We talk a great deal about what television means to people. It shapes how we see the world, gives us language for experiences we cannot otherwise articulate, builds communities of strangers who feel less like strangers because of a shared devotion to particular characters. This is all true and worth saying. But a TikTok posted this week by @sloppyjoey17 offers something rather more literal.
The story goes roughly like this. On the night of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s series finale — May 2003, for those who need the date placed firmly in their memory — a tornado warning was issued in the family’s area. SloppyJoey17’s mother and several neighbours took shelter in a nearby storm cellar, as one sensibly does during a tornado warning. His father decided to stay in the house. He wanted to watch how Buffy ended.
After the storm passed, the father went to check on his family in the storm cellar. He found that an oak tree had fallen across the entrance, sealing it completely. He freed them. Nobody was seriously hurt. Had he been in the cellar when the tree fell, in 2003, before the mobile phone coverage we take for granted now was anything like reliable, the outcome might have been very different.
The TikTok accumulated 1.8 million loops and over three hundred and twenty-seven thousand likes. Sarah Michelle Gellar reposted it on her Instagram with the caption: “You don’t owe me anything.”
I have read a great many things on the internet this week and that caption is the best of them.
The comments that followed were exactly what you would hope for. “Rename the cellar the Sarah Michelle Cellar.” “She did save the world… a lot.” The replies had the quality of a room full of people who have been waiting their whole lives to deploy a specific Buffy reference and have finally been given legitimate cause.
The finale itself — “Chosen” — is a remarkable piece of television. Buffy activates every potential Slayer in the world simultaneously, which is both narratively satisfying and quietly political in ways that the show had been building towards since the beginning. That a man was willing to risk a tornado to see how it resolved speaks not to foolishness but to the specific kind of attachment that Buffy inspired in people who loved it. It mattered to them. It still does.
That the show also, entirely incidentally, saved his family’s lives is the sort of thing that gets written into the mythology of a programme that already has plenty of mythology to spare.
Buffy saved the world. A lot. Including, on one May evening in 2003, at least one storm cellar’s worth of people in a tornado. I feel certain Gellar would want me to clarify that the credit here belongs to the oak tree, and to luck, and to a father who simply could not bear to miss the ending. But still.
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