In 1997, Joss Whedon’s award-winning, original series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on the WB network. When Buffy Summers, portrayed by Sarah Michelle Gellar, arrives at fictitious Sunnydale High School in California, she comes leaving a long trail of trouble in her wake. Her mother wants her to make a fresh start, and though you don’t know much about her, it would seem that Buffy wants the very same thing. Buffy is a tired girl, in desperate need of friendship, but she’s only at Sunnydale High School for about an hour before she realizes there is no rest for the slayer. She’s been chosen by fate to protect humanity from evil, and Sunnydale is right over the Hellmouth–a gushing cornucopia of demon activity.

The Buffy series gathered cult-legend status quickly after it first aired, spinning off into two comic book/graphic novel series, a collection of series novels, role-playing games and even an alternative series called Angel, which followed Buffy’s one-time vampire love-interest, Angelus, played by David Boreanaz.

Though the WB network is no more, the network credits the success of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series with their popularity, especially with the younger audiences. Adding to the series’ cult-legend status, it was so well-loved that if you’re interested, you can even devote a course to Buffy studies in some universities.

As a character, Buffy Summers contributed to popularizing female heroes in both television and literature. Despite the show’s often cheesy effects and over-the-top action sequences, the empowering notion of a sixteen-year-old girl out slaying vampires and demons every night makes many typical high school woes seem almost trivial. Alongside her band of supportive friends who collectively became known as “The Scoobies,” Buffy offered a sense of hope to the high school outsider, that no matter how strange or bizarre you might think you are, there is also someone else out there who feels the same way.

The series ran for seven seasons, switching over to the UPN network for its last two seasons in 2001.  Though it would also seem that vampires rarely duck out of the spotlight for more than as minute, Buffy kept the vampire genre simmering long enough to inspire a whole new generation of fans, writers and TV watchers.