Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the most beloved genre shows of all time. Over twenty years after its premiere, it still has a massive, loyal fan base.
The series continues in comic book form, there are still numerous books being written about it, and even a rebooted TV show in the works.
Buffy is famous for tackling serious teenage issues from first boyfriends to addiction to self harm, as well as for being meticulously planned out.
Joss Whedon knew what he wanted to do with the show and planned so many things, like Buffy’s sacrifice in “The Gift” and the introduction of her sister, Dawn, years in advance.
But not everything in Buffy was planned. That’s just one of the realities of television, these shows are produced incredibly quickly and Buffy starred a lot of in-demand up-and-coming actors, so nothing ever turned out exactly as expected.
The cast and crew had to deal with a lot of last minute changes, some of which saved the show and some of which presented challenges that simply proved much harder to overcome.
This happens to every TV series, and how the show deals with these problems is what often separates a mediocre show from a great one.
Buffy, for the most part, handled its curveballs and last minute ideas incredibly well, though there are some ideas that impacted the series for the worse. In this list, we’ll be looking at both examples.
Here are the 10 Last Minute Changes That Hurt Buffy The Vampire Slayer (And 10 That Saved It).
20. Hurt: Oz’s Departure
One of the biggest last minute changes that affected Buffy was Seth Green leaving early in production of season four.
The actor left to go shoot the movie Knockaround Guys and by the time he was able to return, the show had already changed so radically that there wasn’t a place for him anymore.
Originally, his love triangle with Willow and the werewolf Veruca was supposed to last the bulk of season four, but his unplanned exit caused them to tell a very condensed version of that story.
Because of this significant change to the show, Whedon and co. were forced to put a much heavier focus on The Initiative than initially planned.
There were plans to bring Oz back in both Buffy and Angel, but those never materialized.
19. Saved: Ms. Calendar’s Tragic End
Ms. Calendar’s loss in season two was one of the first truly impactful sendoffs of the entire series. But according to the book Joss Whedon: Conversations, it wasn’t originally planned exactly as it appeared on the screen.
The writers knew that Angel needed to take someone out so that viewers could see that he had truly gone evil and wasn’t pretending, but they weren’t initially sure who.
They’d talked a bit about it potentially being Oz before settling on Jenny as the character that made the most sense.
There were plans for her character to make further ghostly appearances, but not long after leaving, actress Robia LaMorte became a born-again Christian, causing her to disavow the series.
14. Hurt: Never Bringing Back the Gentlemen
ittedly, this could have been for the best, but if anyone could have figured out how to make these villains work a second time, it would have been the Buffy writing team.
This never appeared to have been a fully-fledged idea for an episode, but there were a couple of times when Joss Whedon toyed with the idea of bringing back the Gentlemen due to the overwhelming popularity of the episode “Hush”.
This could have worked because the characters immediately became so iconic that bringing them back would have felt like establishing a horror franchise inside of the successful TV show.
The idea was scrapped and never came to , but the Gentlemen did make a return in the comic Spike: Shadow Puppets.
17. Saved: Angel’s Resurrection
For probably a very brief time, there was talk of Angel not returning from the ultimate sacrifice Buffy made at the end of season two.
In Joss Whedon: Conversations, Whedon says that when the time they brought him back in season three, it became harder and harder to find new ways to explore that relationship, leading Angel to leave for Los Angeles and kickstart his own spinoff series.
However, WB had actually seen spinoff potential long before that, and their belief that this character could sustain his own series was one of the chief reasons he was brought back in the first place.
This worked out for many reasons, chief among them being that Angel got to thrive as a character on his own show more than he’d ever been able to on Buffy.
16. Hurt: Turning Buffy into a Rat
“Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered” is a very fun and hilarious season two episode that pushes to the point of absurdity when Buffy is turned into a rat for the bulk of the episode.
While this sets up Amy’s ability to turn people into rats, which she later uses on herself, it’s bizarre for the main character to disappear from a whole episode of her own show like this.
Initially, Buffy was supposed to play a larger role in the episode, but that had to be changed at the last minute.
Sarah Michelle Gellar had been offered the chance to host Saturday Night Live and when she went to do that for four days, they replaced her with a rat in the meantime.
15. Saved: Willow and Tara’s Relationship
Believe it or not, Willow and Tara’s relationship was never entirely planned. In fact, it’s one of the most unplanned things that happened throughout the entire show.
Willow was supposed to still be with Oz through the bulk of season four, though Whedon did say that they would have gotten to the point of figuring out her orientation eventually.
Even after Oz left, Tara was introduced as a new friend for Willow, someone she could practice magic with outside of the main group.
However, it became immediately clear that these two were going to be much more than just friends.
To their credit, the Buffy team saw that and embraced it, leading to one of the Buffyverse’s best romances.
18. Hurt: Never Bringing Back Ms. Calendar
Jenny Calendar was a great character that fans really responded to, which made her departure so harrowing. Angel had destroyed a character that everyone had really loved.
She did return for a season three episode titled “Amends” in which she played The First Evil.
When The First returned as the main villain of season seven, using the faces of characters that had lost their lives, it was very noticeable that Jenny never came back.
The reason for this was Robia LaMorte’s newfound faith. She had serious problems with playing The First in “Amends”, believing evil to be a very real force that she didn’t want to encourage young viewers to trifle with.
13. Saved: Spike Becoming a Main Character
Spike was one of the characters that evolved the most on Buffy. He began evolving right from the very beginning. In James Marsters’ audition, Spike didn’t even yet have a British accent.
The vampire was meant to be a briefly occurring villain for the early part of season two, meant to last four or five episodes at most.
However, people loved him and they kept bringing him back. Spike’s popularity continued to grow and grow and the cast and crew all loved working with him, so in season four they found a way to make him a series regular.
From there, Spike only continued to evolve as a character, making the decision a very smart one on the part of the creative team as viewers got to see a villain of the week evolve into a hero by the end of the show.
12. Hurt: The Initiative
There are some good ideas in the Initiative plot line, specifically the notion of science and magic being unable to coexist, but there are a lot of problems with it as well.
Much of the season was changed late in the game. According to Joss Whedon: Conversations, Veruca was meant to be a much bigger presence in the season and Maggie Walsh was supposed to be the main villain with Adam as her right-hand underling, but that changed as well when actress Lindsay Crouse had to leave the show.
After that, viewers got stuck with Adam’s ultimate plan of wanting to create an army of Franken-Creatures like himself.
While there were some neat moments, it’s clear in the end product that the season wasn’t completely what it had been intended to be.
11. Saved: Anya Surviving Season Five
Anya was another character who was never supposed to be remotely as popular as she became. After all, she was created as the monster-of-the-week for a one-off episode in season three’s “The Wish”.
However, then they brought her back for “Dopplegangland” and they kept finding reasons to bring her back.
At the end of season five, Xander proposed to her, but in typical Joss Whedon fashion, she was not actually meant to survive that episode.
In fact, it was only after Anya clearly moved in Xander’s arm during the last moments of the finale that Whedon and crew realized that they didn’t want to let go of her just yet, and wanted to keep Anya around to the end of the show.