Wolf Pack comes to Paramount+ in the new year, bringing Sarah Michelle Gellar back to the world of the supernatural. While Wolf Pack is created by the man behind Teen Wolf, Jeff Davis, and both focus on teen werewolves, the stories aren’t connected. Davis, Gellar, and the rest of the cast explained how Wolf Pack is a whole new bag to Andrea Towers in TV Insider and TV Guide Magazine’s studio at New York Comic Con 2022.
For starters, Wolf Pack‘s streaming platform allows for one big thing broadcast TV didn’t: swearing. Davis is thankful for this merciful change, though Gellar grieves the fact that she still can’t (let Buffy swear!).
“Tonally, it’s a very different show than Teen Wolf,” Davis adds. “It’s a little more adult; it’s a little more real.”
Wolf Pack is an adaptation of Edo Van Belkom’s books, the narrative of which fit perfectly into a story Davis had been brewing. The California wildfires serve as the backdrop for the idea. When the fire blazes throughout Los Angeles, it unleashes a terrifying supernatural creature into the community. Two teens are bitten by the monster when it attacks a hoard of people stuck in a traffic jam on the 405. From that point on, the boy and girl are inexplicably drawn to each other and to two other teenagers who were adopted 16 years earlier by a park ranger after another mysterious wildfire.
Armani Jackson, Bella Shepard, Chloe Rose Robertson, and Tyler Lawrence Gray make up the cast of teens. As the full moon rises, all four of them come together to unravel the secret that connects them — the bite and blood of a werewolf. Gellar plays Kristin Ramsey, an arson investigator and highly regarded expert in her field who has suffered personal loss. She leads the search to find the teenage arsonist responsible for a wildfire and the elusive reawakened monster.
As seen in teasers for the YA drama, Wolf Pack has a much darker look than Teen Wolf. As Davis teases, “You will see this show, and you will know this was made with love and passion, and it was made to be cinematic.”
Why come back to the supernatural when she already has one of TV’s favorite spooky stories, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, under her belt? Gellar was excited to be part of a brand new TV supernatural universe.
“There’s so much that is a reboot” these days, she tells us. “To be in a world that’s completely new that we get to create from scratch, you don’t see that very often.”
The werewolves in this series are a metaphor for working through mental health struggles, and the teen wolves finding their pack a metaphor for young people finding hope amid the isolation of the COVID era.
“To take the issues that we are really dealing with today, with the anxiety, with not having your pack, feeling really isolated and using that to tell the story, I think is really beautiful,” says Gellar.
Learn more about this werewolf pack in the full video interview above.
Wolf Pack, Series Premiere, Thursday, January 26, Paramount+
