Once upon a time, NBC was planning a big, lesbian reboot of Xena: Warrior Princess but, because we can't have nice things, that reboot is apparently dead. In the original, cult classic show, Lucy Lawless' Xena and her sidekick Gabrielle (played by Renee O'Connor) kicked ass and launched a thousand fan fiction stories with their simmering chemistry.
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The revival, which was set to bring back co-creators Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi, was going to focus more on the lesbian relationship between the Amazonian goddess and Gabrielle as well as, you know, the fighting and her iconic armbands. The ground started to fall out from under it, though, when it was announced that writer and showrunner Javier Grillo-Marxuach (of Lost fame) left the project over creative differences.
It was rumored that these creative differences stemmed from him wanting to put the lesbian relationship front-and-center, which lead to today's announcement from NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salke that the reboot won't go forward at all. "Nothing is happening on that right now," Salke told the Hollywood Reporter. "We looked at some material; we decided at that point that it didn't warrant the reboot."
The announcement that its DOA is shocking not just because we're fangirls for Xena, but also because a queer-centric reboot of Warrior Princess would have come at literally the perfect time. Not only are we in a golden age of iconic 90s TV reboots with Twin Peaks, but the TV landscape is also offensively lacking in strong, queer female characters. Plus, in a year when the Xena-adjacent Wonder Woman conquered the box office, isn't it time to let the Warrior Princess of the small screen shine once more?
NBC hasn't closed itself off entirely to a reboot down the line so, while you wait for them to get their shit together and make the right decision on this, catch up on the original show on Hulu.
