Xena isn’t a nostalgic relic, it’s a gem highlighting what the streaming era lacks.

As a Buffy the Vampire Slayer devotee, I never felt the need to trawl through DVD bins in search of Xena: Warrior Princess. A long-running, seminal ’90s fantasy about an ass-kicking woman destined to change the world? Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. When something is as cherished as Xena is – it has a committed fan culture and an indentation in pop culture — it’s easy to feel as if the ship has sailed. Thankfully, the universe had different plans for me.

In early 2025, I was sorely missing the television structure I grew up with. Shows stopped feeling like a rewarding investment of time and energy that developed as I did, and more like six-hour-long movies over in a flash. Between this realization and knowing if I didn’t watch Xena now, I never would, I half-heartedly dove in. Looking back, it was partly out of wanting to shelve it for good; I’d watch a couple of episodes, then let myself off the hook. I wasn’t expecting it to rapidly become one of my favourite stories.

The adventure begins… and immediately hits a roadblock

When I pressed play on episode 1, I thought I’d made a mistake. Despite my high cheese tolerance, Xena is hammy and distinctly ‘90s in everything from the mustache-twirling villains to the Standard Definition video it was mastered on. The first two episodes didn’t enchant me, despite the undeniable hook of its star, Lucy Lawless, towering over bad guys, saving fair maidens, and gleefully waving a sword around.

I only knew the basics going in: tall, dark lady with good arms fights bad guys and has a queer-coded relationship with her best friend. The series was more action-forward than I anticipated; the episodic storytelling revolves around warlords, land disputes, and villagers caught between violence. Retrospectively, this turn-off was maybe part of weaning myself off of today’s prestige TV structure — one big story rather than smaller ones strung together.

Despite our underwhelming first date, I gave it another shot. TV shows are like people; they don’t always put their best foot forward, and can grow on you in delightfully unforeseen ways. It was easy to trudge along, given how watchable Xena is, even at its worst. I went from contemplating stopping to deciding it would go into my ‘background show’ rotation, to be relied upon during hungover Sunday mornings when my brain was too fried to watch something I cared about (you don’t have to tell me these are bad consumption habits, I’m aware).

“Is There a Doctor in the House?”

By the tail-end of season 1, Warrior Princess had evolved leaps and bounds. Season 1 is still a weaker season, but the writers had found solid ground in the unlikely duo of Xena and Gabrielle (Renee O’Connor), a young, innocent villager who insisted on joining her. While still episodic, season 1 quietly established the series-long throughline of Xena’s attempt to reconcile her violent past as a warlord and the effect Gabrielle has on her journey.

Because of the mostly self-contained episodes, season 1 leans on Lawless and O’Connor’s budding unlikely couple dynamic. This progresses in the latter half of the season, which searches for things to underpin the story beyond the ‘battle-of-the-week’ design. Namely, young, sweet Gabrielle becomes an exploitable crack in Xena’s stoic armour, and the writers begin exploring their differing philosophies and moral codes as they navigate a bloody, cruel world constantly testing their mettle. Season 1 takes a while to pick up steam, but it lays the groundwork for the existential, morality themes synonymous with Warrior Princess.

My turning point was the season 1 finale, which is a mostly one-location bottle episode about Xena and Gabrielle stuck in a temple filled with injured villagers and the opposition soldiers who hurt them. It’s an action-light, dialogue-heavy episode about collateral damage during conflict, the tension between religion and science in medicine, and how dehumanization leads to disaster. If I had to pick an episode to convince a nay-sayer to get on board, it would be this one. It’s a captivating, delicate episode showcasing raw writing talent — Xena frequently experimented with form and TV’s hallmarks, and “Is There a Doctor in the House?” is a stellar example.

Tension mounts as captured enemy soldiers plan to kill the men nursing them back to health. When their forces attack the temple from outside, Xena triages the scene, making split-second decisions about which patients are too far gone, while she’s yelled at for practicing medicine instead of praying. It’s breathlessly shot and edited, with minimal music and little room for the show’s usual comedy. From a creative perspective, it’s a doozy, but it also had a huge impact on the series going forward.

Gabrielle naively leaves the safety of the temple to get to an injured boy (a bad idea, but a quintessential Gabrielle thing to do). The next time we – and Xena — see her, she’s being rushed back into the temple on a stretcher, pale and short of breath. The episode shifts Xena’s attention from a bustling room of villagers to her little, often annoying, tag-along, who suddenly feels like the most important person in the world.

Gabrielle sneaks up on you, and Xena, in how you don’t realise how much you care until her eyes are teary or her small frame is lifeless. Xena’s gut-wrenching, desperate attempts to save her and relief when Gabrielle finally inhales are the best minutes of the season. It’s the first time Xena looks terrified, and the first time she sobs. There’s a stamp of importance on it, from the swelling music to the violent CPR Xena administers. This is the kind of patient character drama that pulls me in, so watching season 2 became an inevitability.

From this point on, the series is canonically a love story hinging on their relationship. They both nearly die so often and have to be saved via mouth-to-mouth (this series was creative in getting around same-sex kiss censorship) it’s a running joke.

Experimentation

Juiced up by a new Xena-Gabrielle dynamic, ushering in growth and a focal point, Warrior Princess moved forward by juggling that with the series’ morality-play themes. Though these two elements are the chief building blocks, the long seasons were still sprawling and creatively liberating. There are musical episodes, body swap episodes, AU episodes, dream episodes, slapstick comedy episodes… You name it, Xena did it. It wasn’t for the sake of it, either. The writers were passionate about the unique quirks the TV medium offers.

Series now rarely run long enough to be this playful, nor do they establish enough lore or depth to be meta or deconstructive. Part of the joy of falling in love with Xena is how many surprises it has in store. There’s ‘filler’, but it’s rarely resented because these installments are often amusing. Some episodes play like the writers were given a dare: ‘Hey, I bet you can’t write an entire episode where Xena’s only goal is to catch fish.’ Xena has a cheeky, go-for-broke quality that’s endlessly charming, if cheesy.

Things that matter — characters, ideas, boldness — are done right, which makes laughing at hammy action or over-the-top flourishes something you do with the show, not at it. Everyone knew how goofy what they were making was, yet simultaneously took every opportunity to create unpretentious, mature drama juxtaposing that.

The Willingness to Get Meaty

I’ve seen a lot of TV. Knowing TV has been my job at times. But I’ve never seen something exactly like Xena. One moment, I’m giggling at absurd stunts where Xena does three backflips for no reason. The next, I’m floored by the risky turns and consequential developments. 

After three seasons of Gabrielle vowing to never kill — her defining trait and a point of friction between her and Xena — priests trick her into murdering a young woman in a ritual during Season 3, episode 4, “The Deliverer.” Warrior Princess has lots of death, yet that didn’t absorb the shock. The dizzying moment shatters Gabrielle’s identity, and the choice is effective because the show carefully built your perception of Gabrielle around purity.

Before we catch our breath and reckon with the ripple effects, the next episode reveals the ritual magically impregnated her with the seed of an evil god… of course. Season 3 is metal, so Xena subsequently trying to kill Gabrielle’s newborn ‘baby’ is par for the course. Later, Gabrielle’s daughter murders Xena’s son, leading to Gabrielle having to ‘put down’ her only child. Typing this, I can’t help but laugh, but the show regularly takes the characters to the ends of their tethers.

Gabrielle and Xena hurt each other, physically and emotionally. They both lose young children under horrific circumstances, and partially blame each other for it. They’re asked to forgive supporting characters who caused them immense pain. They make horrific mistakes that cause irreparable damage, and they have to find a way to live with it. Xena commits hard to its choices and doesn’t spare any characters. People can and do die at inopportune moments, and they abandon the ideals they used to be written around if staleness rears its head.

As much as Xena is about trying to do right, it’s a demanding story that often leaves me unsure of my feelings. This, more than anything else, took Xena from guilty pleasure to just pleasure. The characters’ emotional reality is so defined that when pivotal events happen, they’re powerful not because of shock value but because the world is lived-in. Stones don’t go left unturned; every time I thought, ‘it would be interesting if this character was challenged in this way,’ it would eventually be explored. The series pushes boundaries, and the writers break characters to satisfyingly reforge them. And we care when this happens, because they’re familiar.

By the time season 6 rolled around, I had watched two women grow together, apart, and in every conceivable direction. They were still the characters we met in episode 1, but in an entirely different place, and I could articulate why. This is the benefit time provides. TV is the perfect medium for long-term character-driven storytelling. Done right, it hits differently, and you’ll always remember it.

The show occasionally dampened some turns by undermining them later, but not often enough to make them meaningless. Gabrielle doesn’t get her baby back, and Xena has to move past how the person she loves most was partly responsible for her son’s death. It juggled ‘fluff’ with risky theatricality. Where else are you going to see a woman forgive another after she tried to kill her newborn demon-baby?

*Fleabag voice* This is a love story

I can count on one hand the number of on-screen relationships between women as layered and invested in as Gabrielle and Xena’s was. Connections as patient and rewarding as theirs are extremely rare. Few new series last long enough to build the foundation necessary, and even fewer bet heavily on two women protagonists. It’s odd to think this was, in some respects, better in the 90s through the 2010s, but I struggle to think of relationships that fill the space left by the likes of Xena and Gabrielle, or Buffy Summers and Willow Rosenberg. Things are decidedly more ‘plotty’ now. The drop in sincerity and earnestness doesn’t help. If writers want to move me with on-screen relationships, they must nurture them.

There’s a scene in season 6’s — my favorite season — episode “Legacy” where Xena wants to rescue Gabrielle, who handed herself into a tribe as a prisoner after accidentally killing one of their unarmed men. The dilemma is Gabrielle did something wrong and believes she should justifiably die in consequence. So, saving Gabrielle requires Xena to make a morally grey decision that goes against her hero’s journey and redemption arc. Save the girl, or do the right thing. There’s also hypocrisy, since Xena has previously been in favor of restorative justice in the past, when she was the one on trial.

I knew what choice Xena would make because by then, she was a living, breathing person to me. Despite predicting the rescue, there was still something exciting about watching her behave ‘out of character’ to save Gabrielle. In early seasons, Xena is predominantly logical and unwavering. Compare that Xena to the older version, whose ethos is still there but pliable if a certain blonde is in hot water. And when was Gabrielle not in hot water?

At the end of “Legacy”, she explains Gabrielle is more important to her than “the greater good.” It’s not a decision she makes; it’s instinctive. It’s a tricky episode that could have been too far-removed from the Xena the show had spent years redeeming. Instead, Xena’s devotion rings true, messy, and inevitable. This internal strife demonstrates the world-building and maturation that define the second half of Warrior Princess.

You can’t talk about Xena without acknowledging the obvious romantic undertones of their relationship. The writing is so brazen in season 6, you’d be willfully ignorant to miss it. Their relationship is not purely subtext; it’s canonically discussed on screen. It is, however, ambiguous enough to get around censorship, and for you to deny it if you want to, though I’m not sure why anyone would.

More, please

Warrior Princess has welded itself to me permanently, which is what I want if I’m going to invest hundreds of hours. It makes me ache for a bygone era of TV. There’s a finite number of series with this longevity, and fewer still appeal to me. I’m worried I’ll have watched them all one day, and won’t ever get the same experience. I’ve marveled at plenty of streaming series, but few have imprinted on me. Rewatchability has tanked. Procedurals exist, but I’ve had my fill of Grey’s Anatomy and CSI; it’s a different wavelength.

I felt melancholic during the last episode, like my body knew the jig was up and my ‘first-timer’ experience was ending. Xena died in the finale, though, so my emotional state can’t entirely be blamed on running out of episodes.

I’m 27, and spent months embroiled in a show that premiered before I was born. I’m also rewatching Buffy for the first time since my teen years (and adoring it, thanks for asking), and regularly visit The Golden Girls. I treasure them enough to have my own copies, and a backup of said copies stored in a different physical location. When the apocalypse comes, I’ll be set.
I’ve also landed happily in the surprisingly active Xena corner of the internet, which is mostly composed of 19-year-old lesbians experiencing their rite of passage, and die-hards who are decades my senior and welcoming. I value this community as much as the series. This is old-school fandom, baby, and it’s not easily earned. So, if you’re left uninspired by streaming’s typical formatting, maybe your next favorite series requires some time-travelling.