At the end of one of my undergraduate courses on popular culture and the media, a student wrote on his evaluation 'Enough Buffy' As a teacher and as a fan of the show this irked. What did he mean 'Enough Buffy' when too much Buffy is not nearly enough?. In any case, I'd only shown one clip in the whole course, although I might have mentioned the series on a few other occasions .... er, come to think of it, quite a lot actually.

Once the agony of rejection and implied criticism had worn off, I started to think through what this comment might mean for those of us interested in bringing popular culture and particularly, a popular television series such as Buffy into the classroom. If we do it, why do we do it and what are we hoping to get out of it? What happens if the students don't like what we teach? What are the criteria for inclusion or rejection? Does taste matter? What happens when the popular is no longer popular (think Shakespeare)?

This paper will rehearse some of the major impulses and arguments for teaching popular culture which have developed over the last century, with particular reference to Buffy, before launching on a wild surmise about how Buffy might be taught, within what I envision as a new aesthetics of television studies, which could, of course, include Angel and Firefly.