WB network launched a TV series based on his screenplay for the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it offered him the chance to be showrunner, basically as a courtesy—but he surprised them by accepting. Whedon turned the show into something extraordinary: a genre series about a teenage girl staking vampires in a small California town, it used monsters from the Hellmouth each week as metaphors for the agonies of adolescence. The hero’s journey of Buffy Summers across seven seasons (from 1997
