The Atlantic celebrated the show's 18th birthday with a nice little piece about it you guys might find interesting 🙂 I'm posting two snippets, for the full article click the link
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...vampire-slayer-is-still-revolutionary/387412/
"In its first two minutes, “Welcome to the Hellmouth” establishes a universe, as the camera creeps slowly through a high school in the dark, lingering on skeletons in a classroom and shadows behind a door. But it also establishes a premise—that this is a show about female power. The pretty blonde, a vampire named Darla, isn’t a victim but a predator, just as Buffy has strength and acuity that belie her looks. At the end of “The Harvest,” the second part of the two-episode debut, Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) watches Buffy and her friends walk away, cheerily discussing the ways in which she stands between the world and its total destruction. “The earth is doomed,” he says, wearily. It's this kind of assumption—that being young and frivolous and having profound influence are mutually exclusive—that Whedon would go on to dispel throughout Buffy’s seven seasons.
Buffy is also unique in that, as much as Sunnydale is a Hellmouth, high school is hell. The monsters in the first season are literal manifestations of the demons that plague teenagers—a controlling mother who's so intent on living through her daughter that she switches bodies with her, a pack of teenage boys who become uncontrollably feral, an Internet boyfriend who pretends to be a normal kid but whose real identity is much more complex (in this case, he's a demon called Moloch who got accidentally uploaded onto the Internet). In the episode “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” one of Buffy’s classmates is ignored to the extent that she physically becomes invisible. In transmogrifying common teenage issues into actual, tangible villains, Buffy makes them seem important, and worth agonizing over. It also makes them seem conquerable."
(...)
"Television has had lots of complex, admirable teenage heroines since Buffy, but it's hard to think of one so consistently empowered to take control of the circumstances around her, whether in the middle of a graveyard, surrounded by vampires, or in her bedroom, grounded. Buffy’s super-strength is a physical attribute endowed by the forces of destiny, but it's also a state of confidence and competence that carries her through the varying traumas of having the fate of the world always on her shoulders."
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...vampire-slayer-is-still-revolutionary/387412/
"In its first two minutes, “Welcome to the Hellmouth” establishes a universe, as the camera creeps slowly through a high school in the dark, lingering on skeletons in a classroom and shadows behind a door. But it also establishes a premise—that this is a show about female power. The pretty blonde, a vampire named Darla, isn’t a victim but a predator, just as Buffy has strength and acuity that belie her looks. At the end of “The Harvest,” the second part of the two-episode debut, Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) watches Buffy and her friends walk away, cheerily discussing the ways in which she stands between the world and its total destruction. “The earth is doomed,” he says, wearily. It's this kind of assumption—that being young and frivolous and having profound influence are mutually exclusive—that Whedon would go on to dispel throughout Buffy’s seven seasons.
Buffy is also unique in that, as much as Sunnydale is a Hellmouth, high school is hell. The monsters in the first season are literal manifestations of the demons that plague teenagers—a controlling mother who's so intent on living through her daughter that she switches bodies with her, a pack of teenage boys who become uncontrollably feral, an Internet boyfriend who pretends to be a normal kid but whose real identity is much more complex (in this case, he's a demon called Moloch who got accidentally uploaded onto the Internet). In the episode “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” one of Buffy’s classmates is ignored to the extent that she physically becomes invisible. In transmogrifying common teenage issues into actual, tangible villains, Buffy makes them seem important, and worth agonizing over. It also makes them seem conquerable."
(...)
"Television has had lots of complex, admirable teenage heroines since Buffy, but it's hard to think of one so consistently empowered to take control of the circumstances around her, whether in the middle of a graveyard, surrounded by vampires, or in her bedroom, grounded. Buffy’s super-strength is a physical attribute endowed by the forces of destiny, but it's also a state of confidence and competence that carries her through the varying traumas of having the fate of the world always on her shoulders."