Fifteen years after the pivotal fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired, history is comfortable saying: Buffy got robbed. The Emmys and Golden Globes barely noticed the show in its day — it’s not the egregious oversight of snubbing The Wire but it’s in the same ballpark. Critics were slow to recognize the genius in real time, but the culture is catching onto the innovations that Sarah Michelle Gellar and Joss Whedon were offering in the early aughts.It’s no accident that genre larks like Game of Thrones and Jessica Jones have become the new prestige TV. Basically you can trace your Netflix and Chill routine to the WTF fifth season of Buffy. Its fresh storytelling moves may actually live forever.In the Season 5 premiere, we got to meet Buffy’s sister Dawn — this after Buffy had been an only child for the first, oh, 78 episodes of the series. Dawn was one of the biggest WTFs to ever happen on TV: You can’t just add in a random character and pretend she’s been there the whole time! Today, many long-running shows abuse this move. As their seasons pile up, they want to shake up (or replace) the cast. Yet the writers haven’t planned ahead. The solution is usually to wave hello to some stranger the main cast members allegedly knew long ago — now she’s back! You remember good old so-and-so, guys, right? Remember all those memories? Weird that we never talked about her for the past five years, but, whoa, it’s all coming back to us now.
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