That's how I felt about Buffy heh, I loved all of the little continuity touches with the characters changing relationships in season 2 (when I started watching), and how there would always be mention of previous events. It's a shame that viewers who start Buffy nowadays must miss how unusual that sort of serialisation was at the time.

I remember Joss talking abut how Buffy was partly a soap opera, and that was partly because those were the main shows in the 90's who did feature long-running storylines that you needed to watch every episode to keep track of, the focus on most mainstream shows was on being being to pick up an episode at any time/your characters not changing too much