Showtime's 4-Part Buffy Replacement Officially Returns This Fall

Published Aug 25, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT

Liz Hersey is an Editor and Critic for ScreenRant's TV team, editing, reviewing, writing, and creating content about the iconic shows you love to watch. She began her editing career at ScreenRant in 2019, shortly after joining the site as a Writer that same year.

With a passion for all things books, Liz frequently attends Toronto literary events and conferences, and loves interacting with her book lover community. In addition to being an avid reader of the romance and thriller genres, Liz is a writer of several short stories, and is currently at work on a young adult witch novel.

When she's not working, reading, or writing, Liz can be found seeing movies at her local cinema, attending live jazz events, or curling up on the couch to binge her favorite TV shows.

You can reach her at liz.h@screenrant.com.

No TV show could ever truly replace Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Showtime does have a series with definite appeal for fans who especially loved the dark, witchy vibes of the iconic '90s teen fantasy drama, and it's returning this fall. Considering the heartbreaking news of Hulu's canceled Buffy reboot, it couldn't come at a better time.

Like Buffy, much of Yellowjackets centers on '90s teenagers, only instead of the titular vampire slayer and her Scooby Gang fighting monsters in Sunnydale, California, it's about a high school girls' soccer team en route to a tournament, only for their plane to crash-land in the Canadian wilderness and force them to survive the harsh elements for 19 months. The show also takes place in the present day, where the adult Yellowjackets characters who survived the crash are forced to deal with its unsavory aftermath.

While Yellowjackets hasn't been able to top its first season, which has a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes score — season 2 has 94% and season 3 has 84% — there's every chance Yellowjackets' fourth and final season, which premieres on November 20, 2026, will stick the landing. It certainly will if it embraces its similarities to Buffy while also learning from that show's mistakes.

How Yellowjackets Is The Perfect Buffy Replacement

Besides being '90s-set shows about high schoolers, what both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Yellowjackets do so well is subvert expectations regarding their teenage girl characters. The entire conceit behind Buffy is to upend the horror cliché of the beautiful blonde running from a monster to her being the one who chases ​​​​​​the monster. This trope-flipping extends to Buffy's other characters, like turning Willow, the nerdy sidekick, into the show's biggest villain, and Cordelia, the stereotypical high school mean girl, into an empathetic young woman who never loses her radical honesty.

Yellowjackets takes a similar approach with its teenage girl characters. Shauna Shipman's arc closely resembles Dark Willow's, as she devolves from Jackie's wallflower best friend into a cruel, cannibalistic heel; rebel and stoner Natalie Scatorccio becomes the most integral teammate in the wilderness due to her hunting prowess; outcast Misty Quigley's survival skills also see her status rise, while Jackie Taylor goes from being the team's celebrated alpha princess to a target of their ire, as her inability to contribute renders her dead weight.

Even though Yellowjackets' supernatural elements are ambiguous, whereas Buffy's are a selling point, both use the extremities of their worlds as metaphors for growing up. In Buffy, it's "high school as hell", and in Yellowjackets, it's the wilderness. Yellowjackets' isolation and cannibalism serve as visceral commentary on the psychological horror and tribalism that often go with being a teenage girl.

Yellowjackets Season 4 Needs To Learn From The Buffy Finale's Mistakes

While Buffy will always be universally beloved, the fandom largely agrees that the show stumbled in its final season. By stuffing season 7 full of new characters in the form of myriad Potentials, it pulled focus from the Scooby Gang, and Buffy's series finale struggled to find satisfying endings for its main characters, with Anya's rushed death considered especially egregious.

With so many deaths in Yellowjackets, season 4 should have plenty of room to satisfyingly wrap up the arcs of surviving main characters like Shauna, Misty, and Taissa. Though the official premise on Paramount+ mentions that "an old flame has a homecoming of her own, returning to town with a hidden agenda" in the present-day timeline, and it's been announced that Molly Ringwald will play Van's mother, Vicky, also in the present, these characters seem like they'll serve the overall story, especially given what happened to Van in the Yellowjackets season 3 finale.

Yellowjackets would also do well to learn from Buffy season 7's lackluster big bad, The First, which was all CGI spectacle and not nearly as compelling as other heavies like Angelus or Glory. While the audience will certainly want some answers regarding the supernatural, the show must keep in mind that the real horror comes from the Yellowjackets themselves — and what they're capable of.

• 

  Shauna Sadecki

• 

  Tawny Cypress

  Taissa Turner