Hey, Ally, Ever Slain A Vampire?

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE slayer could whip Ally McBeal's butt. Harsh? Sure. But where Ally deals with problems by emoting to friends and hallucinating petty slights, Buffy copes by kick-boxing her problems and driving wooden stakes through their hearts. At first glance, ""Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' looks like not much more than a bunch of attractive teens--well, twentysomethings playing teens--running around fighting monsters. And it is. But in the last season and a half, Buffy has also become television's outstanding emblem of anti-Ally feminism--confident, powerful and focused.

Originally targeted at male teens, ""Buffy'' has turned out to be the WB Network's strongest show among women 18 to 34; the median viewer age is 29. ""It's pretty resonant with how you have to live as an adult,'' says Rachel Glass Fairchild, a 28-year-old coordinator at the UCLA School Management Program. ""Bad stuff happens to you, and you have to deal with it and move on.'' Or, as Leticia Rhi, a 27-year-old promotions manager for Ticketmaster, puts it: ""You can take it out of the context of vampires and just think of it as all the usual bulls--- women have to deal with.'' Bonus extra: series star Sarah Michelle Gellar has a brown belt in tae kwon do, so Buffy is dizzyingly physical.

It's not that she doesn't have a problem-fraught personal life. Buffy can't get any homework done because she spends her nights slaying. She's a social outcast. After she lost her virginity to her good-vampire boyfriend, he reverted to evil. But she wastes no time with angst. ""The fact remains that it's more important that she kill vampires than get a boyfriend,'' says Veronica Hollinger, a professor of cultural studies at Trent University in Ontario. Buffy negotiates a frightening universe with aplomb, doing unpleasant jobs--and doing them well--because they have to get done.

The popularity of Buffy and her spiritual sisters--Xena, Captain Janeway on ""Star Trek: Voyager'' and Dana Scully on ""The X-Files''--suggests that fantasy television can tell stories about women that reality-based shows won't. ""What interests me is making a hero out of somebody who doesn't [ordinarily] get to be a hero,'' such as an adolescent girl, says Joss Whedon, the show's creator. By recasting the classic quest myth with a woman as the star, ""Buffy'' tells viewers that girls can fight evil, too. Hey, it beats going to law school.

© 1998