Stakes, crosses, holy water, boyfriends, lip gloss. Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired on March 10, 1997 (4 years before I was born, and 15 before I first made contact with the show via a Tumblr gifset) as a low-budget teen soap featuring titular Buffy Summers: a tiny, fashion-conscious high schooler who reluctantly patrols Sunnydale for vampires, monsters, evil robots, and other things that go bump in the night. Over the course of its explosive seven-season run, the show cemented TV tropes and formats that have endured in the shows we watch today and has since lived on in collective pop culture memory for over two decades. Buffy and her friends (+ lovers, enemies, and toxic situationships) have been memorialized in probably every single internet platform you can think of, and if you’re like me, you’ve probably spent many, many hours absorbing everyone and their mother’s thoughts on who Buffy should’ve ended up with. Which leads me to the podcasts.

I used the Spotify for Developers API to request information about shows and episodes tagged as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". I then cleaned the data by eliminating unrelated results that managed to slip through and used pandas to perform some analysis, before creating the following visualizations on DataWrapper and Tableau.

The size of each tile corresponds to the number of episodes each show has released. When clicked, the tooltip displays the show's description, total episodes, explicit status, and link to the podcast's Spotify page. If you're looking for a lengthy podcast to listen to on a trip, check out Slayerfest98! Or if you're hanging with the kids and want to listen to a shorter, non-explicit show, try out The Sunnydale Review.