By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a show that transformed pop culture forever while transforming some of its stars into household names. The show effectively made history, as evidenced by the many prestigious awards it won, including multiple Creative Arts Emmys and 10 Satellite Awards. However, one Buffy episode made history in the worst possible way: “The Puppet Show” was the series’ lowest-rated episode ever, and to make matters worse, it broke a franchise tradition by playing the credits alongside the final scene rather than separately.
Buffy And The Puppet Show
This is normally where we’d do a recap of the episode in question, but for Buffy fans, “The Puppet Show” is an episode that lives in infamy. It’s a bit of a bait-and-switch story in which Buffy and the Scoobies first believe that they must fight a walking, talking demonic puppet that sounds almost as creepy as he looks. It turns out, though, that he’s actually a demon hunter who has been cursed to live in the doll’s body until he completes a special task. Namely, hunting and killing each member of the brotherhood of seven demons.
While Buffy fans think of “The Puppet Show” as (to put it mildly) a lesser episode, most don’t realize that it is the lowest-rated one of the entire series. In this case, “lowest-rated” is not a measurement of quality, though the episode does have a deservedly terrible reputation. For example, Rolling Stone ranked this episode as #127 in their big list of best-to-worst Buffy tales. That doesn’t sound so bad until you consider there are only 144 episodes, meaning that this one comes dangerously close to scraping the bottom of the barrel.
In this case, “lowest-rated” means instead that out of all the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, “The Puppet Show” was the one that was viewed the least when originally broadcast. According to the show’s Nielsen Ratings, only 1.9 million households tuned into this puppet misadventure when it was first broadcast. The “first broadcast” part is important because, as you might imagine, reruns invariably pull in fewer viewers than their first-run counterparts.
Buffy fans hate “The Puppet Show” for many reasons (including the bizarre plot and clunky dialogue), but it’s worth noting that it had less competition for lowest-rated episode than you might think. As the show got more popular in subsequent seasons, even really bad episodes (looking at you, Season 6!) would still have millions of viewers more than the average episodes. Ratings were lowest for Season 1, and “The Puppet Show” had the dubious honor of being the least-viewed episode in those tumultuous early days.
Speaking as longtime Buffy fans, we’re also annoyed that “The Puppet Show” made history in another negative way by running the end credits over the final scene via a split screen. Creatively, this was a bizarre choice that ruined the flow of what was already a very bad episode. Apparently, the network agreed: after the initial airing, this final scene was excluded from future WB airings, but (for better or for worse) you can now watch the restored scene on DVD, streaming, and TV.
There you have it, Buffy fans: in terms of viewership, “The Puppet Show” is the worst episode of the franchise. And the strange choice to split screen the credits meant that an already-terrible episode failed to stick the landing. Fortunately, subsequent episodes only got better, making this paltry puppet pablum a thing of the past for fans eager for more stalking demons and less talking dolls.
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