Although Buffy Summers has plenty of iconic quotes, the show’s greatest line ever perfectly epitomized the story of the series 25 years ago. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of TV’s most influential shows ever. Itself inspired by the success of Twin Peaks and The X-Files, Buffy The Vampire Slayer went on to directly inspire supernatural shows that blended a procedural case-of-the-week formula borrowed from cop shows with more serialized, soap-opera-style season-long arcs.
Without the innovations of Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s setup, viewers would likely never have gotten Supernatural, Grimm, Riverdale, Lucifer, Pretty Little Liars, Evil, The CW’s Nancy Drew, or Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. More recently, the news that Netflix’s upcoming Scooby-Doo: Origins will reboot the iconic franchise as a live-action YA mystery series owes a lot to Sunnydale’s Scooby Gang and their unique blend of character comedy, teen drama, and horror mysteries.
However, this rundown limits the influence of the series to other shows that have a lot in common with Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s target demographic and story. In reality, the show’s impact on the pop culture landscape as a whole was far broader. Writers for the series went on to work on Smallville, Lost, and Daredevil, along with countless other major hits, and Variety later argued that everything from True Blood to Wednesday to even Game of Thrones would have struggled to win over mainstream viewers without Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s help popularizing the fantasy genre on TV.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Greatest Quote Ever Epitomized The Show’s Real Story
On the topic of Game of Thrones, one of the most notable qualities of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was its surprisingly unapologetic darkness. The show was hardly HBO’s famously brutal Deadwood, but the series often killed off major characters permanently and with little warning, and their deaths could be genuinely devastating for what was seen, initially at least, by many critics as a standard teen series. Taking death and grief seriously allowed Buffy the Vampire Slayer to make fantasy TV feel more mature, adding weight and gravitas to the show’s quirky premise.
This was best epitomized in the show’s greatest quote ever. While Spike’s sardonic “if every vampire who said he was at the Crucifixion was actually there, it would’ve been like Woodstock” remains hilarious and Buffy’s own “I‘m not exactly quaking in my stylish yet affordable boots” perfectly encapsulated the character’s appeal, it was a line from season 5’s finale “The Gift” that captured the quality which made the series unique. For all of Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s silent episodes, musical episodes, and other TV innovations, the show’s real strength came from the depth of its main character.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Best Line Highlights Its Biggest Contribution To Genre TV and Movies
After spending the entire episode trying to find a way to defeat the hell god Glory without sacrificing the life of her little sister Dawn, Buffy finally realizes that she can sacrifice herself instead. This prompts her to tell Dawn, “the hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live… for me” before throwing herself into the portal that Glory had created, closing the portal but sacrificing her own life in the process.
Judging by the title of Buffy the Vampire Slayer alone, viewers could be forgiven for presuming that the series was a light-hearted, playful genre TV parody for young viewers like Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Mona the Vampire. However, the best line in the series proves that Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s biggest innovation was taking the lives and deaths of its young characters seriously, lending real weight and poignancy to their sacrifices and making the classic show feel both life-affirming and occasionally devastating in moments like Buffy’s tragic sacrifice to save her sister and the world.
- Release Date
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1997 – 2003
- Network
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The WB