The Canceled Buffy Spinoff Better Than Angel
The runaway success of 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. That show admittedly fell short of the original show’s overall quality, but Angel is rightly remembered as being one of the best spinoffs in television history. What many Buffy fans don’t realize, though, is that we nearly got something potentially even better than Angel: a Faith spinoff focusing on Eliza Dushku’s popular vampire Slayer.
The Buffy Faith Spinoff
This idea was the brainchild of Tim Minear, an Angel writer who later went on to become the Emmy-nominated executive producer of American Horror Story. After Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended in 2003, Minear wanted to follow up on that show with a separate Faith spinoff that would follow up on this Slayer’s adventures after she came back in season 7 to help Buffy save the world. Originally, Minear envisioned his show as a “Faith meets Kung Fu.”
This is, of course, a reference to the amazing ‘70s TV show starring David Carradine in which the main character wanders the Old West, righting wrongs wherever he encounters them. While Buffy had mostly focused on the fixed location of Sunnydale, Minear wanted the Fath spinoff to have its title character “probably on a motorcycle, crossing the earth, trying to find her place in the world.” He conceded that that show “would get an arc at some point,” but he felt “the idea of her rooted somewhere seemed wrong to me” and that “the idea of her constantly on the move seemed right to me.”
While she originally appeared in Buffy, keeping Faith on the move in this spinoff would actually pay off one of the biggest storylines in Angel. As Minear points out, Faith broke out of prison in that show in order 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 “there would have been some people after her” following her jailbreak, which might explain Faith constantly moving from place to place in her own spinoff.
Why It Didn’t Happen
After Buffy, fans were hungry for more, and a Faith spinoff would likely have been a success due to Eliza Dushku’s popularity, so why did this show never get made? The primary reason is that Dushku felt Sarah Michelle Gellar left some “really big boots to fill,” and that “sometimes you have to go with your gut, and my gut was telling me that I maybe needed to try something else that was just different.” In short, she wanted to do some non-Buffyverse work, which is why she ended up as the lead character in the supernatural drama Tru Calling.
As hardcore Buffy fans know, this Faith spinoff is just one of many canceled projects in Whedon’s universe. There were also ideas for a Giles spinoff, a Spike movie, an animated spinoff, and even a Slayer School show featuring some of the newly minted Slayers from Buffy’s seventh season. While all of these could have been fun (especially the Giles show), none had the sheer potential of a spinoff featuring Faith. That’s because, as this rogue Slayer once joked, fans are always ready to “thank God” for “hot chicks with superpowers.”
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