” doesn’t do anything for me if my attraction was “witty coming of age series with supernatural overtones”.
I would have said Wikipedia is a questionable source on "open source software projects", period.
The idea that Apache software projects are too obscure to include, while every single individual episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a detailed article, is pretty typical of the site.
Think bigger! One of the best episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was almost entirely silent, and yet still featured the cleverness the show is known for. Some of the most evocative scenes in recent movies are largely dialog-free, such as several scenes in Roma, or Gravity. It isn't just Cuaron, either, remember Castaway?
Imagine a movie that can be watched with no sound but still tells the whole story. Now imagine the same movie can be listened to without seeing the screen, and again, tells the whole story.
The point of "show, don't tell," is to keep lazy or beginning writers from relying too heavily on assumptions about their readers. It doesn't mean "make things explode and don't worry about the plot making sense."
I own several TV's but I end up watching a lot of TV and Movies on my iPad anyways.
It's nice to pick it up and take with me to the bedroom, my desk, my dining room table, the bathroom, etc. Wherever I want to go, it follows.
Also, movies in particular have terrible audio mixing for in home usage. The dialogue is way too quiet and the effects are way too loud. I end up adjusting the volume on the TV the whole time I'm watching it. This is less of a problem on the iPad because I'm a lot closer to it.
16:9 TV's are also bad for watching movies. If I want the movie to be a reasonable size on my TV, I need a much larger TV than I actually want to have. Again the iPad fixes this issue by being close to my face.
edit: Also, watching 90's TV on Netflix is fantastic on the iPad because it lets you zoom in to the center of the 16:9, remastered show for a full screen, 4:3 viewing experience. It's great for Friends, the West Wing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which is not on netflix anymore), etc.
I am personally a huge advocate of not forcing this stuff on high schoolers, on the grounds that it has the effect of inhibiting them from ever getting into ever again because they think they already tried it. I believe we should find ways to get the same ideas across, but with works that are more approachable to people of that age, and build a pathway for them forward into the great works of the past instead of trying to teleport them directly to the end goal. But until people in general stop essentially celebrating how awesome it is that we force students into unpleasant and unapproachable works, and consider their distaste and writing off of literature forever as a sign that things are being done correctly, nothing will change.
I've often thought I could make a pretty decent literature-appreciation course around the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which, no sarcasm, is what really opened my eyes to these issues for the first time, somewhere in my mid-20s. It would piss people off who would assume that it simply can't be possible that we could learn how to appreciate literature from such an accessible and fun (and not-stuffy) source, but I know it can be.
This was clearly inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Doublemeat Palace" :)
Recipe inspired by Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Lots of hinting that fast food demons were eating people, but the eldritch secret of the Doublemeat Palace episode (2001) was that the Doublemeat Medley sandwich contained no meat whatsoever.
When I am watching a Netflix movie my (download) bandwidth between me and whatever computer is serving it is much higher than 10bps. By 5 to 6 orders of magnitude. And that bandwidth has been matched perfectly by evolution to my processing speed. Speeding it up so I can binge watch all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 40 seconds doesn't do me much good.
I guess Musk is talking about upload speed. I can't think of a whole lot of good reasons to increase my upload speed to anything much faster than typing and talking other than turning myself into a sensor for the hive mind.
That reminds me of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, on thanksgiving:
Anya: I love a ritual sacrifice.
Buffy: Not really a one of those.
Anya: To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It's a ritual sacrifice. With pie.
Funny this should come up today. I saw episode 1 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer last night, in which Mr Giles (the oh-so-British librarian) remarks "I'd much rather be at home with a cup of Bovril and a good book".
I, for one, am optimistic. Even though the JJ Abrams reboot movies sucked, he's not the only one who can do the work. There are hordes of people in Hollywood who grew up on Star Trek, love it properly, and want to bring back the spirit of exploration and optimism and the ensemble cast work that make the older series so compelling. I think the world needs a new Star Trek - one that isn't just shiny effects, but holds true to the sense of hope and courage that I loved and still love. And I know it can be done.
On the plus side, the quality of ensemble-cast science fiction tv writing has exploded over the past 15-20 years, starting with how Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer built season and multi-season story arcs that depended on character growth. I would love to see the sort of rich, passionate writing that made Firefly, Walking Dead, and other shows so effective applied to Star Trek!
And I'm a little biased toward the development of web-only series - some friends of mine are doing Cartoon Network's first web-only series, and I'm really hoping it succeeds spectacularly and points a new direction for CN. Fixed timeslots in general are a dated way of doing shows now. Timeshifting is the norm.
So yeah, hope for a bright future. And screw the Prime Directive.
Rock Band. Watching nerdy TV shows/movies with strong female characters (firefly, DS9, Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
Though the best way is probably to find female attendees and ask them what they want, or invite them to be part of the planning and to choose activities.
Rather than respond to a lot of different comments, I'll just note (and these comments are US-centric):
1. Because of the internet, recording technologies, etc., we have a much more accurate view of the relatively recent past than one had in the 1980s.
2. From the 50s to the 80s there was a huge change in societal attitudes vs. authority, order, etc. Nothing as dramatic has happened since. Cynicism has changed in its specifics, been put aside occasionally, etc., but since the stock market crash of 1987 and Iran/Contra took some of the bloom off the Reagan rose, there hasn't been a huge societal consensus, so there in particular hasn't been a huge societal consensus that was later shattered.
3. Sexual mores had a much bigger shift from the 50s to the 80s than from the 80s to the present; the 80s are when the view was adopted that sex was permissible but dangerous, and that's been the general societal attitude ever since.
4. I agree that modern filmmaking techniques emerged in the 1970s. Hollywood then regressed to the more commercial action blockbusters, but eventually technology evolved to the point that the same or even greater quality of storytelling was possible on television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was like a series of 1970s auteur movies of 22 * 47 minute duration. The same is true of Babylon 5, except that the dialogue (usually stolid at best, Londo & G'kar excepted) and special effects were more in the George Lucas vein. TV may have progressed even further since.
5. The internet brought tremendous changes to day-to-day life, especially if you include the rest of computing (PCs, video games, mobile phones) as well. I don't have a good answer for why that alone doesn't make the 1980s feel more distant than they do.
6. People never know many details of era before their own. This was brought home to me when my stepdaugher, who is a Middle East expert (e.g. relevant Master's degree from Harvard), couldn't get a Trivial Pursuit question whose correct answer was Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Also: Buffy the vampire slayer (season 4). It's a bit strange people make biblic references for such projects when the "don't you play God" theme (itself a variation on the myth of the golem) is, volens nolens, part of popular culture. Or maybe the team deliberately did it, as a kind of memo?
For context, I'm 34, and like many around here a bright teenager. One thing that I really missed was story coherency, the careful assembly of motivations, events, themes, and characters into a cohesive whole. I don't even know how to describe my standards for a good story as a youth, but they're wildly different than they are now, and in particular many of the things I enjoyed then I now consider incoherent nonsensical trash. Things like Star Trek Voyager, which I always found weak, but now I can explain that weakness, or Final Fantasy X, which merely slightly bothered me at the time, which I now realize is because it was so bad it managed to penetrate the thick fog of blissful ignorance I was living in, but only a little. On the other hand, many of the original Star Trek episodes actually make a great deal more sense to me now than they used to. (It's fun to read the Blish novelizations of them; without the campy 60s videography and terrible effects, the true quality of the underlying stories comes out more clearly.)
I woke up to this around 25 or so. It was actually Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series, of course, not the forgettable movie) that tripped this for me; I realized I cared far more about the characters than any campy horror show had any right to make me care, and I began to wonder why, and poke into the mechanics of how that was done. That turned out to be a longish and interesting journey.
(I know I've mentioned several media that aren't "reading" here, but it trivially applies there as well.)
I'd agree that we don't want all of that stuff, but there's something very wrong with the filtering process when niche historical material gets purged while every Buffy the Vampire Slayer character and episode has a detailed article.
The percentage of art qua art that is bullshit pretension simply used as a signalling device for an in-crowd of self-congratulatory people is not 100%.
But it's also not 0%.
Fortunately, I don't need to care. The art qua art crowd are welcome to their signalling parties and occasional strokes of insight, and I'm welcome to think the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer was really rather artistic, and by and large we two need not even cross paths to growl and yip at each other like two little teacup poodles viciously defending their turf on the matter of whose definition of art is correct. Viva la freedom.
"About two weeks ago, Jessie Stricchiola let me know that her Wikipedia page had been deleted. Apparently, she wasn’t notable enough."
Apparently, every fictional character from every forgotten TV show seems to merit their own page (see, for example, the amount of space that Wikipedia devotes to "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and its cast of characters). It's hard to imagine why any real person wouldn't be "notable enough" by these standards.
My girlfriend and I went AppleTV + Netflix about a year ago, and we haven't missed cable at all (I don't watch sports). The Netflix catalog is sub-optimal and lacking some important content (HBO shows like The Wire, for example) but it's also great if you have certain niche interests and like to watch an entire TV series (Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the X-Files, for example. And now Star Trek!).
We also tend to spend less overall time watching TV. There's something about the ease and pull of flipping cable channels that keeps you watching, whereas with Netflix, you have to actively commit to another episode/movie. That requires a certain cognitive effort and in most cases, we'll find that after one or two 30 minute (well, more like 22 minute) episodes, we're done for the evening.
But hey, every single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has its own descriptive article, and that's what's important, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_episodes
While individual Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes would seem to be only of borderline notability, any Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode in existence has been seen by many millions of people. Do a comparable number of people know about Steve Yegge?
Or slavishly detailed write-ups of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes.