Sarah Michelle Gellar in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' 20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection In the mid-‘90s, a new channel found magic by connecting with the then-current generation of teens, Gen Y (for the youngins out there, that’s what they used to call millennials). The WB, which later became The CW, captured the emerging teenagers’ experience of coming of age at the close of the 20th century. Or at least, it provided a glossed-up version of high school: fashions rivaling Clueless’ Cher, evenings spent at under-18 clubs frequented by a parade of on-the-cusp punk and rock bands and the struggles faced by teens growing up in a single-parent home.
Among this new genre of shows The WB launched is the perennially beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ran for seven seasons from 1997 to 2003. The series centered on the trials of Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a cheerleader turned superhero who’s the only thing standing between the California suburb of Sunnydale and the apocalypse. Together with Willow and Xander (Alyson Hannigan and Nicholas Brendon) and the rest of her friends — affectionately called the Scooby Gang — each week Buffy balanced the totally relatable challenges of passing history exams while staking (or dating) the undead, all with her trademark irreverent sass and witty repartee.
Much like its heroine, the show wasn’t afraid to take a big swing, with peak episodes including the musical “Once More With Feeling” and the innovative, nearly dialogue-free “Hush.” But despite its cultural impact, Buffy has a complicated legacy that can’t be ignored, with several of the stars speaking out in the #MeToo era against the behavior of the show’s creator, Joss Whedon (who has denied all allegations).
That said, whether you’re Team Angel or Team Spike, get ready to find out what Sunnydale’s most beloved residents — and the ones you loved to hate — have been up to since the series wrapped.
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Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy
Image Credit: 20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection; Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images In the pilot, Buffy is the new girl at Sunnydale High after having been expelled from her school in Los Angeles for burning the gym down. What no one knows, however, is that there’s a perfectly good explanation: The place was filled with vampires, and as her generation’s chosen Slayer, she was simply doing her job. Throughout the series, Buffy is faced with similar dilemmas as she tries to juggle the demands of school and a normal teenage social life with her night job.
Gellar — who got her first acting credit at age 5 and was a regular for two seasons on the daytime soap All My Children before taking on her most iconic role — made time for several films during Buffy’s run, including I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), where she starred alongside Jennifer Love Hewitt and now-husband Freddie Prinze Jr. She then played against type in 1999’s Cruel Intentions, and played into Buffy’s “Scooby Gang” reference as Daphne (with Prinze as Fred) in 2002’s live-action Scooby-Doo and its 2004 sequel.
After Buffy, Gellar took a step back from acting — apart from appearances in the Grudge horror franchise and short-lived CW series Ringer — to raise her two children and focus on other enterprises. Among them were her cooking and lifestyle company Foodstirs, which she founded in 2015 and ran until the COVID-19 pandemic fatally disrupted the company’s supply chain. She recently made her return to episodic television, this time in a mentorship role both onscreen and off in Paramount+’s Wolf Pack, where she played Kristin Ramsey for one season. “I hope that I’ve set up an infrastructure, a safety net for these [younger] actors that I didn’t have,” she told THR of the show. “My generation just didn’t have that.”
