There really could be an eighth season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" on UPN, even if star Sarah Michelle Gellar comes back. But who would be the new star of the show?

"Buffy" executive producer Marti Noxon recently talked to Sci-Fi Wire about those possibilities.

"It is a discussion that we've begun to start having, with both Fox and UPN," Noxon said. "But it's really ... stages. I think the main thing that (creator) Joss (Whedon) feels, and I also feel, is that we wouldn't continue if we didn't feel that we had something exciting to bring to the table. If it felt like we were desperately trying to keep the franchise alive, that's not something that I think interest him. I think it's much more about, can we come up with a concept that might be either Sarah-free or Sarah-light that feels, you know, like a show worth doing?"

Among the possibilities tossed about is having Faith (Eliza Dushku) stay on after she makes several guest appearances at the end of the upcoming season as well as possibly having Buffy's little sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg) taking over the lead role.

"We don't really have a firm plan," Noxon said. "I mean, (using Dawn) is obviously one of the possibilities. But we haven't settled on that at all. I think it was just time to grow Dawn up a little bit, and it's just sort of a natural thing that she would want to sort of follow in Buffy's footsteps."

And about Faith, Noxon said that it "depends entirely" on Dushku's schedule.

"It's definitely a very interesting possibility," she said. "I know some fans are pretty excited about that. So we'll see. I don't even know if Eliza's interested."

Of course, all this talk and Noxon said it isn't written in stone that Gellar will even leave after this coming season.

"Sarah has not said definitively no, but I think it's pretty liekly that she'd at least want to scale her involvement back."