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Escape 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 did not reach the overall quality of the original show, but Angel is rightfully remembered as one of the best spinoffs in television history. What a lot Buffy however, what fans don’t realize is that we almost got something potentially even better than Angel: Faith spinoff focusing on popular vampire slayer Eliza Dushka.
Buffy Faith spinoff
This idea was the brainchild of Tim Minear, 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 follow up the show with a standalone Faith spinoff that would follow the slayer’s adventures after she returned in season 7 to help Buffy save the world. Minear originally envisioned his show as “Faith meets Kung Fu.”
This is, of course, a reference to the wonderful 1970s TV show starring David Carradine, in which the main character wanders the Wild West, righting wrongs wherever he comes across them. While Buffy Mostly focused on the fixed location of Sunnydale, Minear wanted spinoff Fath to have its title character “probably on a motorcycle, cruising the Earth trying to find her place in the world”. He admitted that the show “will have an arc at some point”, but felt that “the idea of it being rooted somewhere felt wrong” and that “the idea of it being constantly on the move feels right”.
While she originally appeared in Buffykeeping Faith moving in this spinoff would actually pay off one of the biggest storylines in the Angel. As Minear points out, Faith escaped from prison in this show to help stop Angelus (the amoral and sadistic monster that Angel turns into when he loses his soul). She later went to Sunnydale to help Buffy stop the First Evil, but after her prison break “there would be some people after her”, which could explain Faith constantly moving from place to place in her own spinoff.
Why didn’t it happen?
After Buffyfans were hungry for more, and a Faith spinoff would likely have been a success due to Eliza Dushka’s popularity, so why was this show never made? The main reason is that he felt Dushka Sarah Michelle Gellar left some “really big shoes to fill” and that “sometimes you have to go with your gut, and my gut was telling me that maybe I need to try something else that’s just different.” In short, she wanted to do something other than the Buffyverse, and that’s why she ended up as a main character in a supernatural drama True Calling.
Like hardcore Buffy fans know that this Faith spinoff is just one of many canceled projects in the Whedon 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 the seventh season of Buffy. While all of these could have been fun (especially Giles’ show), none had the full potential of a spinoff with Faith. That’s because, as this rogue Slayer once quipped, fans are always ready to “thank god” for “hot girls with superpowers.”
