The CW
This is what the TV obsession with demographics hath wrought: at TCA press tour session for the new thriller Ringer, Sarah Michelle Gellar, a 34-year-old woman, was fielding questions that implied she might be too old to be starring in a show on the CW network.
The meme began when one reporter at the panel began a question by mentioning he was “surprised after all these years” to find that Gellar was only in her early thirties. “What did you think?” she laughed. “That I should be, like, 70?”
Which led into the question: would Gellar be doing as many of her own stunts as she did on Buffy the Vampire Slayer? “Well, due to my advanced age,” she said dryly, “they’re cutting them down a little bit because we are a little worried about the osteoporosis.”
In general the session was a reminder how offhandedly funny Gellar is and how well, as on Buffy, she handles roles that have an element of comedy. Unfortunately, Ringer—in which she plays a recovering drug addict who assumes the identity of her own twin sister after sis’ apparent suicide—looks like a pretty dark concept judging from the pilot. The show, in fact, was originally considered for CBS, which has a few dark crime stories of its own. That might have been a bad idea, though; as Gellar and the producers noted, CBS prefers procedural shows that have self-contained stories in each episode, whereas Ringer is thoroughly serial.
Gellar also discussed the challenges of playing two characters, Bridget (her main character) and Siobhan (the sister) both in the pilot and later in flashbacks. “They actually cloned me,” she said. ” We thought we’d take advantage of modern technology and Dolly will be playing the other twin.” Thus making a deft science joke referring back to the famous cloned sheep who was in the news in 1997, the year Buffy the Vampire Slayer went on the air and that a chunk of The CW’s audience was learning to walk.
All in all, the session was enough to make your narrator—who was well into his twenties when Dolly was born—feel like the old, old man that he is. [Pause to cue up “Landslide” on my iPod.] But not all the demographic attention was focused on Gellar. At one point in the day, a reporter noted the casting of Rachel Bilson (The OC) in The CW’s Hart of Dixie and asked the network’s programming chief if there was a strategy of casting shows with stars who were already “iconic” to a younger audience from older TV shows.
Bilson turns 30 later this month. My God. Shouldn’t she be playing a mystery writer who solves crimes on CBS?