UPN Hypes Buffy

July 18 -- It's a brave new world for Buffy the Vampire Slayer next season: The show will air on a new night on a new network, her mom's dead, and, oh, yeah, Buffy's dead too.

When asked by folks at the summer Television Critics Association press tour just how he was going to resurrect his dead star, series creator Joss Whedon promised no "lame," Dallas-style, "It was all a dream" plot twists.

"This is something I've actually dealt with before, in the Alien series," said Whedon, who had the task of bringing Ripley back from the great beyond in Alien Resurrection. His solution for the sci-fi sequel was to bring her back as an alien-human hybrid clone.

"It's not going to be a dream sequence," Whedon said to the New York Daily News about Buffy's comeback. "It's not going to be a cheat. We did this knowing that we were going to have to bring her back — and that we were going to have to do it legitimately, with integrity."

Emmy Miss and Angel Split

Buffy ended its six-year run on the WB and now moves to UPN, where it will debut Oct. 9 with a two-hour special. UPN shelled out $100 million for two years of Buffy, and now with it and WB reject Roswell in its lineup, UPN predicts that it will beat the WB on four of the five nights the networks offer competitive programming.

Meanwhile, even though Buffy isn't a WB property anymore, the slayer's ex-network had to answer Buffy-related questions at the television conference, particularly whether Buffy and its spinoff, Angel, which is still on the WB, will continue to share crossover episodes. WB Entertainment President Jordan Levin gave a resounding "no" to that possibility: "I think it's more important, in the long term, that Angel really establishes itself … independently from Buffy."

Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar, who had originally sworn to leave the show if it left the WB, told reporters that the move "has given us a new excitement about the show — it's like we're getting to start fresh."

Whedon was philosophical about the repeated Emmy snubs of his show, telling the press, "With a name like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you're never going to be Emmy bait."