Buffy Reboot
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #184. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Elsewhere, here.
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What if we rebooted Buffy? What if there was a way to do it where Wheadon signed away his rights to any royalties off the name (I don’t know how royalties work) so that issue was taken off the table? Most reboots and remakes are bad and yet . . . what if they weren’t? What if this one was good? If everything must be remade and rebooted anyway, I would prefer it at least be good. Battlestar Galactica (2004) was good! Stage and film actors have been “remaking” Shakespeare for over 400 years and no one has a problem with it if the production is good. I’m kidding, people have a problem with everything.
I’ve surprised myself coming to this opinion as I am normally against rebooting shows with perfect endings. The last season of Buffy is only okay, for the most part, but the finale is something really special (spoilers ahead for a show that premiered in 1997), where the hero saves the world by becoming less exceptional, sharing her powers, by finding a way to undo hundreds of years of misogyny that constricted untold numbers of women without them even being aware that there were invisible ropes holding them back. It feels simple, like how the show must end, but that’s only because it is so very much how it should end.
But what if Buffy realized she hadn’t left adequate safeguards on the slayer power to ensure that it would remain in the fists of the many? What if there were women all over the globe whose right to dusting vamps was taken from them? What if Buffy in her middle-age had to reckon once again that it was her body, but their choice? Or what if her power was taken away along with the rest of them?
I’ve surprised myself because not so long ago I would have said that Buffy represented a very specific kind of feminism or at least girly representation that isn’t needed in new iterations. I would have said it was a thing of its own time and that it was too white, too gender essentialist, too full of creepy dudes masquerading as nice guys to make sense bringing back from the dead. Buffy always wanted to rest. Let her rest. I might have even argued that the show’s beautiful, capacious finale was proof of this very argument.
But I don’t know . . . now I think it might be nice to see someone fighting. Not Buffy Summers (let her rest!), but some new slayer.
It’s incredible how many different kinds of misogyny are represented in the show’s original run. Frat boys feeding teenage girls to snakes, robots who hate insolent teenage girls, techies who build teenage girls to have sex with, a Mayor who likes when his hired assassin dresses like a young girl, a boyfriend who laughs at you after sex, a situationship who sexually assaults you, a best friend who lectures you for breaking up with your most boring of boyfriends. All of them are working for Trump now.
I don’t think a reboot of Buffy would radicalize anyone. It was never a radical show, but it was one that reflected how many monsters there were in the world and emphatically called them what they were. When was the last time the centrists in the Democratic party said something that clearly, and then . . . I don’t know, kicked the shit out of them. When someone calls Buffy a bitch she kicks the shit out of them. I think people need to remember that’s an option.
Amended: One day after filing it was announced in Deadline that a Buffy reboot is in the works at Hulu. Obviously I didn’t actually want this to happen unless I was put in charge.
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Natasha Ochshorn is a PhD Candidate in English at CUNY, writing on fantasy texts and environmental grief. She’s lived in Brooklyn her whole life and makes music as Bunny Petite. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.
