10 Buffy The Vampire Slayer Episodes That Changed Everything

2. The Body

Death is never easy. It's also - normally - not very realistically portrayed on TV, especially in action-based shows. Almost never does it have any real impact. Someone is shot, loved ones mourn, tune in next week. Rarely does a show dwell on death - on a particular death - for long. Certainly not for an entire episode, yet that's exactly what Buffy did with The Body, creating in the process one of the most realistic, genuine portrayals of the most inevitable conclusion to life: death. Buffy's discovery of her mother's body - dead not from the forces of evil, but from an aneurysm following brain surgery - changed the makeup of the show completely. And it changed how a lot of fans viewed death. With a younger audience, few Buffy viewers had been confronted with the reality of a body, the body of a loved one, in their home. How time slows (as it often does in an emergency), how even the most seasoned veterans can fail to act. And how when it's all said and done, the mundane details are still there, the papers to be filled out, the well-meaning but ultimately inconsequential condolences to be accepted. The choice to eliminate the usual score, and go forward with just dialog and the odd sound effect, hammered the reality of the situation home. Somehow, a zany show about vampires managed to portray one of the most accurate examinations of death seen on television.