I've been threatening to do a Buffy the Vampire Slayer tribute for a while now -- and here it is, inspired by my compulsive viewing of the Season 3 DVD collection (I can't help it! Season 3 has Evil Vampire Willow!)

I'm not really too upset about the demise of the show. They had seven seasons, after all. A pretty good run. Shows that run longer often start to lose what made them appealing in the first place (like, did anyone watch the last two seasons of The X-Files? I know I tried...but had a tendency to fall asleep. Or just stop paying attention, pick up a magazine or something). Buffy is now a thing that is completed, contained -- just like Sandman, serialized storytelling that became something very like a novel.

As dramatic entertainment, Buffy is a strange beast -- literate, even intellectual, but also full of oozy beasts and frothy pop-culture references; heavy on melodrama and metaphor, but with a puckish sense of humor that rarely lets an important emotional moment take itself too seriously. And, for a show that never won an Emmy, it has been highly praised by television writers, and obsessively analyzed by people who like to write scholarly papers about fiction

And also, by people who like to natter on (as if anyone cares) on the Internet.