Netflix’s Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld is a fresh remix of Buffy-style monster slaying

Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld’s first season feels like a classic monster slaying story remixed for a new generation.

Though it has been decades since Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s final episode aired, the show’s lasting cultural impact can still be felt through the stories being told by people who were impacted by it. Netflix’s Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld feels like the kind of show that might not exist if it weren’t for the way an entire generation of kids grew up watching a teenage girl fight monsters from week to week. The new Titmouse-produced animated show’s world of magic, and its focus on a young warrior who just wants to be a regular high schooler, makes it impossible not to see it as a tribute to Sunnydale’s finest.

But as often as it riffs some of Buffy’s signature beats — teen angst, supernatural love triangles, a town full of normies who kinda know something weird is going on around them — Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld uses them to tell a much more dynamic tale about who gets to be an “all-American girl.”

Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld tells the story of how its titular Chinese American teen is yanked out of her boarding school in South Korea and dragged to a small Texas town to fulfill a destiny she doesn’t want any part of. Things are good for Jentry in Seoul, where her friends have basically become her family and people that she can trust with some of her dark secrets. They know about Jentry’s uncontrollable ability to start fires and that it is part of why her feisty elderly aunt Gugu (Lori Tan Chinn) sent her to study abroad. But as dangerous as Jentry might be, her friends don’t care because they, like Gugu, love her. And with Jentry’s powers having seemingly gone dormant since she left the US, she assumes her days of literal bridge-burning are all in the past.

All Jentry wants for her 16th birthday is for things to stay as they are and to keep building a new life that feels like it’s really hers. But when she’s attacked by Ed (Bowen Yang), a Twilight-obsessed shapeshifting vampire tasked with delivering her to his master Mogui (Kenton Chen), Jentry knows that her wish for a blissfully mundane childhood isn’t coming true anytime soon.

While younger viewers might not initially pick up on just how much Jentry Chau borrows from Buffy, the ’90s monster-of-the-week show’s influence on showrunner Echo Wu shines through in Jentry’s journey back to Texas to enroll in a school run by a paranoid administrator. Jentry’s being new-ish in town is all it takes for vice principal Wheeler (Sean Allan Krill) to be suspicious of her sudden arrival, and she tries to keep quiet about her extracurricular monster hunting. But because Jentry’s reignited powers lure so many mythological ghouls out of the woodwork, there’s enough day-to-day chaos that it’s kind of easy for her to pretend she’s just another student who can’t believe how her high school seems to be situated on top of a hellmouth.

The show’s monsters — a cavalcade of demons and spirits plucked from Chinese mythology — are a huge part of what makes Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld feel like such an inspired spin on the monster-of-the-week genre. Almost every supernatural creature Jentry faces speaks to the series’ focus on exploring her cultural heritage, rather than using its aesthetics as superficial set dressing. Jentry’s powers make her formidable, but it’s because of Gugu’s years of teaching her about Chinese folklore that she’s able to outsmart the ghosts she encounters when she journeys into the underworld.

Image: Netflix

One of the series’ funnier episodes follows Jentry and her classmates on a field trip to the Alamo, where a tour guide summons a bunch of dead American soldiers to scold the kids about how “rude” it is for them to want to know more about the monument’s actual history. It’s one of the instances where Jentry Chau more explicitly reminds you that, in addition to centering Jentry’s Chinese heritage, it’s telling a story about an American girl who has been encouraged to think about her country’s past and how that shapes some people’s perceptions of her.

Jentry has far more interesting things to deal with than racism, like her complicated love triangle situation with her childhood friend Michael (A.J. Beckles) and Kit (Woosung Kim), another mysterious transfer student. But it’s clear the show wants you to appreciate that there’s more to telling relatable yet culturally specific stories than simply putting a few characters of color onscreen.

Even though the Buffy vibes only grow stronger with each episode — Jentry ends up with a Scooby Gang of her own who all have their own supernatural stuff going on — the show remixes them just enough to make this first season feel like a refreshing addition to the Chosen Girl™ canon. You can see that Wu and the rest of Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld’s creative team have poured their hearts into this first chapter, and it would be great to see what else they might want to conjure up.

Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld’s first season is now streaming on Netflix.