Xena: Warrior Princess used to be one of our favorite shows.  It aired from 1995 to 2000, though we only originally watched the first three seasons and an episode here and there afterwards.  We stopped watching every week when the show started taking a different direction (when they left Greece), but we did eventually watch the entire show and enjoyed many of the later episodes.

Xena: Warrior Princess was a spinoff of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.  She was a warlord who found the error of her ways when she met Hercules.  He told her that the only way to truly live was if you were protecting others and working for the greater good.  She spent the first few seasons trying to make amends for her past with her friend Gabrielle by her side.  The show was canceled after six seasons and it ended up becoming more popular than Hercules by the end.

We really enjoyed the humor of the show as long as it didn't go completely over the top (like the episode "Married With Fishsticks").  The main cast and recurring guest stars were all really good actors and were able to pull off the comedic episodes as well as the dramatic ones.  It was interesting to go from a really dark episode (such as when Xena and Gabrielle's children died) to a musical episode right after it, but it was part of the charm of the show and it somehow worked.

The worst part of the show was when Xena killed almost all of the Olympian Gods to save her daughter, Eve.  It just was really weird and didn't seem to fit with the show's storyline.  A few seasons earlier, Xena told Gabrielle that her daughter Hope had to die because she was evil.  Then, when it was Xena's daughter that everyone was saying was evil, Xena went and killed off all the Gods. Another part that we saw flaws with was that Xena had far too much backstory for someone her age.

The show went wrong when it started concentrating on the whole Dahak storyline.  After Gabrielle had Hope, the show started focusing too much on all of that and then completely abandoned its roots.  By the end of the show, it did not even resemble the original premise at all and Xena and Gabrielle's characters had changed too much.  Character development is one thing, but having Gabrielle turn into everything she hated in Xena (she went from carrying a staff, which she preferred because it was not threatening without sharp edges, to fighting with scythes and killing off the bad guys left and right) seemed too far.

Some of the most memorable scenes to us are when Xena told her son Solan he could travel with them and then he died moments later, when Xena told Ares he had a one in a billion chance with her and he was happy with that, when Xena told Joxer he had the heart of a lion, and pretty much the whole episode of "The Bitter Suite".

Xena, because she was a different type of female character, who really grew throughout the show.  Joxer was adorable and could have some really meaningful scenes when he wasn't acting stupid.  Ares was our other favorite character, because he was just awesome and grew the most out of any character in either Hercules or Xena.