It has been
announced that the Xena reboot is no longer happening. Of course, one
of the big selling points of this new series was that the
relationship between Xena and Gabrielle which was subtext (albiet it
really, really heavy subtext) would be elevated to text and be one of
the main things the producers wanted to explore. And, you know what?
That rather sold me on the idea.
For my money
a reboot needs to have something to say that the original didn't.
Xena has aged really, really well (by which I mean the show, though
Lucy Lawless absolutely has as well) and there's not much about it
that could stand to be improved aside from the fact that there's an
amazing and loving relationship at its core that could only be
knowing winks and plausibly deniable subtext at the time (“Is that
a hickey?” Joxer asks to blushes from both women).
So why did
this show get axed?
Allow me to
be bitter for a moment. You see, given the state of LGBTQ+ and
specifically lesbian/wlw representation on US television I think that
this show got greenlit because TV executives were told about how many
times lesbians died on the original show. We got to this point with
the executives thinking that was the whole truth and they'd get some
lovely, lovely controversy out of the series by continuously killing
lesbians.
Then
someone, some idiot, let slip to the higher-ups that all those
lesbians who died were the same two women and that they kept coming
back to life!
And that's
when the executives lost interest, the bastards.
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