Last week, at the height of San Diego Comic-Con, Fox dropped a bombshell that a new Buffy the Vampire Slayer was in the works, starring a black woman in the lead role. The initial report said the show would be a reboot of the ‘90s television series but showrunner Monica Owusu-Breen has made a statement which sounds like that that’s not the case at all.
In a statement just posted to Twitter, Owusu-Breen touched on her own personal history with the Buffy TV series, before addressing that the new show will introduce a new slayer.
For some genre writers it’s Star Wars.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my Star Wars.Before I became a writer, I was a fan. For seven seasons, I watched Buffy Summers grow up, find love, kill that love. I watched her fight, and struggle and slay.
There is only one Buffy. One Xander, one Willow, Giles, Cordelia, Oz, Tara, Kendra, Faith, Spike, Angel... They can’t be replaced. Joss Whedon’s brilliant and beautiful series can’t be replicated. I wouldn’t try to.
But here we are, twenty years later...
And the world seems a lot scarier.
So maybe, it could be time to meet a new Slayer...And that’s all I can say.
Basically, don’t think “reboot,” think Buffy: The Next Generation. A revival instead. (Whether they’ll keep the “Buffy” name is another question of course.)
Which, after all, makes sense within the fiction of Buffy anyway. There have always been multiple Slayers in the show’s universe, destined to be the chosen one fighting against the tides of darkness, passing on that right upon their death, until Buffy’s own death and resurrection led to the awakening of multiple women with the potential to become Slayers. What’s not to say that the future star of this new Buffy show isn’t just another of these potentials, finally taking on the mantle for herself?
Owusu-Breen added that she can’t clarify more about the show right now, so we’ll have to wait until we learn more to see just how this new Buffy series is set to unfold. But at least we know one thing: we can stop calling it a reboot.