By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 24 seconds ago

Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans are still reeling from the bad news that Hulu canceled the reboot of this iconic ‘90s show. The streamer had ordered a pilot, and things seemed to be going well: not only was Sarah Michelle Gellar returning to star in the new series, but the showrunner was going to be Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao. The fandom had visions of Buffy returning as a prestige TV show, but Hulu’s cancellation put a stake through those dreams, leaving us only with dust.

As usual, battle lines were quickly drawn when it came to discourse about this show’s failure. Some (including Gellar herself) thought this was just a matter of out-of-touch executives not getting what Buffy was all about. Hulu, meanwhile, reportedly claimed the problem was that the show was too small, too focused on younger audiences, and (perhaps most importantly) didn’t have enough Gellar in it. Personally, I tend to believe Hulu, as they wouldn’t throw away a golden IP for no reason. With respect to Zhao (who has done some excellent work), the cancellation of the Buffy reboot clearly proves why Oscar-winning directors should stay in their own lane.

High “Stakes” Drama

What was the Buffy reboot about? While official details are relatively minimal, the show was reportedly going to focus primarily on a new Slayer played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong. She was going to have to deal with a new vampire menace that popped up in a very familiar location: Sunnydale. Like Buffy, this new Slayer named Nova was going to have a hard time learning the ins and outs of dusting vamps. Fortunately, Buffy herself was going to serve as this young warrior’s mentor, helping her keep the forces of darkness at bay. 

Hulu didn’t like the initial pilot, believing that it was too small for an IP this big and that it had too much kiddie stuff and not enough Sarah Michelle Gellar. They demanded reshoots, but those weren’t enough to save this ambitious reboot. The streamer ended up canceling the new Buffy show, which Gellar ultimately blamed on an unnamed executive. As she told People, this exec “was not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn’t for him.”

Getting The Bad News

Part of why Gellar is so upset with the cancellation is that she had worked with director Chloe Zhao for years to develop this reboot. To the Buffy actor, bringing the show back was a real no-brainer. One of the most beloved IPs of all time getting rebooted by an Oscar-winning director; what could go wrong? However, Hulu’s cancellation of the series (and, make no mistake, they wouldn’t cancel the show if they thought it would make money) reveals a simple truth: like most Oscar winners, Zhao is good at making a particular type of film, and her skills don’t necessarily transfer to the small screen.

Chloe Zhao is an excellent director of such films as The Rider, Nomadland (which won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director), and Hamnet (which was nominated for a whopping eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director). But Zhao is best when making indie films that focus on relatively unknown actors (Hamnet turned rising star Jessie Buckley into a Best Actress Oscar winner). But she seems to struggle when it comes to creating bigger films with more mainstream actors. This is most evident in The Eternals, her Marvel movie that ended up being a wall-to-wall snooze fest.

Eternals Was Our Warning

Obviously, hindsight is 20/20, but it seems like the failure of The Eternals effectively foretold the failure of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot. Audiences hated this film because it lacked the mainstream appeal of the MCU. The pace was slow instead of brisk, the writing was serious instead of funny, and the villains were abstract rather than clearly defined. It just didn’t feel like a superhero movie for most of its runtime. Instead, it felt like a typical Chloe Zhao joint: an introspective indie film that just didn’t fly with fans of tights-and-flights films.

The exact same thing happened with the Buffy reboot on Hulu. Executives reportedly thought the show wasn’t “mainstream enough” for the audience. Those same execs worried the new show was trying to chase too much of a youth demographic compared to the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which appealed to both children and adults. Finally, they worried about the relative lack of Sarah Michelle Gellar, who reportedly had only one line of dialogue in the original pilot.

Letting The Past Die

To sum it up, the show was going to be a Buffy reboot that had hardly any Buffy in it. No other legacy cast members were in the pilot, so fans weren’t going to get to see any reunions between the Slayer and fan-favorite characters like Willow or Spike. That means most of the show would focus on the new Slayer and her new Scoobies, which is (let’s be honest) a bit like making an entire show out of Dawn’s Season 7 adventures with her forgettable Sunnydale High clique.

Left to her own devices, Chloe Zhao creates breathtaking works of cinematic art, the kind of awesome indies that remind you why you fell in love with movies in the first place. But she is clearly a poor choice when it comes to genre entertainment. The Eternals was dead on arrival, and the Buffy reboot died before it streamed a single episode. Ironically, Zhao found out the reboot was canceled on the same weekend that she attended the Oscars to see how many awards Hamnet would take home. It’s a juxtaposition that drives home a simple, stake-like point: this Oscar winner should stay in her own indie darling lane and stop dabbling in genre entertainment she clearly doesn’t understand.

By Jennifer Asencio
| Published 30 seconds ago

Basketball season is winding down and at the time of this writing is in the first round of its playoff tournament. Before that could begin, there was also a play-in tournament meant to fill out the rest of the playoff brackets through one-game matches whose winners would continue to the next round. The games have been frenetic, with most of them decided in the last minutes.  Basically, basketball is hurtling down the canyon, about to drop the torpedo into the Death Star.

Imagine you are watching Luke Skywalker just about to use the force to make his shot, when all of a sudden the streaming service you are watching it on interrupts the action for “technical difficulties.” That is exactly what happened to basketball fans on not one but two streaming services.

Peacock and Amazon Prime are splitting the duty of airing the NBA postseason. Amazon Prime aired the play-in tournament, while the two networks are swapping the playoff games back and forth. During three different games, both within the final minute of very close matches, both streamers suffered technical difficulties that interrupted the broadcast.

Technical Interruptions Interfere With Gameplay

On April 14, 2026, the Orlando Magic and Charlotte Hornets were in a match-up for all the marbles. The winner would go on to the next round of the play-in tournament, while the loser went home. With 30 seconds left in the game, the score was 123-120, which, if you know basketball, means the Hornets only needed one shot from the right part of the court to tie the game, and they had the ball. Suddenly, Prime, which aired that game, put up a “technical difficulties” card, during which the Hornets did score another basket, making the score 123-122 while no one could see on television. The contentious game ended with the Magic winning, 127-126, but fans only got to see it because the teams called a time-out while Prime fixed its issue.

A week later, on April 20, 2026, the New York Knicks played the Atlanta Hawks on Peacock. The game ended with the Knicks losing 107-106, but once again, the final minute was interrupted by a “technical difficulties” card. This time, the difficulties were offset by a time out and viewers didn’t miss any of the action, but the Knicks-Hawks game wasn’t the only difficulty Peacock had that night.

Also playing that night after the Knicks-Hawks game were the Denver Nuggets and the Minnesota Timberwolves. For most of the game, the teams traded the lead, ending halftime tied. But in the last quarter (12 minutes of active game time), the ‘Wolves started a major comeback. In the final minute, it was anyone’s game, with both teams bringing their best play to the match … and then technical difficulties struck again.

To the credit of the NBA teams playing these games, all three called time-outs when the technical difficulties overtook the broadcast. Often, interruptions like this cause viewers to miss the action, and the broadcast usually just resumes when it is fixed rather than showing viewers what they missed. The rules of basketball serendipitously offset this with time-outs and frequent breaks for players who are literally running at full speed for minutes at a time, but a lot of live broadcasts do not have breaks like that.

The Streaming Blob Absorption Conundrum

Paramount+ also suffers issues with its streaming services often lagging, and the live TV function on that service is also often inaccessible. Survivor 50 fans lost 15 minutes of the premiere episode because the live TV feature was frozen for many viewers as numerous people tried to watch the show. MLB.TV bills itself as the home of all things baseball, but it also lags and freezes during live broadcasts of games.

With more live broadcasts getting absorbed by the streaming blob, interruptions like this mark an infuriating turn. It is bad enough that many services have interruptions to movies or demand high prices to eliminate commercials from their content. As streaming services become ubiquitous, they are also demonstrating that they can’t handle the load brought on by live television events.

The Balkanization of streaming services has made subscribing to them similar to subscribing to each cable channel individually (can you imagine having to pay separately for CNN, TNT, AMC, USA, and TBS, on top of premium channels like ESPN, HBO or Showtime?). As it is, to watch post-season basketball out of market requires two different premium streaming services (the Peacock games are also aired on NBC, but only regionally). Watching the NFL postseason this past winter required four. Watching the Oscars is going to require a YouTube subscription starting in 2028.

Past Is Prologue, But We Still Haven’t Learned

Interruptions in the middle of live events are so unpardonable from any channel that it was made official policy to show the entirety of a game and preempt the shows following after the infamous “Heidi Bowl” incident in 1968. During this New York Jets NFL home game, the then-Oakland Raiders were dominating the field of play, so the network decided to switch to a made-for-TV version of the German folk story “Heidi.” The Jets came back to win the game in an exciting upset that only fans in the stadium got to see. While this was a bad network decision and not a technical difficulty, it set a precedent for live broadcasting that existed all the way until the Prime-Peacock NBA postseason broadcasts.

What streaming customers are getting isn’t as consistent as what we got from comparable cable channels. The more broadcasting, live or not, that moves over to streaming, the more the services are going to have to address these problems. Streaming was supposed to be a superior alternative to television. Instead, as the NBA playoffs debacle has demonstrated, they are becoming more of a monster than cable and can’t even provide the same level of service.

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

Gene Roddenberry is rightfully considered one of the most visionary creators in television history. He brought us Star Trek: The Original Series, kickstarting a franchise that has lasted over 60 years through various movies and spinoff shows. Through the medium of sci-fi, Roddenberry explored major issues ranging from Civil Rights to Cold War tension. In fact, he put almost everything into the first Star Trek show except for himself.

Unlike his wife, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, Gene Roddenberry never gave himself a major role in any Star Trek project. This is why you never see his face onscreen at any point. However, what most fans don’t realize is that Roddenberry secretly made a single, uncredited appearance in one episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. In “Charlie X,” the second episode ever broadcast on TV, he served as the voice of the galley chef aboard the Starship Enterprise.

Talking Turkey With Captain Kirk

“Charlie X” is an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series that would arguably be more at home in The Twilight Zone. The Enterprise rescues a 17 year old who is the sole survivor of a crashed ship. The boy soon exhibits extreme powers of telepathy and transmutation, which take a sinister turn when he does things like make people who annoy him disappear from reality. Captain Kirk and his crew are unable to contain the boy, but the godlike aliens who gave Charlie his powers eventually show up and take custody of the dangerous young man.

Based on that description, you’re probably wondering why the heck the Enterprise galley chef even pops up in the episode. “Charlie X” takes place on Thanksgiving, and Captain Kirk wants his crew (who are almost entirely human) to get into the holiday spirit. Earlier in the episode, he tells Charlie that if the crew “has to eat synthetic meat loaf, I want it to look like turkey.” Later, the galley chef talks to Kirk over the ship’s intercom and tells him that even though he put meatloaf in the oven, it has been replaced with actual turkey meat. Charlie laughs, effectively cutting off their conversation.

Making Way For A Woman At Warp

It’s a very short interaction, one that is meant to subtly underscore Charlie’s reality-warping powers. We see the chef at one point, who is played by an unknown actor who doesn’t speak. When the chef speaks over the intercom with Kirk, he is voiced by Gene Roddenberry, making his one and only appearance in a Star Trek episode. William Shatner may have actually acknowledged this cameo on screen, calling the man “chief” instead of “chef.”

The fact that this is Gene Roddenberry’s only onscreen appearance in Star Trek is ironic because his wife became a mainstay actor throughout the franchise. Majel Barrett Rodenberry played Number One in the original pilot episode and Nurse Chapel in The Original Series. She also voiced the ship’s computer in The Original Series and The Next Generation and many other roles (including Spock’s mother, Amanda Grayson) in The Animated Series. For fans of the Golden Age of Star Trek, though, Majel will always be best known as Lwaxana Troi, mother to beloved TNG character Deanna Troi.

Gene Avoided The Screen

As for Gene Roddenberry, he never appeared onscreen in any future Star Trek shows or movies. However, later creators did their best to retroactively make him a part of franchise history. In reference books like the Star Trek Encyclopedia and the Star Trek Chronology, you can see a Photoshopped image of Roddenberry in an older-style Original Series uniform under the listing for Robert April. April is the very first Captain of the Enterprise (before Captain Pike took command) and is played by Adrian Holmes in Strange New Worlds.

We may never know exactly why Gene Roddenberry voiced the lowly, one-off character of the chef in “Charlie X.” In the early days of the show, it might have simply been easier to have him voice the character in the one scene than to hire an entirely new actor. At any rate, this has always been one of the best early episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. But the fact that it represents Roddenberry’s one and only appearance in any version of Trek makes this episode a bona fide part of franchise history.