With all the talk about the Whedonless Buffy movie, should we be surprised that Anthony Stewart Head is talking again about the perpetually-teased Ripper spin-off series? Probably not - but this time, at least, he's telling us what we've missed out on.
Talking to SciFi Wire, Head revealed that, just before Whedon announced Dollhouse, he had been talking to BBC drama chief Julie Gardner about the possibility of doing something with the often-discussed spin-off about Buffy's former mentor, post-Buffy season 7. But Eliza Dushku and contractual complications over character rights stalled the project, leaving us with this glimpse of what could have been:
Originally, when he pitched it to me, it was a series, and it was Giles as this sad, lonely man in England without a real reason to be... It was pretty much ghost stories. Week by week, some ghost story would somehow affect him. Then he said he didn't want to. By that time, I think he had been affected by Angel, the need to write a weekly story. I think he found at that point the drive was different, so he suggested this one film that we were going to make. He told me this story that he had written, and it's absolutely beautiful, and I hope that one day it gets made, whether it's in the guise of Ripper or whether we just tell it as a one-off TV movie. It's a lovely, lovely story. It's kind of a ghost story. It's also about a man investigating his own soul, and it's fascinating, lovely, sad, and it's classic Joss Whedon. I hope we get to make it one day. From there on in, if it was successful, maybe he could have been convinced to do a series. As I say, now he's back in the seat of doing a weekly series with Dollhouse; maybe he can be convinced otherwise. Never say never, but at the same time, I think it's on a shelf for a while.
Now, this is the kind of thing I'd love to see handled in the Buffy comic instead of another story about Satsu.
Anthony Head: The Buffy spinoff Ripper may still be possible [SciFi Wire]