I'm not quite sure how to say this -- I think S2 is the best season emotionally, but S3 is the best season in terms of sheer good television.

[edit: Or maybe Hec and Jess said it better, because that's pretty much what I mean.]

And I watched about 5 or 6 episodes of S1 yesterday, and -- having *not* watched it from the start -- I was wondering: for those of you who DID watch Buffy from S1, did you have the sense that you were watching something unprecedented?

I'm with Hec on why Sesaon 3 rules. After that it's a waffle between 2 and 4 whose virtues were almost diametrically opposed (i.e. 2 - best arc / sucky stand-alones vs. 4 - sucky arc / best stand alones), and I usually end up favoring whichever one I'm rewatching at the moment.

Also, as his deathmatch proved, Riley had some pretty good moments, and almost all of them were season 4.

did you have the sense that you were watching something unprecedented?

I started with Episode 6 of S2 (Halloween) and I absolutely felt that I was was watching not just something unprecedented but that someone had reached into my brain and grabbed everything I thought was funny, poignant and emotionally riveting and had cast the perfect actors to portray it all and then put it on TV. Never ever having been a cult fan of any TV show, I thought I was losing my mind when it became all I could think about on some days. I told everyone who would listen and lots of those who wouldn't. And NO ONE watched it.

I didn't start converting people until well into S4 when it was clear that it was getting a lot of critical praise. Stoopid friends.

I went to dinner with my sisters on Saturday night and after listening to me talk about Buffy for years one of them finally watched two eps. The Body and Intervention. My sister's comment was "I didn't really like the one where her mom died...I mean, isn't she supposed to have superpowers - she just seemed like a normal kid."

I was all "What? But the whole point is that it doesn't matter if you have super powers....bahhhh nevermind."

cereal:

The Body- disliking sister did enjoy the Buffybot though and agreed that JM was indeed hotter than a hot thing. So I guess I will continue to return her calls.

I guess...but only just. My brother hates Xander. I wanna say "Dude, you are Xander."

I'm not sure which is my favorite. Probably goes something like S3/S4/S6, S2, S5, S7/S1. I can't pick between my top 3.

I have to say S3 was the best in my book, as S3 was the first season I watched, and it hooked me like thing with a big, big hook. My response was something akin to what tina said above.

I follow that with massive S4 love, as I thought it was an awesome follow up to my freshman season. People say there are problems with S4, but I have a really hard time seeing them. I am admittedly biased.

I even liked S5, and don't have a hate-on for CK, but I totally see why she bugs others.

It was only S6 & 7 that I felt much weaker than what had come before, but S6 ended with my all-time favorite ending arc ever, and S7 will never feel the hate from me because despite it's massive problems, it meant that Buffy went off the air before it ever even came close to the "show about a collection of FBI agents hunting the supernatural, one or two of whom actually even met Mulder and Scully once..." phase.

I still have only seen one or two scattered episodes from S1 & S2, so I can't include those in the ranking, but they will eventually find their way on to my DVD shelf, and I will finally be able to rate them properly.

I know the S1 episodes I've seen still don't do a whole lot for me, and they didn't when they first aired. I gave Buffy two seperate shots, but never paid a lot of attention to them at the time, so I almost never got into the show.

Thankfully, I had some friends who, when the first ep of S3 came on the first Tuesday night after I had moved to Los Angeles, forced me to sit down, shut up, and watch the cool TV show.

Now, I also have a friend who by all rights should be a Buffy fan, but he's not, because he did what I did during S1 & S2, didn't pay much attention to the one or two episodes he watched, and wrote off the show as being "stupid teenaged humor."

Now, we all know this is a spectacularly ignorant, and utterly uninformed opinion, and I need to correct his thinking on this. If I were given a challenge to rearrange his thinking on Buffy with just one episode, which one do you think I should use?

I'm thiking OMWF. Yeah, it's not the best introductory episode as far as character and story goes (and will potentially lead to confusion when I show him pre-Dawn episodes), but I'm not sure there's a single better episode for expressing "this show is intelligent, adult, and these are the kinds of things they've been capapble of the whole time, that you have written off without being fully informed."

What do you guys think?

I would say OMWF ONLY if he is a big fan of musicals. Otherwise, I have known several intelligent people who have just seen that one episode and thought that both the show and I were crazy.

I would say Hush.

Sean, I probably have S1 and S2 on tape (from FX), if you want them, since I have DVDs now.

"show about a collection of FBI agents hunting the supernatural, one or two of whom actually even met Mulder and Scully once..." phase.

Doggett is The MAN. t with the Doggett-love

Hush is another one I thought might be good for that sort of thing.