The last of Buffy
May 20, 2003
By Tom Dorsey
The Courier-Journal
The people who love "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" are going to miss their favorite female assassin after tonight's series finale at 8 on UPN. Others who never watched the cult hit will wonder what the ruckus is all about. Literary tears of angst and anguish have been freely flowing from the computers of critics. Ordinary viewers, who don't have a newspaper column in which to eulogize the series, have been holding their memorials online.
The New York Times gave the show's demise a full-page departure on one recent Sunday. That's the kind of space the paper usually only devotes to explaining fabricated stories. USA TODAY wept that the end of "Buffy" feels like a dagger to the heart.
You might think writers were talking about the death of a series like "Friends," with its 21 million viewers. And certainly the demise of that series a year from now promises to be pretty traumatic for its fans. But "Buffy" has never been a mega-million hit despite the avalanche of media hype. It's been dying a slow death lately, ending up at No. 151 in the rankings with an audience of about 3.7 million. "Friends" would have been flushed down the network drain a long time ago with those kinds of numbers.
No matter. "Buffy" was a must-see for seven seasons for those addicted to the tales of a waif of a girl who took on the evil vampires of the netherworld to save the planet. Sarah Michelle Gellar rose to some prominence playing the part for all it was worth.
The series, which sprang from a 1992 movie, was cleverly written with lots of funny asides, and although fans took it seriously, it was never meant to be heavy drama. USA TODAY thinks it was a metaphor for the monsters we all face in life, especially teens who see everything as a matter of life and death.
Could be. Or, maybe it was just original enough to strike a chord in people looking for something really different, which "Buffy" certainly was.
Tonight's finale finds the vampire slayer asking her prey "how many times do I have to kill you?" One last time is the answer as the finale features a grand get-together of all Buffy's gal pals to rid the world once and for all from evil. Quite a feat for a heroine who describes herself tonight as cookie dough waiting to see how she turns out.