I mean, they have the freedom. No one's saying they shouldn't have the right to make the show. But I do think that there's a meaningful relationship between the artwork's era and the audience's era that can make a retelling a better idea. And sometimes it's not about skill -- sometimes you can have very skilled artists, but they just don't bring anything new to the table. Gus Van Sant is an extremely talented director, and Vince Vaughn, Anne Hache, Juliane Moore, Viggo Mortensen, and William H. Macy are all extremely talented actors, but the 1998 Psycho remake brings nothing new to the table to make it worth the while of making it or watching it.
We've already seen at least one reimagining of Buffy in the form of the recent comic book reimagining, and looking at the summaries for it... it just seems gimmicky. "What if the Master, but it's Drusilla?" "What if Robin Wood, but student?" "What if Xander, but vampire?" Like, hey, maybe it's good, I dunno. But the world's full of good art, and nothing about it seems new enough to be worth reading.
A Buffy remake needs to bring something new to the table and not just be a variation on a pre-existing idea for it to be worth making in my view, or worth watching.
Yes, that's why I said skill and vision, not just skill. Having one without the other - that's the difference between good art and great art.
As for the rest of this, this is still all talking about how something 'shouldn't be made' based on nothing but the fear that it won't be worthwhile. There's still never any way to know what's going to be worthwhile without actually letting it get made.
I get people have busy lives and there's too much art in the world to ever see it it all anyway, so if something gets made that doesn't sound worthwhile to you, then obviously don't watch it. But people are way too quick and way too persistent to knock the very idea of something just because they can't possibly conceive how it could be in any way worthwhile. If you're not at least in the room with the people making it (or thinking about making it) then the simple fact is you have no idea whatsoever whether it will be worthwhile or not. And even a lot of the people in that room, including at least some of the time the main creatives themselves, won't know for sure until they've actually finished making it, either. So the whole concept of 'this doesn't need to be made' is just nonsense.