Yes, this was a soap opera... a teen soap opera. And not just a regular soap opera, but one of those fantasy soaps, such as Passions and Days of Our Lives. So why do I remember it 9 years after it was canceled? Because it was great. It was shamelessly melodramatic and superficial, filled with conniving and selfish "poor, little rich kids". Imagine having Cruel Intentions piped into your living room 5 days a week. Trust me, you'd get addicted to it just as my friends and I did. There was even a campaign to get the show back on the air. My school had a petition. Why am I telling you this embarrassing bit of unsolicited information? Because you need to know the truth. Sarah Michelle Gellar was a remarkable actor then, just as she is now. And her presence alone made this show respectable and worthy of our affections. I still to this day remember a specific episode in which Sydney (SMG's character) was supposed to publicly announce her secret relationship with the son of her mother's rival. Well, you can pretty much figure out this storyline. Sydney chickened out and her boyfriend gave up on her. And she ran after him, taking a shortcut through a cemetery, where she fell on her father's grave. She finally arrived with dirt and leaves in her hair, her make-up smeared, only to see her beloved with his arms around the dim-witted and naïve third member of this love triangle. If Sydney had been played by someone else, this episode would have seemed to come right out of a Mexican soap, displaying an absurdly awful case of over-acting. It would've been nothing more than a bad joke. But fortunately, SMG brought real emotion to a severely lacking script, and she made me cry with her. So on this day of Buffy's season finale (series finale?), as SMG's career takes another spectacular turn, I thought I'd tell you that Swans Crossing wasn't what you think it was. It was a lot more.
