‘Friends are the family we choose for ourselves’: Young people and families in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The young people at the centre of Buffy the Vampire Slayer present themselves as an alternative family that contrasts with the programme's conventional families. This device helps to raise awareness about changing family structures in contemporary Western society, particularly with respect to the family's capacity to facilitate the development of young people. The series implies that the stability associated with the nuclear family is often illusory and/or achieved at the price of young people's freedom and agency. The alternative structure, by contrast, answers the call for the ‘democratisation’ of the family (Giddens, 1999) and is coded positively in spite of many weaknesses.