Why Academics Love “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

This week, Katherine Schwab from The Atlantic published a great extensive piece about the scholarly interest in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The article talks about the kind of TV studies that’s been happening for years, but I’m glad it’s finally going mainstream after over a decade.

I highly recommend the read, even if you’re not a Whedon fan.

Here’s a short excerpt:

Buffy scholars have taken dozens of different approaches to understanding the television show or using it to further work in other disciplines. In the decade since it went off the air, a Stanford University population ecologist used mathematical formulas to determine potential vampire demographics in Sunnydale, the fictional California town where the show is set. A strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the prominent Washington, D.C. think tank, compared Buffy’s war against the forces of evil to the U.S.’s war on terror and named a new paradigm in biological warfare after the fictional vampire slayer. An English-language historian and linguist published a lexicon of ‘Buffyspeak,’ the insider name for the particular slang and expressions used in the show (Examples include: “Love makes you do the wacky,” “What’s with the grim?” and “She’s the Do-That Girl”).

As a bonus, you can check out this Emily Nussbaum piece (also about Buffy and TV criticism) I mentioned last year.