Buffy's 25 Best Characters Ever

Nearly 20 years after Buffy the Vampire Slayer last aired, TVLine is raising the cult-classic series from the dead for a reevaluation of sorts. We're not questioning whether it was as excellent as we remember — we've rewatched it often enough to know that it was. But we are wondering whether the characters that we liked the best... actually were the best.

23. Buffybot

Eat your heart out, Rosey the Robot! (Jetsons reference, kiddos.) The perky sex toy that Warren created under duress as a plaything for Spike was so hilariously wrong that we kinda wished she'd been recharged and pulled out more often.

19. Dark Willow

The antithesis of the heroine from which she sprang following the death of girlfriend Tara, this formidable villainess was powered by black magic but fueled by grief and a hunger for vengeance. As for the original's bestie, she thought that Buffy really needed "to have every square inch of [her] ass kicked."

20. Dracula

You can always "count" on him for a good time. And in his one appearance — Season 5's premiere, which re-teamed Sarah Michelle Gellar with her former All My Children leading man Rudolf Martin — he made such an impression that he scored a spot on TVLine's list of the best TV Draculas ever.

9. Drusilla

Played by Juliet Landau with the kinda commitment that usually gets a person confined to a padded cell, Spike's bonkers sire never failed to delight with her mad, mad musings. Remember the time she went stargazing... at the ceiling? Yet the danger that she represented was not to be underestimated. Just ask poor Kendra.

22. Kendra Young

Remembered for far longer than she lasted, the fierce Slayer who was activated by Buffy's Season 1 "death" came equipped with an accent unique to vanilla Sunnydale, the world's coolest weapon (Mr. Pointy!) and, for Buffy, an eye-opening devotion to their calling.

Bonus Entry: The Master

Ah, you never forget your first — and certainly not your first Big Bad, a villain quick to give himself credit for being among the "very few vampires [who are] cunning enough to have lived as long as I." Not to mention left behind a legend that's lived even longer.

Bonus Bonus Entry: The Trio

It would be easy to write off Sunnydale High nerds Warren Mears, Jonathan Levinson and Andrew Wells as funny wannabe "nemesis-es" of the Slayer's if their alpha male hadn't turned out to be so evil that he not only killed his ex but Tara, too (in an attempt on Buffy's life).

5. Angel

The quintessence of an anomaly — a vampire with a soul — David Boreanaz's so-called Demon With an Angel's Face not only inspired legions of admirers to beseech him to bite them, he spawned his own excellent 1999-2004 spinoff. What? This isn't news to you?

12. Angelus

Take away Angel's soul, and what were we left with? The Scourge of Europe, we discovered, a sadistic prick whose love of torture was exceeded only by his love of torturing a certain besotted Slayer. Or, as the Master once put it, "the most vicious creature I ever met. I miss him."

7. Anya

When Emma Caulfield's Patron Saint of Women Scorned was stripped of her powers and condemned to attend Sunnydale High, she lamented that once upon a time, she'd been "feared and worshiped across the mortal globe." Hey, even now, she's worshiped. "And I'm flunking math," she added. Eh, we couldn't help 'er there.

24. Caleb

Being played by The Rookie's Nathan Fillion generally guarantees a character a spot on best-of lists, no matter the theme. But this misogynistic preacher was special, owing to his affiliation with the First Evil and his habit of spewing words that "curdle in your ears."

11. Cordelia Chase

Charisma Carpenter's character once described herself thusly: "I was a cheerleader, a princess and a warrior." And she was right on all counts. What she failed to mention, though, was that her putdowns were as biting as any vamp's canines and that her evolution into a full-fledged member of the Scooby Gang was as magical as any of Willow's hocus pocus.

16. Darla

The cruel beauty of Angel's sire and the Master's henchwoman was that she looked like every adolescent boy's prom-queen fantasy — right down to the naughty-schoolgirl outfit — but was as rapacious a killer as ever there was. No wonder she wound up being resurrected on Angel; only the good die — and get to stay dead — young.

4. Faith Lehane

Andrew once described Eliza Dushku's Slayer as "a lethal combination of beauty, power and death." He left out the brokenness that made Faith as tragic as she was thrilling to watch, but otherwise? Well done, dude. Nailed it.

17. The Gentlemen

All it took was a single episode — Season 4's sublime, largely dialogue-free "Hush" — for the fairy-tale demons to become iconic. The dapper suits... the leering smiles... the spastic minions... it's fitting that so few words were said during the hour because we can't think of one that does the baddies justice.

10. Rupert Giles

Yes, yes, he was Buffy's Watcher. But Anthony Stewart Head's alter ego was also very much the Watched, a Sunnydale High librarian who was the father figure that the Slayer — and, in a way, all of us — wanted. On top of that, he was much more of a badass than his prim and proper English demeanor suggested.

25. Glory

A hellish hoot, That Which Cannot Be Named didn't want to launch her reign of terror at all. Humanity, in the goddess' estimation, was "disgusting. The food, the clothes, the people... I could crap a better existence than this." If only she'd managed to get rid of Dawn!

13. Harmony Kendall

This dumb-blonde Cordette's growing pains eventually included fang marks — which somehow turned Mercedes McNab's mean girl into one of our favorite comic-relief characters, an aspirational airhead who loved only one thing more than unicorns: her "blondie bear," Spike.

15. Joyce Summers

OK, so "You get the hell away from my daughter" was no "Get away from her, you bitch." We've still gotta give it up for Buffy's mom, a flummoxed force to be reckoned with to whom we became so attached that it just about killed us when she was turned into nothing more than (sniffle) "The Body."

8. Daniel 'Oz' Osbourne

Even after Willow found out that Seth Green's character was a werewolf, she still went ahead and dated him. We didn't blame her a bit — he was irresistible, not just the strong, silent type but the strong, silent type who, as she once noted, "always know[s] what to say, when you bother to talk."

1. Buffy Summers

As the series reminded us at the top of every episode of its first two seasons, "In every generation, there is a Chosen One." For those of us glued to the TV in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that "one" was Sarah Michelle Gellar's Slayer, an openhearted heroine who was deadly with a stake and even deadlier with a quip. Nearly two decades later, she's still had neither an equal nor anything close to it.

3. Spike

A hopeless romantic hiding behind a Billy Idol 'do and a bark that was wor... er, OK, equal to his bite, the erstwhile William the Bloody would be the first to acknowledge that he was "love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it." Moreover, James Marsters' vamp was passionate and funny enough to make (most of) us switch allegiances and root for him and not Angel to end up with Buffy.

14. Tara Maclay

If anyone fell as hard for Amber Benson's enchantress as Willow did, it was us. We thrilled to every step forward in their romance — and facepalmed at every step backward. And even now, nearly two decades after "Once More, With Feeling," we still have Tara's "Under Your Spell" in heavy rotation in our headphones.

18. Vamp Willow

In an alternate reality that didn't include the Slayer having come to Sunnydale, we met the blood-sucking version of her BFF, a leather-clad supervixen who never left us saying, as she infamously did, "Bored now." As an added bonus, the alter gave Willow her first inkling that she was a lesbian.

6. Xander Harris

The Zeppo, our ass! Nicholas Brendon's snarktastic character was an integral part of the Scooby Gang, not as he feared "the guy who fixes the windows" but the one who opened them for us, allowing us to see beyond Sunnydale's supernatural tint.

21. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce

Hey, don't come at us over Wesley's low ranking. Instead, recall that the Watcher didn't become someone really worth watching until he crossed over to Angel. On Buffy, he was officious and irritating — and mainly redeemed by the fact that the ingratiating Alexis Denisof played him.

2. Willow Rosenberg

Though, as Buffy's witchy BFF noted in Season 4, "nowadays every girl with a henna tattoo and a spice rack thinks she's a sister to the dark ones," Alyson Hannigan's adorkable enchantress was the singular sorceress who cast a spell on us that to this day has never been broken. She's also the only character with three — count 'em, three! — versions of herself in this countdown!