Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
There is a running success Buffy the Vampire Slayer lead to the development of a Angel spinoff that focused on the titular vampire with a soul played so memorably by David Boreanaz. That show must have lacked the overall quality of the original show, but Angel is rightly remembered as one of the best spin-offs in television history. What a lot Buffy However, fans don’t realize that we’re about to get something that could be even better than that Angel: a Faith spinoff focusing on Eliza Dushku’s popular vampire Slayer.
The Buffy Faith Spinoff
Tim Minear’s idea, an Angel a writer who later went on to become an Emmy-nominated executive producer American Horror Story. After Buffy the Vampire Slayer that ended in 2003, Minear wanted to follow up that show with a separate Faith spinoff that would follow the adventures of this Slayer after she came back in season 7 to help Buffy save the world. Originally, Minear envisioned his show as “Faith meet Kung Fu.”
This is, of course, a reference to the wonderful TV show from the 70s starring David Carradine where the main character wanders the Old West, righting wrongs wherever he comes across them. While Buffy focused primarily on the static setting of Sunnydale, Minear wanted a Fath spinoff to have its title character “probably on a motorcycle, criss-crossing the earth, trying to find her place in the world.” He admitted that the show “would have an arc at some point,” but felt “the idea of it being rooted somewhere just seemed wrong to me” and that “the idea of it constantly moving seemed ok for me.”
While she originally appeared in Buffykeeping Faith moving in this spin-off would really pay off for one of the biggest stories in Angel. As Minear points out, Faith broke out of prison in that show to help stop Angelus (the pathetic and sadistic monster Angel turns into when he loses his soul). She later went to Sunnydale to help Buffy stop the First Evil, but “some people would have been behind her” following her jailbreak, which could explain Faith constantly moving from place to place in her own spin-off .
Why It Didn’t Happen
After Buffyfans were hungry for more, and a Faith spinoff would likely have been a success due to Eliza Dushku’s popularity, so why was this show never made? The main reason is that Dushku feels Sarah Michelle Gillard left some “very big shoes to fill,” and that “sometimes you have to go with your gut, and my gut was telling me that maybe I needed to try something else that was different.” In short, she wanted to do some work that wasn’t in the Buffyverse, which is why she ended up as the main character in the supernatural drama. Tru Call.
Like hard core Buffy fans know, this Faith spinoff is one of many canceled projects in the Whedon universe. There were also ideas for a Giles spin-off, a Spike movie, an animated spin-off, 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 of them had full potential as a result of Faith. That’s because, as this rogue Slayer once joked, fans are always ready to “thank God” for “hot chicks with superpowers.”
