The canceled Buffy Spinoff Better Than Angel

The author Chris Snelgrove
| Published 27 seconds ago

Runaway success Buffy the Vampire Slayer led to the development of an Angel spinoff that focused on the titular vampire with a soul, played so memorably by David Boreanaz. This show certainly fell short of the overall quality of the original show, but Angel is rightly remembered as one of the best series in television history. What many Buffy What fans don't realize, however, is that we almost got something potentially even better Angel: Faith spinoff focusing on Eliza Dushka's popular vampire Slayer.

Buffy Faith Spinoff

This idea was created by Tim Miner, an Angel a writer who later became an Emmy-nominated executive producer American Horror Story. After Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended in 2003, Minear wanted to continue the show with a standalone Faith spinoff that would follow the adventures of this Slayer after she returned in Season 7 to help Buffy save the world. Minear originally conceived his show as “Faith meets Kung Fu“.

This is, of course, a reference to the amazing 70s TV show starring David Carradine, in which the main character roams the Old West, righting wrongs wherever he finds them. While Buffy was primarily focused on a specific location in Sunnydale, Minear wanted the title character of the Fath spinoff to be “perhaps on a motorcycle, traversing the land trying to find her place in the world”. He allowed that the show “will have an arc at some point”, but felt that “the idea of ​​her being rooted somewhere felt wrong” and that “the idea of ​​her constantly being on the move felt right to me”.

While she originally appeared Buffykeeping Faith on the move in this spinoff would actually pay off one of the bigger storylines Angel. As Minear points out, in this show, Faith broke out of prison to help stop Angelus (the amoral and sadistic monster Angel turns into when he loses his soul). She later went to Sunnydale to help Buffy stop the First Evil, but after breaking out of her prison, “there would have been some people” that could explain Thea constantly moving from place to place in her spinoff.

Why didn't it happen

After Buffyfans were hungry for more and a Faith spinoff would probably have been successful due to Eliza Dushka's popularity, why was this show never made? The main reason is that Dušku felt Sarah Michelle Gellar left some “really big boots to fill” and that “sometimes you have to settle and my gut told me maybe I should try something else that's just different.” Long story short, she wanted to work with the Buffyverse, so she became the main character of the supernatural drama. True Calling.

Like hardcore Buffy fans know that this Faith spinoff is just one of many canceled projects in Whedon's universe. There were also ideas for a Giles series, a Spike movie, an animated series, and even a Slayer School show featuring some of the newly formed Slayers from Buffy's seventh season. While all of them could have been fun (especially the Giles show), none had as much potential as a spinoff involving Faith. That's because, as that rogue Slayer once joked, fans are always ready to “thank god” for “hot chicks with superpowers.”