by Emily Maesar, Associate TV Editor

There was never a doubt which TV season I would properly start this column with, if I’m being honest. The shows that started airing during the normal season, and as mid-season replacements, include shows like King of the Hill, Just Shoot Me!, Suddenly Susan, and Everybody Loves Raymond. Not to mention the shows that were still airing around the new ones. 

For this month’s look at one television season (1996-1997), I wanted to bring five specific shows to the table. Smart Guy, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Clueless, 7th Heaven, and (of course) Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All of these shows are pretty different, but they do indicate some trends that have carried into the modern era and are worth investigating.

First, there’s Smart Guy. While not actually related to Sister, Sister, it did star Tahj Mowry, Tia and Tamera’s little brother. It’s a show about a young boy, genius beyond his years, who starts high school with his older brother. Hilarity ensues! It’s very much a show made to be watched together as a family and would run until the end of the 1998-1999 TV season, ending with three seasons and 51 episodes. Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Clueless, however, were both shows that were made for teen girls to watch on small CRT televisions, covered with stickers, while tying up the phone line talking to their friends during the commercials. 

Sabrina the Teenage Witch is about a girl who, on her sixteenth birthday, discovers she’s a witch. She lives with her aunts, who are also witches, and has to navigate the messy world of being a teen and also having powers—not to mention all the rules! Based on the Archie Comics series, the show would run for 7 seasons, a total of 163 episodes and 3 TV movies. It would make the great transition from ABC to the WB during the 2000-2001 season.

By contrast, the Clueless TV show was an adaptation of Amy Heckerling’s 1995 film of the same name (itself a loose adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma). Running for 3 seasons across 62 episodes and two networks (ABC and UPN), the series recast some of its leads from the film (Cher was played by Rachel Blanchard, Josh was played by David Lascher, and Tai was played by Heather Gottlieb) and all but erased the romantic implications of Josh, before he was totally dropped from the show after the first season. Otherwise, the show was very much a rich LA girl’s sitcom from the 1990s. Fluffy and charming, without the same kind of bite of the film. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Sabrina herself, because they were both on ABC, made a crossover appearance at Bronson Alcott High.)

For this TV season, though, I wanted to talk more specifically about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (who’s surprised) and 7th Heaven. As I put this project together, I didn’t actually intend for it to be a conversation about The WB, but it makes sense that it will end up being that way a lot of the time. Talking about American teen shows is kind of impossible without doing it in the shadow of the ultimate teen network. This was, of course, before it merged with UPN to form The CW, which is currently trying its hardest to detach itself from its former demographic—for some reason. (In fact, all five shows I wanted to talk about from this season ended up on one of the networks that would eventually merge into The CW, even if it wasn’t for a while into the run.)

Let’s actually start with 7th Heaven, since it began at the start of the 1996-1997 season, in August (a tiny bit earlier than is tradition). There’s no getting past the fact that 7th Heaven is actually a family show. Sure, there are teens, and they very much get their own storylines, but the parents are clearly the leads of the show and the family is the important aspect. Which is, of course, because it's a Christian show at its core. It was often considered one of the top ten family friendly shows by the PTC (the Parents Television Council, a deeply conservative Christian media group). They said, “7th Heaven manages to provide moral solutions to tough issues facing teenagers without seeming preachy or heavy-handed.” Which… debatable, but okay!

7th Heaven is about the Camden family. The patriarch of the family, Eric Camden (known abuser of young girls, Stephen Collins), is a Protestant minister in a suburban town in California. The family is made up of a wide range of children, from a baby to a sixteen-year-old. And the show does not shy away from being overtly Christian—both in how the characters are being raised, but also in the rhetoric and the way plotlines are solved. But that didn’t stop 7th Heaven from being wildly popular. It lasted for 11 seasons, airing 243 episodes during its run and was the only show to last the entire length of The WB’s drama and teen-centric life, only to end after the first year of the network transitioning over to The CW. The TV season after 7th Heaven aired its final episode is the one that gave us the original Gossip Girl—perhaps the funniest piece of history in the teen show whirlwind of it all. 

But okay, what about the actual show? What can 7th Heaven, and all its success, tell us about being a teenager in America in the mid-1990s? Quite a bit, I’d wager. First, you have the overt religious state of the country. Obviously, some critics were not down for the Christian propaganda that the show was selling, but the general American audience seems to have been clamoring for it—if its high overall ratings are to be considered, and I think they should be. The second thing is specifically for the teen girls out there, which is the amount of control and power that the men in your life both have and seem to want over you—specifically over your sexuality. Like, the pilot is the perfect example of this. When Mary, the eldest daughter played by Jessica Biel, wants to figure out how to kiss, she asks her oldest brother, Matt (Barry Watson), to help her. Which… that’s certainly something. 

Matt doesn’t quite agree, though their father sees them in a compromising position (and he doesn’t really say anything about—which is weird!). Ultimately, the storyline ends up with Mary having a crush on Matt’s best friend, but then Matt gets overly controlling about his friend dating his sister—not to mention Mary being romantically interested in anyone. It’s a kind of obsessive control over her dating life that continues on throughout the show. And it’s one that’s often depicted in media, especially teen and young adult media. It usually rears its head as the idea of a father hurting his daughter’s date, should anything happen, or in rifts between friends when an older brother’s BFF is interested in his younger sister. The truth of the matter might be highly debatable, but its prevalence in media allows those instances where it is occurring in someone’s life to be normalized. It becomes an act of love through shows and movies, and not an act of weird obsession and control, the thing that it actually is. 

Which brings us to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A show that has strong elements of women breaking through the control that men often exert on them. Based on the 1992 film of the same name, Joss Whedon was given the chance to reinvent the story of the slayer by Gail Berman, the president and CEO of Dolly Parton’s Sandollar Television. He has been deeply unhappy with the film (which I think is a fun romp, but you know how these things are), and dove headfirst into bringing Buffy Summers to the small screen. 

Now, I’ve written about Buffy before—for You Can’t Sit with Us, Movie: The Series, and for a very exhausted look at the trope Bury Your Gays—so there’s no shortage of me talking about how important, but ultimately messy the series is. Joss Whedon, the seemingly horrendous boss that he was (in many ways), was very vocal about writing “strong female characters.” And it would be incorrect to say that Buffy, and the other women on the show, weren’t strong. However, it often seemed like the only way that Whedon knew how to prove how powerful they were was by putting them through absolute hell and making them crawl their way back (sometimes even out of graves). It’s very clear, from a more modern point of view, that Whedon’s feminism, such as it is, was deeply rooted in the second wave. Which doesn’t mean there aren’t good things to take from it, or that some of those storylines and plots aren’t empowering, but it does mean that you have to take them with not just a grain of salt, but a whole ass Himalayan salt lamp. 

However, I would say for the purposes of this piece, the contemporary view of teenagerdom is the bright and shiny center of talking about Buffy. Its impact across all of television, particularly the era it aired in and the few years directly following it, as the writers and creatives from it dispersed, really shows off the kind of impact it had. Even in film! You don’t get writers like Diablo Cody, writing her insanely good and fun and specific teen films without Whedon and company. Juno and Jennifer talk the way they do, and are infinitely quotable, because of “Buffy Speak.” In fact, most shows and films made for teens in a post-Buffy world really tried to dial into the dialogue of the show, because it felt so specific and was so quotable. 

But Buffy also hit it off with teens, particularly teen girls, because of its mix of genres and its ability to tap into the fears, dreams, and anxieties of 1990’s adolescence. There’s a reason why the primary audience for The CW’s hit show Supernatural was predominantly teen girls (or young adult women), and it’s because traditionally, women love genre. So, Buffy the Vampire Slayer being a mix of horror, comedy, romance, and drama really allowed women and girls to get excited about the world the show was playing in, and the plotlines about high school, the weird space of post-high school, and relationships (both romantic and platonic) allowed women and girls to connect to it on a personal level. 

And, like 7th Heaven, part of the story of Buffy had to do with men trying to control women and girls. On Buffy, however, the characters fight back against the powers that be and often win, whereas on 7th Heaven it’s just something the girls have to accept. With very few exceptions, the main villains of every season of Buffy are men trying to take control in some way. Sometimes they’re true evil, like the Master or the First. Sometimes they’re just some guy, like Warren. And sometimes they’re the love of your life. In season two, Buffy and Angel have sex for the first time, an anxiety inducing moment for many teens (particularly teen girls). It’s actually very lovely, until the soul that Angel has been cursed with gets jettisoned out of his body and he becomes the villain for season. It’s a fear and insecurity of teenagerdom that gets heightened by the show, rather effectively. 

In a later season, Buffy discovers that the first Slayer was just a scared teenage girl who was forced to carry the spirit of the Slayer by three powerful men. Because of these actions, many more young girls throughout time were forced to take on the mantle of protecting the world, often at great personal cost. In the finale of the show, she (along with Willow) is able to break this act of bondage the men of the past trapped them in and freely give the strength and power of the Slayer to women and girls across the world.

If 7th Heaven was a grounded and slightly more realistic look at what it was like to be a teenager in America in the mid-1990s, then Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the fantastical version. Still true and honest, but with something for the weirdos and the day dreamers. Both shows really put The WB on the map for the teen audience and would continue to be blueprints for the network as the decade waned. There’s a reason I started this in the 1996-1997 TV season—it was truly the beginning.