Buffy, Buffy, always Buffy.
ETA: And here I always thought that Buffy had the hottest cast of any TV show, ever. May favorite character: Anya
Okay, I never watched more a couple of episodes of Relic Hunter, so I’ll buy that it wasn’t as bad as the other shows I listed. Looking at it’s wiki and IMDB pages it appears that it was on for 3 seasons which certainly gives it about 3 times as many episodes as these other shows.
Instead pretend I listed Jack of All Trades twice. It deserves special mention for completely wasting Bruce Campbell’s presence. 
Buffy, easily. Xena was campy fun, Buffy was art (and still fun).
This is the kind of question that would be good for me to ask on a first date, if I started dating again. If anyone answered Xena then I’d know it was time to make my excuses politely and leave. If they said ‘who?’ then there’d be no need for excuses, of course.
Xena was fun but it’s in the ‘so bad it’s good’ territory, and sometimes it was just bad. Buffy was high quality in every way. It was very much character-driven (that’s a really odd criticism - that’s like complaining it didn’t have vampires) and the characters all developed tons over the series (another really odd criticism). The only valid criticism in this thread is that Sunnydale was conspicuously white for a city in California.
Nah. Just view it as an opportunity to watch the series again with someone new! 
Not really. I’m serious - if someone hadn’t even heard of Buffy then we’re going to be operating in such different worlds that the only way we could get together is in some sort of planetary collision catastrophe.
I’ve got to disagree with this assessment. Ms. Attack is a deeply geeky gal, and the love of my life, but she was, and is, so geeky that modern technology like the TV is instantly suspect, and shows with odd things like vampires and gods were also just too…too weird and modern for her. She is kind of ‘geek-classic’ the way geeks were in the olden days, when they just made subtle references to the Iliad in order to identify themselves to the tribe.
After she met me, the man widely regarded as Speaker to the Geeks, she came more into the mainstream of our people. She now regards Buffy as one of the best TV shows ever. My point is, you may want to reconsider ‘Buffy who?’ as a deal-breaker. It’s probably a better answer than ‘I don’t watch Buffy’, or, in your case, ‘Xena’.
Unfortunately, I still don’t believe this.
While the movie was different from the series, it was still written by Joss. What he got to do in the TV series was closer to his vision. In fact, he changed the movie by having Buffy burning the gym down, which is what the original script did. So, it was very much what the creator, Joss, intended.
Xena is closer to old series Star Trek in how the show is handled. Very few long running stories. Maybe a recurring villain but no arcs in general. The point being that someone can watch any episode and figure out what is happening.
I say this because when JMS went to sell Babylon 5 to the networks, Star Trek made it more difficult! They wanted a weekly adventure series, not an ongoing story which is harder to sell.
I think this is the case with Buffy as well. It took years to get a network to take it and then it was WB, hardly a mainstream network.
Finally, Buffy started in '97. Early '97, in fact, as a half season for the first season. My point is that you are saying that Buffy got help from those other series when in fact, Buffy probably made them possible to have a show with a strong female lead and with fantasy theme, both of which are traditionally hard to sell. Further, there have always been series like what you describe going back thirty years in terms of not doing well. Friday the 13th, Legend, Time Cop, Time Trax, The Crow and more.
Again, I am not arguing about whatever your preference for a show is. That’s fine! I just don’t think what you are saying is accurate about how Buffy got started.
vislor
*Xena *all the way, even though I’m painfully aware of how bad the show became in the fifth season.
I know these boards too well to get into how and why I dislike Buffy.
I’m guessing you didn’t watch a lot of Xena, because what you say here is incorrect. I wish you were right though, because I really disliked some of the later Xena arcs. Then again, I disliked some of the later stand-alone episodes even more. Take Married With Fishsticks…please!
*Xena started in 1995. Although there’s no way to be sure, I think Jihi is correct that if a fantasy/action series with a female lead had flopped big time in 1995 then it would have badly hurt the prospects of any other fantasy/action series with a female lead for years to come. Had Xena never existed at all then Buffy might have been produced anyway, but had Xena failed then it would only have made Buffy harder to pitch.
That doesn’t speak to the fact that Buffy didn’t exist on television – and may not have gotten the green light – until Xena paved the way two years prior by showing a female-led action series with fantasy elements could thrive.
(Edited to add: or basically what Lamia said. :D)
Very much not true. Perhaps during the first two seasons, but much of the back end of the third season was an arc involving the rift that developed between Xena and Gabrielle when Xena’s latest obsession led Gabrielle into the hands of the evil God Dahok, who implanted his hellspawn into Gabs, who gave birth to said hellspawn, whom Xena wanted to kill, and Gabs lied to her claiming that she’d sacrificed the baby, which later led to the murder of Xena’s child and revelation that Gabrielle had lied, and yadda yadda. Huge interconnected season-ender there.
Fourth season had the ongoing arc of death/ascendance/death again, starting with Gabrielle’s sacrifice and Xena’s attempts to recover her, and Callisto’s revenge and Gabrielle’s ongoing transformation to a pacifist and the whole Eli/Jesus analogy and Xena’s premonitions of getting crucified… and then the apotheosis of the death of Caesar. (God, was there a better episode than Ides of March? As ambitious, deep, earthshattering and transcendent as anything on Buffy.)
Fifth season’s arc was all about resurrection and the birth of Xena’s child, the God-killer (Livia/Eve). I remember less about this season because of the horrific 25-year-leap that ended my captivation with the show. Still, the sixth season had a few overlapping arcs, basically the reformation of Xena’s bitchy daughter, and the whole expedition to Norseland, and… ugh, I dunno, it was such a hot mess that I wasn’t paying much attention.
The whole reason third and fourth season Xena was so frikkin’ amazing was the overriding arcs and themes that brought the show to a whole 'nother level. It wasn’t monster/annoyed deity/evil warlord of the week. They touched on those in eps within the arcs, but most episodes focused on the major issues of Xena/Gabrielle’s mutual betrayals and how, if at all, they could rise beyond death itself to save their souls.
Anybody who’s citing Emma Peel as the first action girl is overlooking Cathy Gale, played by Honor Blackman, who directly preceded Emma on The Avengers.
Footage of her leather-clad form kicking ass is on YouTube.
But your GF had at least heard of Buffy. If someone hasn’t even heard of Buffy then their frame of reference is too different to mine. It’s not about what they like and don’t like, but the world they move in. TBF, I am extremely picky when it comes to long term relationships and am very lucky that I met someone who fit my ridiculously long list of criteria.
I’m not sure she had heard of Buffy when I met her. I don’t think she had. I’ll have to ask her.
Yeah, Xena was much more heavily arc based than people seem to realize. The 3rd, 4th and 5th seasons were all based heavily in serialized storytelling and one season lead to the next. ‘The Rift’ in season 3 led to Gabrielle’s ‘pacifism’ in season 4, (she no longer had the hero worship thing going on with Xena and was looking for answers elsewhere), which led indirectly to the duo’s death and resurrection in season 5 which is where Xena experienced her ‘immaculate conception’ at the hands of an ‘anglicized’ Callisto which is how she gave birth to Eve/Livia which led Xena back to Rome, etc…
Also, choie, Ides of March is hands down my second favorite season finale of all time, one of the most powerful hours of television I’ve ever seen. It’s just too bad the show went to hell shortly there afterward.
I think right here Lamia may have hit on where vislor and I were talking past one another by differentiating two statements.
“Buffy wouldn’t have existed without Xena”, is of course not true. Buffy was well developed by Joss long before Xena existed.
“Buffy wouldn’t have been greenlit as a show if Xena had failed”, is a very different statement and is closer to what I was trying to say. Xena’s success is part of what allowed Joss to successfully pitch the show to the execs at WB.
Just to be clear if I haven’t, I was a huge fan of Buffy as well and I thought it was a great show. I have room enough in my heart for both.
I don’t have a deep critical analysis here. I was kind of skeptical of both to start, but got sucked into BtVS in Season Two & hooked. Never had that with Xena.
I’m not certain the success of Xena had anything to do with Buffy being greenlit - seems like idle speculation to me, unless there’s a cite for some producer saying so. I think it was greenlit because it was clear it was a good show with an attractive young cast, just the sort of thing the WB was looking for.
Buffy by a landslide.