On March 14, Sarah Michelle Gellar announced on Instagram that Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale, a planned continuation of the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series set to be produced by Hamnet director Chloé Zhao, had officially been cancelled. Now, following a new interview with Gellar, we know who to blame: an unnamed exec who was “proud” that he’d never watched the original series.
The quote comes from an interview with People Magazine, during which Gellar stated that she received the news of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale’s cancellation a moment before attending the premiere of her upcoming film, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. “We had an executive on our show who was not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn’t for him…So that tells you the uphill battle that we had been fighting since day one, when your executive is literally proud to tell you that he didn’t watch it.”
The weird thing about Gellar’s comment is that it’s pretty easy to find the full list of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale’s executive producers, and there’s only one man out of the nine credited producers: Kaz Kuzui. That may lead you to assume that Kuzui is the obvious subject of Gellar’s quote, but I don’t think that’s actually the case.
Kuzui served as a producer on both the original 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer film and as an executive producer on the entirety of the 1996 TV series. He was also involved in attempts to reboot the series as a film in 2009 and as another, separate TV series in 2018. I don’t know about you, but I feel like the guy who has attempted to get five separate Buffy projects off the ground probably doesn’t hate Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
However, as reported by Deadline, this adds credence to the rumour that Craig Erwich, President of Disney Television Group, is the real target of Gellar’s ire. Deadline’s report both states that “according to multiple sources, the executive Gellar was referring to is Erwich,” and that Erwich was the one directly responsible for cancelling the series, as he oversees Hulu Originals’ projects. That being said, several of Deadline’s sources also told the publication that Erwich’s decision had more to do with the quality of the pilot, with some saying it would have been too expensive to produce and others suggesting it didn’t live up to the standards established by the original series.