The Cutprice Guignol

So, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot, Buffy: New Sunnydale, died an official death over the weekend – much to the delight of my co-writer, who covered why the rebooted series was such a bad idea in the first place last year. But reading a few of the reactions to the cancellation as well as some apparently leaked material that came out in relation to the new series got me thinking about the unique challenges facing a reboot of an iconic coming-of-age show like Buffy – and why, even in this era of endless requels, reboots, and reimaginings, it remains such a tough one to bring to screen.

There’s been a lot of talk about what exactly led to the failure of this particular reboot, developed by the brilliant Chloe Zhao and featuring a return from Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy herself; from executives with a grudge to failure to find a distributor, I get the feeling that it’s a story we’re going to be hearing a lot about in future. Amongst this chatter has come a leaked script, which is claimed to be an early draft of the unaired pilot – and, look, let’s be very clear here, there’s no way to be sure that the provenance of the script is accurate, or, if it is, that it in any way meaningfully resembles the pilot that actually wound up being shot for the Buffy reboot. But taking a look over this script and the vastly negative reactions that came in response to it, it struck me just what a tough job Zhao and company had in picking up on this franchise – and not just because of Buffy’s legendary status in genre television.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, at its heart, a coming-of-age show, a show about teenagers navigating the struggles of adolescence and that messy stumble towards adulthood – it’s one of the most iconic and, even to this day, most effective versions of that story in genre fiction, even despite its stumbles (by which I mean, the inclusion of Xander at any point in any way, shape or form, at least as far as my entirely-prejudiced arse is concerned). And, for so many of the fans who watched it, it was one that reflected their own adolescence in some way – the appeal was the sense of reflection in the characters and storylines, and the intimate connection it had with their own lives, even as fantastical as the stories often were. I think it’s fair to say that a huge portion of BTVS’s most dedicated fanbase likely grew up with the show, and that coming-of-age and adolescence were central themes to the show – and, when you put those two things together, a reboot is a pretty damn tricky thing to contend with.

To pull off a reboot, you have to please your existing audience and draw in a new one. When the common thread between the two versions of the show isn’t just the returning characters, it has to be the themes, feel, and setting, and marrying something that appeals to the original fans (and even so many that have discovered it in the twenty-five years or so since it finished) with a coming-of-age story for a new, modern audience feels like a kind of Catch-22. Telling a coming-of-age story is central to Buffy’s conceit, but the people who loved and related to it the first time around have, well, come of age – not to mention the fact that stories of adolescence and self-discovery are so often uniquely tied to the era they take place in, leaving even more space between this version of the show and the one that existed before. When so much of what people loved about the show was it being a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the lates 90s and early 00s, can you just slap a new era on to that and hope for the best?

Not to say that people of a certain age can’t or are opposed in some way to enjoying these kinds of stories, nor that shows can’t take on more than one major plot thread at a time, but the reaction to the leaked script and especially the modern slang and approach to writing adolescence, I think, really reflects a tension between the two aspects that the reboot had to get right. Drawing in a new audience with the coming-of-age story fits with what Buffy originally set out to be, but it leaves fans of the original series with less of that direct connection to the show that once reflected so much of their own experience.

All of this to say – the reboot is dead in the proverbial anyway, so I’m not sure any of this is of great importance, but I found it pretty interesting. I would love to hear your take on the failure of the Buffy reboot below, and your opinion on rebooting iconic coming-of-age shows in general – are there any that have got it totally right, or others that have failed before they got off the ground? Let me know in the comments!

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