To say that the legacy of the coming-of-age fantasy horror adventure series Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been a controversial one would be a dramatic understatement.
The series was seemingly doomed to fail from the beginning; showrunner Joss Whedon had desperately tried to gain interest in his vampire universe in the wake of the failure of the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a critical and commercial disappointment that he felt didn’t represent his vision.
Despite a rocky first season, the characters of Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan), Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon), Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter), Angel/Angelus (David Boreanaz), and even the vampire Spike (James Marsters) soon grew past their initial archetypes and generated an immediate emotional reaction from the show’s fans.
This made it particularly challenging for Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s network owner, the WB, when two episodes were hit with censorship.
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