Sarah Michelle Gellar Discusses The Deeper Meaning Behind Her New Show Wolf Pack

Having toplined several series during her career, Sarah Michelle Gellar knows quality when she sees it. Her latest outing, "Wolf Pack" on Paramount+, sees her playing Kristin Ramsey, an arson investigator who finds herself caught up in a huge supernatural mess when a wildfire that decimates a California forest stirs up some supernatural creatures. Among those creatures are werewolves who take a bite out of teens Everett Lang (Armani Jackson) and Blake Navarro (Bella Shepard), making them part of the pack. She also has to cope with fraternal twin werewolf teens Luna (Chloe Rose Robertson) and Harlan Briggs (Tyler Lawrence Gray) who have been raised by a human forest ranger named Garrett (Rodrigo Santoro). Into the middle of the show's mixture of teen angst and romance falls some very dangerous threats that may impact werewolf society forever.

Naturally, this isn't Gellar's first time at the supernatural teen drama rodeo. The "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" alum also serves as an executive producer on the project, which means she definitely must believe in the material and what it has to say. But here's what she thinks makes "Wolf Pack" different — and the deeper meaning she sees hidden behind the show's angsty action-drama.

During an interview with Attitude Magazine, Sarah Michelle Gellar explained that the show's combination of real-life issues, like mental health and the importance of community, provides "Wolf Pack" with a more interesting core meaning.

"Supernatural to me works the best when it's superhuman. All these stories, if you go back through the dawn of time, we created these stories because they answered things that we didn't have answers for, we didn't understand." She sees such stories as vehicles to harness mythology to tell bigger stories about how the world affects each of us, and the way bigger issues can be deconstructed through fables. To wit: "[a]nxiety is a word we all throw around a lot but we don't talk about what to do about it. We also don't talk about the fact that the medical, real definition is it's your body running at peak condition. So if you can harness that, if you can learn how to control that, that's a superpower. It's not a negative."

Gellar compared the pack structures of the werewolves on the show to what it felt like living with a small pod of people during the COVID-19 pandemic and the concept of chosen family. "The idea of the pack, to me that was the most fascinating," she said, adding that her pod of people had helped provide her with a sense of human unity and community. Her close friends became extremely important to her. "If it wasn't for them I would not have made it through. And I'm a person, I'm a social person, I want to touch and talk and they provided that for me in that time."  

Audiences will have to wait and see if "Wolf Pack" provides that sense of fraternity to its viewers.