Buffy The Vampire Slayer's First Season Was Forced To Abandon A Few Wild Concepts

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" might have started out as a cult hit, but it's surely now reached the status of all-time-great TV show. The series lasted for a full seven seasons from 1997 to 2003 and while it has become complicated to love in the wake of startling accusations against showrunner and creator Joss Whedon, the show itself produced some of the best moments in TV history.

As it went on, "Buffy" dealt more and more with serious and weighty issues, making for some truly heartbreaking "Buffy" moments. By the time the fifth season rolled around, Whedon and co. were producing harrowing and affecting explorations of grief with such classics as "The Body," which opens with an unforgettable one-take sequence in which Buffy's mom dies. Joss Whedon still considers that episode the best thing he's ever done.

Back when "Buffy" was first starting out, however, the series was much more episodic, featuring a monster-of-the-week format that saw the Slayer and her Scooby Gang cohorts battling assorted supernatural entities with each new episode. Long before the haunting events of "The Body" played out, Buffy and company were battling seductresses that were actually giant insects and a sentient ventriloquist's dummy called Sid.

That's not to say that "Buffy" wasn't a layered and thoughtful show from the outset. The writers were just a tad more willing to venture into more outlandish territory as the show found its footing. And while they managed to work in everything from unpopular girls who literally turned invisible to a controlling mother who possesses her daughter in order to relive her cheerleading glory days, there were several similarly wild ideas that never made it into the show.

In "Joss Whedon: The Biography," author Amy Pascale details how the writers would think of interesting and compelling moments and then work backwards to "break" the story around them. The example Pascale gives is season one, episode five, "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date" where the writers had the concept of Buffy being on a date that goes awry when her date is cornered by a vampire, but had to work backwards to develop the story surrounding it. 

For season one of "Buffy," there were several of these concepts that the writing team was never able to "break." These included such simple ideas as the Scoobies finding a box in Sunnydale High School that they didn't know how to open. Writer Dean Batali claimed the team "spent four or five hours one night" trying to figure out the story beats that would lead up to the box's discovery and the reason why it couldn't be opened, but that ultimately, none of the writers could figure it out and the concept was dropped.

Batali revealed another abandoned episode idea which Whedon was quite enamored with. As the writer explained, "There was another story about the idea of a race of demons that are aliens. Joss really liked the idea that demons were actually aliens, that they were from outer space." Hey, the show has done weirder. In a season that saw demons being uploaded to the internet and Xander becoming possessed by the malevolent spirit of a Hyena — one of the spookiest episodes of "Buffy" — demons from outer space wouldn't have seemed too out of place. But another potential narrative that was never written might well have stretched credulity a tad too far, which in this show is saying something.

When "Buffy" was first starting out, Joss Whedon had to assemble a team of writers for his show, which had been given the greenlight by the then-nascent WB network mid-season. The unaired "Buffy" pilot Whedon produced had failed to wow WB execs, and so his vampire slayer series wouldn't be given an order until the short-lived "Savannah" was canceled mid-season. Among the writers brought on to pen that first season of Whedon's show was Dave Batali himself, who aside from remembering the alien demons and mystery box also recalled one of his own ideas that never made it into the inaugural season of "Buffy."

According to Amy Pascale's book, once he was hired, Batali wasted no time in pitching a story that would have seen the titular vampire slayer join forces with a group of religious kids at her high school to fight a demon. Evidently, Batali — who went on to co-author a book on how Christians can better understand and appreciate TV — felt that both Buffy and the Christians would be aligned in their opposition to demons. But, as Pascale writes, "Joss let him know that he didn't want the show to deal with it."

Interestingly enough, though Whedon is openly atheist and nixed Batali's religious-themed episode before it could go anywhere, the show creator did maintain much of the Christian iconography that's so central to the vampire myth. Specifically, crucifixes appear throughout the show as a way to ward off vamps, with, as Pascale notes, Angel (David Boreanez) gifting Buffy a silver cross in the season premiere and delivering the line "Don't turn your back on this." Perhaps that's why Batali was moved to remark that while Whedon is an atheist, he "never seemed to be anti-faith."