Movies - TV
Buffy The Vampire Slayer Cut Some Pretty Wild Ideas From Season 1
By JOE ROBERTS
While “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” would explore serious and weighty issues in later seasons, the series began with a much more episodic, monster-of-the-week format.
Season 1 still offered thoughtful stories, but the writers often explored more outlandish ideas as the show found its footing. Luckily, not all of them made it into the show.
In “Joss Whedon: The Biography,” author Amy Pascale details how writers would think of compelling moments for an episode and work backward to develop the story around their idea.
For Season 1 of “Buffy,” there were several concepts that the writing team could never “break” and were ultimately dropped, such as the idea of an unopenable box.
Writer Dean Batali claimed the team “spent four or five hours one night” trying to figure out the story leading up to the box’s discovery and why it couldn’t be opened.
Even show creator Joss Whedon had ideas that he couldn’t work into a story, like the one that would reveal a race of demons were actually aliens.
Some ideas for Season 1 were outright rejected. Whedon dismissed Batali’s story of Buffy joining forces with a group of religious kids at her high school to fight a demon.
Despite being an atheist, Whedon kept the Christian iconography that’s central to the vampire myth, including Buffy’s silver crucifix gifted by Angel in the show’s premiere.