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5 Spike
From: Buffy The Vampire Slayer , Angel
William The Bloody Brilliant
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Perhaps the biggest compliment you can pay Spike is that when he became a regular character in Angel, he not only didn’t come across as some gimmick to get Buffy fans watching the spin-off, he actually made you wish he’d been part of the spin-off’s DNA from day one. Angel was a great show without him; with him, it took on a whole new lease of life – a bloodsucking take on The Odd Couple , with its two reluctant antiheroes bickering and trying to get one up on each other constantly. Even Boreanaz, who you’d assume would have hated the idea in a starry, egotistical way, seemed to be re-energised by having a vampiric sparring partner on board.
That’s the key to Spike, though. He was, as Joss Whedon once said, one of his “most fully developed characters”. He was a Swiss army knife of different personalities – soppy lovestruck poet, to psychotic bloodsucker, to punk hedonist, to lovestruck vampire, to saviour of the world, to existential ghost and beyond – but each seemed to flow organically into the next. He could change. He could adapt. He could grow. Writers often talk about their characters’ journeys, but few characters had as many stamps on their emotional passports as Spike.
It also helped, of course, that he had cheekbones like set squares, a cool leather duster and James Marsters bringing him to life.
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4 Buffy Summers
From: Buffy The Vampire Slyer
Se saved the world a lot
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“I wanted her to be a cultural phenomenon,” Joss Whedon told The Onion in 2001. “I wanted there to be dolls, Barbie with kung fu grip.” Sometimes, Mr Whedon, dreams can come true (although while there were Buffy dolls, we’re not too sure they had kung fu grip). His Buffy Summers became just the sensation he wanted her to be: an ordinary schoolgirl with an extraordinary destiny, a conflict that made her one of the most fascinating characters in modern TV. She was vulnerable, yet stronger than any human on the planet; she was seemingly shallow, but contained depths that surprised us; she was doomed to suffer, yet still found the courage to joke about things that would make most people hide under their duvets.
Kristy Swanson first brought her to life, doing her best with a bad lot in the original movie in 1992, but she lacked Sarah Michelle Gellar’s spark and sass. When Gellar stepped into Buffy’s shoes it was as though our Vampire Slayer had truly come to life. Thanks to her (and with a little help on the side from a warrior princess named Xena), the ’90s TV viewer learned that women didn’t just exist in that little glass box to look pretty and fall in love with the hero: they could also kick butt like butts existed just for them to kick.
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