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[COLUMN] Maybe We Don't Need a Buffy, the Vampire Slayer Relaunch | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2025-02-07 15:00:19 +0000 UTC
It was announced last week that Disney was working on a relaunch of the beloved 1990s television series Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, with the premiere to be directed by Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao and featuring Sarah Michelle Gellar reprising her role as Buffy Summers.
This is somehow both a little surprising and completely inevitable. It is inevitable because nothing is allowed to stay dead in the modern entertainment landscape. As if to underscore this point, Gellar first hinted at her openness to returning for a Buffy revival while promoting her role on Dexter: Original Sin. Indeed, Buffy has already been revived in multiple formats, including a series of canonical comic books and a sequel podcast that was killed by Disney.
It is also an entirely predictable move from Disney itself. The company’s purchase of Fox was motivated in part by a desire to access its library of intellectual properties to bulk up Disney’s streaming offerings. Prey was a Predator sequel that went straight to streaming. Alien: Romulus was originally intended for Hulu. Later this year, Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth will bring the iconic xenomorph to the small screen.
The studio that attempted to turn Willow into an expensive streaming show (and then deleted it from their library after the cult hit failed to break out) was always going to see Buffy, the Vampire Slayer as a potentially lucrative nostalgic cash-in. After all, the audience that grew up watching Buffy, the Vampire Slayer on the WB and UPN is now the ideal target market for streaming services. These are now adults who may be ageing out of going to the cinema, but can afford a Disney+ subscription.
If anything, it is a surprise the company waited this long. The market has been flooded with revivals of 1990s television shows like The X-Files, Sex and the City, Will and Grace, Frasier, Mad About You, That ’70s Show, Twin Peaks and Beverly Hills 90210, to say nothing of reboots like Bel-Air or looming revivals like The Nanny. Of course, there are probably reasons for this. Most obviously, Disney’s purchase of Fox only finalized in March 2019, just a year before the pandemic.
Indeed, it seems notable that the announcement of the Buffy relaunch coincides with the sense that Disney has finally got complete control of the assets it acquired with Fox. The studio is still integrating the X-Men into its shared Marvel Cinematic Universe, relaunching X-Men: The Animated Series just last year. The first Alien television series is launching later this year. It’s entirely possible that this Buffy revival came together as quickly as it could have.
Of course, there may be other reasons that it took so long for Buffy to be resurrected. Most obviously, Buffy is the brainchild of Joss Whedon. Whedon was television royalty, and his fingerprints are all over Buffy. It is worth acknowledging that Buffy was relaunched from a failed feature film based on a Whedon script, cementing the idea that much of Buffy’s creative success was down to its writer given that television is traditionally seen as “a writer’s medium.”
Much of what made Buffy so unique came directly from Whedon, including the heavy emphasis on monster-as-metaphor storytelling and Whedon’s trademark “Whedonspeak” which was a feature of his work on other shows like Angel, Firefly and Dollhouse and even films like The Avengers. Whedon was one of the first generation of television auteurs alongside Chris Carter on The X-Files or Aaron Sorkin on The West Wing, paving the way for prestige showrunners like David Chase or David Simon.
As such, the legacy of Buffy is incredibly compromised by the very serious allegations that have been made against Joss Whedon by actors like Charisma Carpenter and Gal Gadot or his ex-wife Kai Cole, not to mention many of the cast and crew who worked with him but spoke on condition of anonymity. According to actress Michelle Trachtenberg, who was a teenager on the set of Buffy, there was reportedly an unofficial rule that Whedon could not be left alone with her.
There is an ongoing debate about how best to deal with work by problematic artists. Obviously, this is a very subjective issue. There is no single right answer. However, that issue becomes particularly complicated when so much of the artist is in the work itself. It’s easy to understand why Netflix cancelled The Sandman, given the extent to which the eponymous character is a stand-in for author Neil Gaiman.
Whedon will not be returning for the relaunch. However, as the creator of the characters and the property, this reboot will still enrich him. He will earn money for doing nothing. Given how much of Buffy was tied up in Whedon’s sensibility, his writing style and his personality which will (rightly) be absent from the relaunch, and the fact that using the title means having to pay him, it does raise a pretty reasonable question about why those involved would not just make a new show.
After all, director Chloé Zhao has a very obvious and honest affection for vampires. In February 2021, it was announced that Zhao was making a “sci-fi western” Dracula movie at Universal. The project seemed to stall, with Zhao “still writing the script” in March 2023. With the release of Renfield, Abigail, The Last Voyage of the Demeter and even Nosferatu over the past two years, Universal may be all Dracula-ed out. Still, why not make that project or something like it?
The answer is simple: more people will watch a relaunched Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (or subscribe to Disney+ for a relaunched Buffy, the Vampire Slayer) than will tune into a new show with a similar premise. It is the cold hard math of the modern marketplace, and it explains why even prestigious television production houses like HBO have gone all-in on franchises and spin-offs like The Penguin, Dune: Prophecy, House of the Dragon, … And Just Like That, The Many Saints of Newark and so on.
There is something bleak in this. Critics like Emily Nussbaum have justifiably argued that Buffy, the Vampire Slayer deserves to be considered as a forerunner to the so-called “Golden Age of Television” that is often argued to begin with The Sopranos. Nussbaum contended that, just like The Sopranos, Buffy came to “represent the new style of TV making” at the turn of the millennium. Buffy was a watershed moment in culture, inspiring a generation of television critics, including Nussbaum.
To put it simply, Buffy does not need or require any sort of follow-up. “I am very proud of the show that we created and it doesn’t need to be done,” Sarah Michelle Gellar stated in December 2022, one year before her conversion on the road to Disney+. “We wrapped that up.” She is correct. What more needs to be said about Buffy Summers? What dangling emotional, character or plot arc demands resolution after two decades?
It is easy to be overly precious about this sort of thing. The Many Saints of Newark did not, in any meaningful way, diminish The Sopranos. On paper, Better Call Saul seemed like a cheap cash-in on the success of Breaking Bad, but went on to expand and enrich it. At the same time, how many of these revivals and spin-offs have that level of nuance and complexity to them? Better Call Saul worked because it had a continuity of creative talent that is (once again, correctly) absent here.
In many ways, this cynicism over the announcement of the relaunch of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is not necessarily about Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. It is, instead, the end result of a decade of this sort of nostalgic cash-in. After all, it has only been a decade since Matt Singer coined the term “legacyquel” to apply to films like Creed and The Force Awakens, but it somehow feels so much longer. There had always been projects like that, but suddenly they were inescapable.
There was always going to be a point where diminishing returns set in, and the novelty of seeing one’s “old faves” return would finally wear thin. That point is not marked by any specific film or television show. It happens on a case-by-case basis. It is a war of attrition. Maybe it’s “somehow Palpatine returned”, maybe it’s the second Indiana Jones legacyquel, maybe it’s the reverential Ghostbusters movie, maybe it’s the Frasier reboot without the rest of the cast.
For years, television was seen as “a vast wasteland.” It was considered a lesser artform than film, in part because its boundaries were more nakedly defined by commercialism than even film. The length and structure of a television episode was not determined by dramatic necessity, but by commercial mandate. Length and structure are important in defining art. As such, the idea of an ending – and who gets to decide when and how that ending arrives – is important.
One of the key moments in the evolution of television as an artform was when it came to understand the importance of an ending. Historically, television shows ran until the point that they became too expensive, which meant that it was very rare for a show to go out at its critical, commercial or creative peak. Instead, shows typically had to be allowed to go bad, to lose enough of the audience that the studio decided to cancel it. That’s why so many shows run longer than needed.
One of the defining features of the Golden Age of Television was the freedom that many showrunners enjoyed to end their shows on their own terms, rather than allowing them to run so long that they disappeared into obscurity. Shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad all have definitive endings where the showrunner decided to stop. Giving that power to a creative – allowing them to decide where a story ends – allows them to give shape to the art.
To be clear, there were always shows that had satisfying endings like MASH, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and even Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. However, this often felt like luck. For every show that ended well, there was another that ran too long like The X-Files, Heroes, The Office, Scrubs and so on. This is arguably still the case on network television. A television show that has a satisfying ending is a rare thing. Realizing the value of that was an important step in the medium’s evolution.
In some ways, this trend is just the end result of the “contentification” of media, which increasingly feels like a very particular form of “enshittification.” It is not about quality. It is not about artistic merit. It is not about satisfaction or narrative or character. It is only about more. It is about the belief that every film and television show exists not with any value of itself, but instead as an object from which future potential value might be wrung.
Nothing is ever truly over. Nothing is ever truly dead, even actors. This is the end theory of art as a service industry, where the goal is to keep feeding the customer what they think they want. This is the appeal of generative artificial intelligence, a machine that cannot make anything new but can recombine existing elements in infinite combinations, just churning out more, more, more, unburdened by anything as trite as artistic integrity.
Buffy, the Vampire Slayer was a beautiful and brilliant television show. It spoke to an entire generation. It also had an ending, and that ending is part of what made it so wonderful. It’s worth thinking about that before exhuming the grave and sinking one’s fangs into the corpse, in the hope of one last hit.
Comments
Darren Mooney
Ah, I think it’s there, in the same way it’s in say “The General.” Which is worth acknowledging, but also fixating upon that can feel like a distraction from the actual real issue. (I mean, it’s good to acknowledge it, but maybe removing the flag and the monuments that are still part of day-to-day life rather than a largely forgotten show from the 2000s. But yes, another illustration of why maybe we should keep bringing back zombie franchises.)
Darren Mooney
Well, this is the Scott Mendelson “rip off, don’t remake” philosophy, where there is a world of difference between “Star Wars” and “Dam Busters” as compared to “Star Wars” and “The Force Awakens.” And there is a world of difference between adapting a story from one medium to another as opposed to, say, bringing back all the old actors for a sequel that rehashes all the beats of a film that already exists. “A Fistful of Dollars”, “Yojimbo” and “Red Harvest” may all be interrelated, but it’s a world of difference between that and, say, “Boba Fett but shiny hangs out with Yoda but he’s a baby.”
ben kay
I don't know, maybe it's because I'm not from the US, but I don't get that vibe. Sure if you squint hard enough, I see how one can see that. But the browncoats didn't fight to keep the status quo or to keep slavery in place or really came from a position of any other leverage. I always read it more like: what if the war for independence was lost or the worse side in a civil war won? the alliance is much more coded like an empire or a colonizing force rather than the union. and the way Mal deals with it is clearly marked as a flaw, not a merit.
Dr. Judge, Private Eye
I was a bit glib, appreciate the response. What I was trying to say was: while the presences of geniuses like Lynch and Miller definitely helped those properties, I think what that really gets to is how overrated the likes of Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman actually were all along, and how derivative their "massively original ideas" turned out to be because they didn't credit or talk about their influences or inspirations. One thing I'll say for Tarantino is: as much as I've fallen off his hypetrain, the man is OPEN about what his influences were/are, in a much more similar way to Miller and Lynch, and even he's more obsessed with aesthetics than themes or characters. And I'm not saying: everything should be a remake anyway and NOTHING should be based on new or novel ideas, but what I am saying is: there are plenty of examples of revivals and sequels that work, and the presence of "the Originator" isn't always a positive thing. It's usually more about how much passion the people involved are allowed to actually express. So while I actually agree with large swaths and several points from this, I think writing something off because "it's a revival without the original creator" might not be a good reflex to nurture. Think tangible proof that "the Studio" is taking it away from the people who want to do something creative and interesting with it is a much, much better alarm bell to be rung. And as for X-Men '97: I think that one hits harder for people who WERE big fans of the cartoon, then realized that most of its problems were from a combination of ridiculous studio notes, but also the hypocritical "children's programming rules" of the time, which were about as restrictive as the Comics Code, but had much more nebulous rules. So seeing that not only come back, but come back and be more like the best X-Men COMICS? THAT was worth it for me. I think the cultural impact will be "in 10 years, it will be considered massively underrated."
Dr. Judge, Private Eye
This just gets at my core issue: I've done this cycle once before. In the late '80s to early 2000s, things that were "original" were hailed for just "being original" with far less emphasis placed on if they were any good, and it engendered an almost fetishistic pursuit of "novelty over all else." The problem then becomes: a great many times, people don't understand how derivative great works can be, and suddenly anything "based on something else" is deemed lesser-than, regardless of quality. Which just leads to double-standards, like people hailing The Godfather, JAWS, or Rambo for being "such a breath of fresh air and so original," despite them being based on a "pulpy trash novels." Hell, Carpenter's "The Thing" is one of the best horror movies ever made, and is a remake of an adaptation of a short story. Or Star Wars getting far too many flowers for its "originality" despite being a 1950s samurai epic in space. Which Lucas was...KINDA open about, but really liked to go more into Joseph Campbell and broader "inspirations."
Dr. Judge, Private Eye
That and all the Confederate apologia woven into it has aged like a fine corpse...
Darren Mooney
Well, no, but was undeniably the work of a very distinctive authorial voice. I don't have to think every part of "The Brutalist" is perfect to think that making a sequel to "The Brutalist" would be a bad idea.
Darren Mooney
I think if you are talking about the two recent "Mad Max" sequels and "Twin Peaks: The Return", the involvement of the original auteurs is a major part of why those projects worked, and why they felt like organic extensions of the original projects. Which is obviously (and correctly) off the table here. (I thought "X-Men '97" was fine, but I think it's a niche revival. It's not a project with comparable cultural import to the other two examples or the original series.)
Darren Mooney
Yep. When I stated looking at it that way, it made a lot of sense.
Dan McAlister
The “theory of art as a service industry” is a lens that’s I’ve felt but hadn’t articulated. Thank you, I needed that language.
Dr. Judge, Private Eye
I mean Buffy's kinda just... Dracula X Red Sonja in the suburbs, at the end of the day? And Xander is genuinely one of the worst characters in fiction, and when you learn he's the author's self-insert?...I mean the red flags really WERE always there. Edit: Not thrilled with the tone of the original comment, apologies. I'll keep a more civil tone on here going forward.
Dr. Judge, Private Eye
But see here's the thing: the original isn't some unassailable classic, unfortunately it's a TV show and comic book series that contains Xander. One of the worst characters to ever exist in fiction. Particularly because: unlike the likes of Freeza, Walter White, and Satan the Adversary: Xander is supposed to be a "relatable hero who's usually right, ACTUALLY." Oh and they happily took money to do an anti-drug PSA episode, left the evil mantis teacher plot thread hanging, and had the entire Riley season. In case the "Xander exists" point wasn't enough. I don't brook with instant jaded cynicism when something comes back after an extended hiatus. Yeah, it usually sucks, but between Mad Max: Fury Road, Twin Peaks: The Return, and X-Men '97, the hits HIT HARD. And while "continuity of creators" is all well-and-good I don't think it's the "end all be all." Regardless of creator's current rep.
Swift Justice
They should talk a leaf from Yahtzee's suggestion and instead of bringing back beloved shows for an unneeded last gasp, remake and revive shows that got cancelled before their prime or were a mess in the first place. Heck, X-Men '97 was quite beloved for picking up right where they left off with an actual animation budget.
Swift Justice
I think people are hoping if they ignore it then Paramount will too.
Darren Mooney
Undead media.
Darren Mooney
Yep. Though I don’t know they’ve been named as showrunners, the Zimmerman Sisters who are writing the pilot ran “Poker Face” for Rian Johnson, so they’re obviously talented. (They wrote the Gordon-Levitt/Hsu episode, as I recall.)
Darren Mooney
To be fair, that’s always the way, also happened with the “X-Files” comic series, which was continuity until the show came back.
Luuuuuuu
Fuckin the zombie corpse of last century dead media
Darren Mooney
I think, like “Millennium”, it’s a work that exists enough in the shade to be left untouched. (“Millennium” in HD would be great.)
William Alexander
Ugh this whole situation is so sad and gross. I can’t wait for the talented people hired to do this get blamed for it’s underperformance, or for Disney to hold off on something vibrant like Buffy was for the same reason (as Whedon and Gaiman enjoy the millions they made).
ben kay
oh, absolutely, that's a beautiful gravestone that should be left well alone. all the more reason to be worried, probably
Michael McCarthy
I jest, but feels weird that we have the first Star Trek movie in nearly 9 years and everyone has moved on before it even came out. Sort of like the Nevers to semi return to the subject at hand.
Shannon Vanshoon
I'm honestly tempted to make a joke that the revival/reboot/whatever may be worth it if it means the whole Buffy 'Season Eight' comic-series is now retroactively invalid, since while it had a good start, the reveal of who the 'Big Bad' was has always really annoyed me in terms of continuity... but beyond that, this does feel like, to quote Rick Sanchez, 'a shameless cash-grab', yes.
Darren Mooney
Also, as somebody who actually read “Sandman”, looking at the pace of the show, where the first season covered twenty of the seventy issues, and knowing that Netflix defaults to three seasons, I would regard that statement with a healthy mountain of salt. Three seasons seems doable, dropping the anthology stories and condensing or dropping “non-mythology” arcs. But two seems… highly unlikely. Unless the second is going to be a speed run of dizzying proportions.
Darren Mooney
Oh, but then we’d have to engage with the content of the “content.”
Darren Mooney
To be fair, I don’t know there’s anything to say about that. (It’s bad, but not in especially interesting or illuminating ways.)
Darren Mooney
Honestly, kinda glad “Firefly” remains largely untouched after “Serenity.”
Michael McCarthy
Still putting off that Section 31 article I see.
Rob Dukes a.k.a. Jurgan
The plot of the last couple seasons of Buffy hinged on what a mistake it was to bring back someone who had died and moved on to a peaceful afterlife. There might be something to learn from that.
Tim Wilson
Which may well be the case, but a number of his other projects have been cancelled, Netflix is unlikely to continue with anything further in that universe and for those who loved the comic or series, they now have to deal with that. Harder to scrub him from Sandman compared to Good Omens for instance.
LifeIsStrange
Apparently Sandman was always intended to only be two seasons and it's cancellation had nothing to do with Gaiman.
LifeIsStrange
From what I heard Sandman was always intended to have two seasons only and it's cancellation had nothing to do with Gaiman.
LifeIsStrange
I had mixed feelings about the ending to Buffy and Angel myself so i'm all in favor of the revival frankly. If only for the possibility of bringing back Tara, fridging her was one of the biggest sins in television history as far as i'm concerned, Whedon and his writers really whiffed big time on there and failed to meet the moment so if this revival can fix that that alone justifies it's existence for me.
Darren Mooney
Well, depressingly, it works. People pay to see these movies and shows.
ben kay
So, when will we get 'Cultural Fracking' shirts? What's kinda weird is though that they went for Buffy of all things and not, let's say... Firefly
Tim Wilson
I think it depends for me. I think Whedon’s Buffy having such a feminist message and symbolism, while he was doing what he was doing does make it weird to watch but it doesn’t detract from the messages itself or the follow on works or people it inspired.
Cerulean
"It is not about quality. It is not about artistic merit. It is not about satisfaction or narrative or character. It is only about more." Mhm. They spend so much money on obvious crap. The business genius at play is beyond me.
Darren Mooney
To be honest, I think it's good for art to be creator-driven. And having to deal with this sort of thing really isn't a bad thing in the grand structure of things. Like, it's not the end of the world that Netflix cancelled the "Sandman" show, in the grand scheme of things; it doesn't take away what that story meant to teenage me reading it, even if adult me has to do the adult thing of processing what that means. It's not a bad thing for me to have to unwrap complicated and thorny emotions about the art I consume, If anything, that is a testament to the value and power of art. If I have to choose about art so impersonal that discovering the creator did terrible things has no impact on my relationship to that art and art that means something to me that it becomes painful to disentangle from that creator, I always choose the latter. Even if that's a bizarre thing to argue over. The real victims are the victims obviously, and this is just a sideshow. But the crime itself is no greater or lesser for whether the work is personal or impersonal, and the only cases where I haven't had to process these revelations like that is in the case of work that I never really cared about to begin with. I don't know if that makes any sense.
Tim Wilson
It’s definitely a bummer. It’s doable, Castlevania managed to end on Season 4 carrying on the themes Warren Ellis started in Seasons 1-3 but in general nerd culture is very creator driven so when it does go wrong…
Darren Mooney
Whedon is one of those guys like Gaiman, where it really stings, you know? And they are formative writers for me. And it makes it quite hard to go back to the things that they did that I loved, because so much of them is in that, if that makes sense?
Brian S
I was a huge Buffy and Angel fan at the time, watching each new episode and spending hours dissecting each show, both in person and online. Still, I do not see the need for a revival. What’s to be explored? Buffy leading a new Slayer or Slayers could be interesting, but that was already done in the final season, and not particularly well. Also, it was the dynamic amongst the main characters that I enjoyed the most, especially as the series progressed. I’m pretty sure that the other actors from the original series won’t be involved, and Buffy without Willow or Xander or Giles just doesn’t work for me. Truthfully, I found Buffy to be the least interesting character on the show. She’s not the worst one; that was Dawn, and I challenge you to find a Buffy fan that disagrees. Moreover, I don’t trust Zhao with the production. The Eternals was terrible. As you said in the article, Whedon had his fingerprints all over the show; it was entirely his voice and worldview, presented as a feminist story, but through a male lens. That distance allowed the show to explore darker themes than have been discussed otherwise. Of course, Whedon’s preachings turned out to be bullshit, as such declarations often are.
Tim Wilson
I honestly thought they’d already done this and it had failed, but I might be thinking of Charmed? In any event, this seems to be doomed to failure because anyone invested in the Buffy-verse has already devoured the books, comics etc and in many cases decided to let it go because of the weirdness that came with it. I’m sure it’ll pull good numbers initially but sadly I reckon this’ll be a forgotten footnote very soon. I do appreciate your takedown of Whedon in this though, it really needs to be better known.
