Sarah Michelle Gellar Connected With 'Wolf Pack' Because of Similarities to 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer'

As Teen Wolf marches toward its five-year anniversary of its series finale, creator and showrunner Jeff Davis is readying another supernatural drama series, Wolf Pack. The new show, which is based on the novel series of the same title by Edo van Belkom, follows a group of modern-day teenagers who have to come together to get to the bottom of a mysterious secret after California wildfires awaken a supernatural creature.

"It's a horror show, but we are a very different tone from what we used to be on Teen Wolf," Davis said at the Television Critics Association press tour panel for the series. "This is far more edgy, adult story, which is one of the things I wanted to do after Teen Wolf. Teen Wolf is very much in a comic book world ... Wolf Pack is an all-new tone, there are all-new rules [and] mythology."

Davis took inspiration from the book series in order to create the television series because he found "a synchronicity" between an idea he already had in his head and the opening of the book, which "starts out with a park ranger who finds these cubs in the woods."

"We'd all seen the pictures of the wildfires and the cars driving up 405. That was an absolutely indelible image to me, and I thought, 'What if the cars are backed up, and the fires are creeping closer and closer to the road, and what if in the middle of it there's a high school bus and they have to get out and run for their lives?'"

This time around it is a teenager named Everett (Armani Jackson) who gets bitten by a supernatural creation, which changes his life. Prior to that event, Jackson considered his character an introvert who didn't have many friends and lived in a constant state of anxiety, which he treats with the "general ways people deal with their anxiety," including medication and therapy, but his parents aren't fully in line with such treatments. After the encounter, he gains a pack, including characters played by Bella Shepard, Chloe Rose Robertson, and Tyler Lawrence Grayis.

The series also counts Rodrigo Santoro and Sarah Michelle Gellar (who also executive produces) among its stars. Gellar admitted she had no intention of saying yes when she was first sent this script, but she connected to it because of tonal and thematic similarities it shares with her previous, iconic teen supernatural drama, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

"One of the beautiful things of Buffy was the metaphoric aspect of it," Gellar explained, calling out how the supernatural elements always spoke to teenage issues. "To me, that's what made the show so important and why it still stands the test of time. And when I read the script and spoke to Jeff about the issues he wanted to speak about, mainly anxiety and depression around the use of devices...and lack of connection...I thought, 'What a great allegory to use these horrors to speak about the horrors we're going through now.'"

And that includes "understanding what we're doing to our environment and using this as an in to talk about these bigger issues," she continued.

Gellar plays Kristin Ramsey, the chief arson investigator in town, trying to get crack the case of the wildfires, but of course she will end up having a deeper connection to what is going on than it appears at first glance, too. 

Wolf Pack does not yet have a premiere date.