This past weekend, actor Sarah Michelle Gellar announced that Hulu had decided not to move forward with Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s planned reboot, called New Sunnydale. Gellar says the show ran into an issue with an unnamed exec who was “proud” to have never watched the original series. Now, an alleged early script for the canned pilot has leaked and Hulu made the right call when it ordered rewrites.
The 59-page script, apparently a 2024 draft from early in the pre-production process, focuses primarily on new characters, including a woman named Stacy, for much of the episode. The pilot feels decidedly modern, specifically in its use of current slang and social justice language in a way that feels tailor-made to try to spawn viral clips for TikTok. Instead of “killed,” characters sometimes say “unalived,” which is a term social media users say because they think algorithms suppress content that uses more direct language.
There’s also an exchange between Stacy and her boyfriend Chris in which he claims he didn’t come to her defense earlier because he “didn’t want to take away [her] agency,” to which she replies that he’s “trying to weaponize [her] feminism against [her].” Elsewhere, a character named Larkin, who is described as a “chronic do-gooder with more heart than sense,” is depicted as an exaggerated SJW stereotype, scolding people about “assuming genders” and pointing out gendered dynamics by saying “it’s giving patriarchy.” You can read the full script while it’s still online, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got yanked off of sites hosting it soon.
Buffy was known as a feminist series back when it aired in the ‘90s, and it makes some sense that a modern reboot would be at least aware of online social justice and feminist language, but to say this dialogue is on the nose is an insult to noses. This script was reportedly scrapped or heavily rewritten long before the reboot was canceled, with more recent scripts reportedly adding a lot more Buffy, who only appears briefly in this draft. There were some talented folks attached to the project, including Hamnet director Chloé Zhao, so maybe what they were working with before New Sunnydale was canceled would have actually passed the smell test. Maybe that updated script will leak one day, or someone may swoop in and save the show from cancellation.
