SMG’s telltale accessory on the Buffy set

Something I’ve noticed as pieces of news about the Buffy reboot trickle out is the tiptoeing. By tiptoeing, I mean that every single fan of this show, and half the people who didn’t watch it originally but have been browbeaten into it by friends and family in the intervening decades, is hoping this will be the revival we’ve always wanted, but is aware we might be putting too much on it – too much pressure on the bold-face names of Nora and Lilla Zuckerman or Chloe Zhao, too hopeful that the show would come back to current-day relevance, beyond being a fancon staple for almost 30 years.

But these mundane on-set pics have made me truly excited. Not solely the images of Sarah Michelle Gellar arriving for work; though her smile and the broad daylight is already a contrast to the stories she used to tell about exhausting 20-hour workdays and the lack of days off, with embarrassingly little empathy or support from either the producers or the writers of the articles who chronicled this …but one very-regular accessory:

The headphones she’s wearing around her neck are very specifically what you use on set to listen to each take, when directing or producing/otherwise being a key part of the creative team. They are so much less sleek than what any of us use in our regular lives, but they’re durable because you pull them on and off 17 times an hour, and they don’t get lost, and they work even when you launch off your director’s chair onto set and accidentally leave them hooked on an armrest (ahem. Sorry, sound department).

What this tells me in a bigger sense is that what we’ve been told about SMG’s creative involvement behind the camera has, if anything, been undersold. Obviously the plot centers around Buffy as “trainer/the new Giles”, but SMG wearing “cans” and a big old hat means she’s very much a participant even when she’s not camera ready… all of which makes me even more hopeful this reboot could be the female-focused Buffy we’ve always known was in there. 

The young cast is exciting, too, of course – in addition to Ryan Kiera Armstrong’s regular social media appearances with SMG, Chase Sui Wonders, recently of The Studio, has been cast in the pilot. But I was most excited to read that Sarah Bock – Miss Huang to you, because of when she was born – would also appear. 

It’s all getting a little bit, like, not giddy excitement just yet, but a slow swelling joy that’s just ever so slightly more confident and anticipatory with each new piece of news. I’ve got a feeling…