ABOUT

Named as one of Paste Magazine’s Top 30 Podcasts of the Decade, Esquire's Top 10 Podcasts, Time's Top 50 Podcasts, and BBC America’s 10 Most Buzzworthy Podcasts! 

Buffering the Vampire Slayer is a bi-weekly podcast in which your hosts Jenny Owen Youngs (professional musician & recreational Whedonverse aficionado) and Kristin Russo (professional writer & former goth teen) discuss Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one episode at a time.

We’ve been featured on the iTunes new & noteworthy homepage, on Entertainment Weekly's "Must List," named on both Esquire & Time's Top Podcast lists of 2018, and listed as one of the top 30 podcasts of the decade by Paste Magazine! Not bad for two girls with a penchant for vampire lore and patriarchy-smashing.

Every installment of the podcast also includes a new original song recapping each glorious Buffy episode! *wolf howl*

In addition to our bi-weekly episodes, we also host many live events (including an annual Buffy Prom!), and we’ve had the opportunity to interview many of the incredible cast members about their time on the show! We’ve sat down with James Marsters, Charisma Carpenter, Seth Green, Kristine Sutherland, Harry Groener, Armin Shimmerman, and so many others, and there will be many more to come!

If you are a part of our Patreon community, you can join us for a ton of fun extras including live Buffywatches, bonus episodes, advance ticket sales to live events, merchandise discounts, music & jingles, chord sheets, and more!

LEARN more about our INCREDIBLE team here!

EPISODES

Our podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher & Stitcher Premium (ad-free!), Soundcloud, GooglePlay, and most other podcatchers! If you have any issues, always feel free to drop us a note over at bufferingthevampireslayer [at] gmail [dot] com! Check out our sister-podcast, Angel On Top, which runs concurrently with Buffering and is hosted by LaToya Ferguson & Morgan Lutich!

• CLICK HERE FOR OUR EPISODE TRANSCRIPTS •

MUSIC

Hosts Jenny Owen Youngs & Kristin Russo write an original song for every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as they work their way through the series! A limited run of physical CDs are released at the end of each season, and albums are available digitally through iTunes, Bandcamp, Amazon, GooglePlay, and more - plus are all streaming on Spotify! If you want to get the music as it releases, song by song, join us on Patreon!

ALSO HERE’S SOME MORE STUFF!
LYRICS • CHORD SHEETS • JINGLES • DEMONS TO FIGHT • GAME OF THRONES MUSIC

SCHEDULE + EVENTS

Welcome to our “Jenny Calendar”! Here you will find our seasonal podcast schedule as well as the listening schedule for Angel On Top, our Patreon events, and details for any of our live events! Please note that the below reflects Eastern Standard/Daylight Time, so if you are in a different timezone, it may look like an event starts earlier, later, or even on a different day! If you hover over the event itself, we will note the day and time in the description as well. Awooooooooo!

Buffering THE Vampire slayer's ONGOING
Anti-RacisT COMMITMENTS + WORK

Our team is committed to prioritizing the BIPOC community in all the ways we know how, and all the ways we continue to learn about together.

The below is a working list of our commitments, created in collaboration with members of our BIPOC listenership, our consultant Mackenzie MacDade, and our co-producer Alba Daza.

I. Patreon Access for Black + Indigenous Listenership

As of July 2020, as a means of reparations, our Patreon-only community is open to our Black and Indigenous listeners at no cost to increase the perspectives in those spaces and help bring in more listeners who are living with economic disparities in their day to day lives.

If you are a Black or Indigenous listener and would like access to our Patreon community spaces, ad-free episodes, advance mp3s, and other digital items offered to patrons, please share your email with us here and we will send you the link and password needed:

Some of you are already intimately familiar with the concept and application of reparations, and others may hear that word here, in the context of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast, and wonder how it applies to a space like ours. We are creators in a shared community space, and view our work as a microcosm of the larger world — what we do here, no matter how large or small the scale, is impacted by structures of white supremacy and influenced by our own lived experience as white creators and also makes an impact in the world around us. If you want to understand more about reparations, you can start here and here.

II. Reducing Harm in Shared Community Spaces

Together with a team of hired BIPOC consultants, we will be working with the current moderators in our shared Patreon community Facebook group and other digital community spaces to restructure the way our mods are selected and oriented. The focus of this restructuring will be to lessen harm and to be more prepared for ways to address harms when they happen. One of our commitments is ensuring that our senior mods in that space have pre-existing experience with anti-racist work.  

III. Adding more BIPOC voices to the work

We will be increasing the number of BIPOC voices in both the Buffering and Angel On Top universes on an ongoing and regular basis — BIPOC voices and perspectives are immeasurably valuable to our collective experience of Buffy and Buffering and, by extension, to the way in which we apply those conversations and texts to the world around us. It is important that we honor the value of those voices and give space to them as we move forward.

We will also be working with BIPOC creators directly in the curation and production of episodes specific to race in the Buffy & Angelverse.

Curated Conversations to date:

January 2021: INVISI-BIPOC • Spotify Link
Alba Daza and Mackenzie McDade do an unapologetic deep dive into the BIPOC experience of invisibility. Join them as they discuss the metaphorical and literal ways that Buffy the Vampire Slayer illustrates the ways that BIPOC experience invisibility. They laugh, they (almost) cry, they tell it like it is, and they are ready. to. scrap. Be it through Buffy’s White Savior Complex, the revolution that is "Graduation Day Part 2," or the pure rage of Marcie in "Out of Mind Out of Sight," they are here to share in the solidarity of two BIPOC women talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, no holds barred.

September 2020: A Conversation with Mackenzie MacDade & Alba Daza • Spotify Link
New Buffering the Vampire Slayer family members — producer Alba Daza and consultant Mack MacDade — join us today in conversation with each other! They introduce who they are, the work they are doing within the Buffering universe, and why they choose to do it. Also buckle up for lots of fun personal anecdotes about Buffy, race, and how they both grew up *obsessed* with the show!!

July 2020: LaToya Ferguson, Alanna Bennett, & Ira Madison III on Race in the Buffy & Angelverse • Spotify Link
The absolutely brilliant LaToya Ferguson, Alanna Bennett, and Ira Madison III host today's conversation on race within the Buffy and Angelverse! This is the first in a larger series that will be produced and hosted by BIPOC Buffy fans here on the Buffering the Vampire Slayer and WOW — what a way to begin. These three TV geniuses bring their encyclopedic knowledge of both series to the table with questions like: What would have happened if Leonard Roberts played Riley? Why in the hell was Drusilla able to kill Kendra — an immensely powerful Slayer — with one filed f*cking fingernail? How would it have impacted the arc of the show if Bianca Lawson had been cast as Cordelia?

IV. Accountability

We have built out a feedback form which will exist primarily for our BIPOC listenership to voice concerns as this work continues which can be found at bit.ly/bipocfeedback

This form will be monitored by us both as well as Mack MacDade who is working with us to help in the receiving and implementation of this feedback. This is not intended to defer our responsibility or accountability, but rather to create a safer space for our BIPOC listenership to access with their concerns. You can identify yourself in the form or choose to remain anonymous in your feedback.

V. Community Engagement

At the end of 2020, Mack MacDade led the Buffering listenership in two anti-racism reading and discussion groups; the first navigating Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race, and the second navigating Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism.

We now consult directly with Mack each month to spotlight community events that center and uplift BIPOC voices and/or exist to educate the larger community on important issues. Our Just Keep Fighting Calendar of events is below, and you can also suggest community events by emailing us at bufferingthevampireslayer (at) gmail (dot) com!

You can also, visit our digital library of anti-racist websites, reading lists, and social media accounts to follow to supplement our community work and for general perusal.

You can read about Mack + Alba below, and learn about our larger team here!

If you are landing here from an older episode where we were raising funds for our #JustKeepFighting campaign during the onset of the global pandemic, please know that our incredible community raised over $6,000 that was sent back out to those in need!