Buffy discards Riley and College, loses her Mom and has Giles decide to leave. In the final episode, she DIES. They broke the story-telling engine pretty utterly. S6 required a total re-think of the entire series, while retaining most of the cast. Some of the pieces fit into the new model and some didn't. The show never really recovered, despite some nice creative highlights.

(Since Buffy was, by that point, depicted as a bit on the flawless-side except for what problems life threw at her, her problem was being recently DEAD. This left us with episodes where 'happy ending'= 'heroine doesn't wish she was still dead, anymore'.)

Consider what happened at the end of Season Five, though- they beat a GOD. At the start of S6, they raised someone from the dead. They've basically become the most powerful group of individuals in their world, and getting stronger.

The notion that the 'bads' were the main characters themeselves could have been launched into a story line where they're 'in charge now'- with the metaphor going from "You're a powerless High School student, and essentially powerless" to "You're an adult, you're responsible (in all senses of 'responsible')"- with all the horror that could imply.

Professor Walsh would have made a TON more sense as the Big Bad.

Lindsey Crouse is a great actress, so it is too bad she and Whedon couldn't make it work.

Yes, the show lost something when it switched engines, but the characters kept the thing going for a while. I'm glad it ended when it did, though, as the show had clearly started going to pot.

Still my favorite TV series ever.

Now, grad school on the other hand...

I am hoping that they make a Buffy movie eventually. Gellar's last three movies have been so bad she might need to do Buffy just to jump start her career. I'm surprised there hasn't been a show on Sci-Fi or something that would follow another slayer.

The real issue with the storytelling engine set up in Season 4 was that it was the same storytelling engine as some many other high school shows post-graduation. The "high school is hell...literally" angle had been such a refreshing take that it was nearly impossible to see all of the similarities to 90210, Dawson's Creek, etc.

The college engine was so generic, because they tried to rely solely on the characters and there was no outside generator of story. Hence, all of the dark turns that the characters were forced to take over the later years in order to fuel conflict.

There's one hell of an idea for an Archie comic, though: Arch and the gang in a Riverdale retirement home.

Besides which, with Cheers, they changed the dynamic, since Rebecca owned the bar and was Sam's employer rather than employee - this change is actually fairly similar to what John is describing, if you compare series 3 to series 7.

There are plenty of precedents for this: when Diane left Cheers, the writers replaced her character with an almost identical character. Then they repeated all their old 'will they-won't they' stories and no one seemed to mind. In fact it seemed funnier the second time around.