Joss Whedon: The Biography Page 14

  The first two episodes, “Welcome to the Hellmouth” and “The Harvest,” were packaged together to serve as the series premiere. Originally, Joss had wanted to preface the story with a dream sequence that bridged the gap between the Buffy movie and Buffy’s first day in Sunnydale. It would also serve as a primer for anyone who’d skipped the film, recapping Slayer lore, the Watcher/Slayer relationship, and the death of Buffy’s first Watcher. But the sequence was scrapped due to budgetary constraints. Instead, the WB’s marketing team created a ninety-second trailer combining scenes from series with generic gothic imagery and explaining how, throughout history, a young woman would arrive in a town plagued by mysterious deaths. “For each generation, there is only one slayer,” it announced to viewers. “You are about to meet the Slayer.” It was not quite the informative prologue Joss had in mind, but despite the cheesiness of the stock gothic footage, it effectively informed the audience that this was no ordinary teen drama—this was a high school series in which the stakes really were life and death.

  That fact was reinforced by the on-screen disclaimer that preceded the premiere:

  The following two-hour world premiere is rated TV-PG and contains action scenes which may be too intense for younger viewers.

  The warning may seem strange in retrospect, in an era full of Vampire Diaries and Supernatural occurrences (let alone bed-hopping Mad Men and meth-dealing schoolteachers Breaking Bad on basic cable). Yet Buffy was just the second hour-long drama on the WB, and it was premiering in the 8:00 PM eastern time slot usually occupied by the family-friendly 7th Heaven. (The following week it would settle in at 9:00 PM.) A similar disclaimer would appear at the beginning of subsequent Buffy episodes, but the practice would retire with the series, not carrying over to any of the WB’s other science fiction, fantasy, or horror series.

  Each Buffy episode would end far less ominously, with a crudely drawn white cutout of a monster jetting across the screen in front of the words “Mutant Enemy.” It was the “production slate” for Joss’s production company, which he had named after a line from the rock band Yes’s song “And You and I.” (Mutant Enemy was also the name of the typewriter he had in college.) All television series have such slates, which air during the closing credits, indicating such key entities as the executive producer and the distribution company (in Buffy’s case, 20th Century Fox). Joss got word shortly before he needed to deliver the slate and quickly both drew and voiced the monster, which grumbled, “Grr. Argh.” The Mutant Enemy cutout and his trademark yelp would become almost as synonymous with Joss as his teenage hero.

  The premiere episode introduced the season’s recurring central villain, or “Big Bad”: the Master, a centuries-old vampire who wants to open the portal to hell beneath Sunnydale. But many subsequent first-season episodes were more stand-alone than part of an intricate ongoing narrative, each hitting on a key trial that teenagers experience. “The Pack” explores the pressure to be cool, as Xander falls in with a group of bullies after being possessed by a hyena spirit. In “I Robot, You Jane,” Willow is so excited to have an online boyfriend, unaware that he’s an ancient demon who has been unleashed on the Internet.

  Buffy often took on the difficulties in maneuvering around new emotions and relationships. In the first episode of the series, Buffy encourages Willow to approach a boy, with the advice to “seize the moment, because tomorrow you might be dead”—advice that is pretty much an underlying theme throughout the show. But even though the characters are constantly reminded of their own mortality, they are often swept up in the seemingly mundane, especially when it comes to matters of the heart: Willow has her big unrequited crush on Xander, Xander is infatuated with Buffy, and Buffy falls for the enigmatic Angel, only to discover that their love is star-crossed as well: Angel is a vampire, reformed after a gypsy curse restored his human soul, allowing him to feel remorse for his murderous past.

  “You know, we had our television tropes,” Joss admits. “In what world is Sarah Michelle Gellar not very popular in high school? I want to know about that magical land! But I think we did genuinely evoke something of an outsider sort of feeling: ‘No matter who they are, no matter how popular they are, no matter how pretty they are, no matter what they are. They have that feeling of, you know, I’m on the outs. I’m barely scrambling. I’m trying to figure this out. I’m alone here.’”

  (In fact, Gellar did have a difficult time in school. Like Joss, her mother was a teacher and she attended a private prep school with classmates far wealthier than she was, and she felt misunderstood by the classmates who ostracized and harassed her for being “famous.” She, like Buffy, had to balance important personal commitments with her school-work, only it was auditions and acting gigs instead of slaying and saving the world.)

  Monday nights on the WB began with the wholesomeness of 7th Heaven, followed by the demon-filled adventures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It seemed like the network was sponsoring weekly excursions into heaven and hell. And perhaps it was odd that Joss, the professed atheist, had kept the standard Christian imagery of crosses and holy water in the new vampire universe he had created.

  “He’s atheist, but never seemed to be anti-faith,” Dean Batali, himself a Christian, says. Batali was intrigued that, as an atheist, Joss had created a world in which the vampires are afraid of Christian icons and artifacts. In the premiere, Angel gives Buffy a simple silver cross in a jewelry box with the admonition “Don’t turn your back on this.” Later that season, in “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date,” penned by Batali and Des Hotel, Giles holds a cross up to a newly risen vampire. The vampire recoils and asks, “Why does He hurt me?”

  “We didn’t write that. Joss wrote it,” Batali explains. But further exploration of religious themes, particularly Christian ones, was nixed. Early on, Batali pitched a story in which Buffy teamed up with the religious kids at school to fight a demon, because he felt they all would be on the same side. He and Joss had never debated religion and had no desire to do so, but Joss let him know that he didn’t want the show to deal with it.

  Even without the religious implications, the series was never lacking in allegorical weight. It was the show’s careful development of each story’s metaphor, the “Buffy of it” that Joss and Greenwalt insisted upon, that helped the show gain a foothold with its earliest viewers. That lesson was powerfully demonstrated with the airing of “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” the eleventh episode of the season. This was the episode in which a girl named Marcie is so widely ignored by her classmates and feels so insignificant in the world that she literally becomes invisible. (The premise, with its roots in Joss’s own high school experiences, had been part of his original pitch for the show.) Once Marcie realizes and embraces her invisibility, she indulges her darker side and lashes out against her perceived enemies, including Cordelia. After the episode aired in May 1997, the producers received a letter from an agoraphobic lawyer in her forties. “I’ll never forget: she said, ‘Last night’s show gave me the courage to walk out the door of my house,’” Greenwalt recalls. “I realized we’ve got lightning in a bottle here.”

  In the season finale, “Prophecy Girl,” Buffy learns of a prophecy that says she is fated to die at the hands of the Master. Nonetheless, she ventures into his lair to confront him. The episode, written and directed by Joss, echoes the original movie in interesting ways. Buffy goes to battle in a prom dress and a leather jacket, just as she’d done in the film; the Master, like Lothos, hypnotizes her. But in this case, the vampiric trance makes her so vulnerable that the Master feeds on her blood, then drops her into a shallow pool of water to drown. The Master escapes, but Angel has led Xander to his lair, and the latter revives Buffy via CPR—reminding the audience that this Buffy is even stronger because of her friends. When Buffy meets the Master again, he is incredulous that she defied the prophecy: “You were destined to die! It was written.”

  “What can I say?” she says before killing him. “I flunked the written.”

  J
oss has said that Buffy is about showing what it’s like to come to terms with power, and he ended the season—and possibly the series, if it never made it past the first season—with the message that despite the demands of others’ expectations, despite how easy it is to believe that we’re at the mercy of forces beyond our control, we all control our own destiny by the choices we make. By all conventional wisdom, Buffy’s story should have ended with a failed motion picture, but now, with the help of his creative team, Joss had breathed the life back into her.

  9

  THE BRONZE

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn’t immediately become a household name. In the United States, although the ratings were certainly high enough for the WB to be happy, they were never so impressive that they challenged the show’s time-slot rivals on the major networks. Joss’s new series garnered a lot of praise from reviewers for the emotional and metaphorical depth of its writing—somewhat surprisingly, given that critics initially had been split on The X-Files and mostly looked down on more campy sci-fi/fantasy shows such as Xena and Star Trek: Voyager—but it struggled to find mainstream success.

  In fact, Buffy owed a debt to those earlier series, for showing a netlet searching for its identity that it could find success with a show that garnered so-so ratings but inspired fervent fan devotion. “We were not a wealthy or respected show for a while,” David Solomon explains. “We were kind of like The Vampire Diaries [was in 2011]—a show that feels like it deserves the buzz whether it’s getting it or not. They kind of just create their own.” Buffy got a lot of notice really fast, not from mass audiences but from a small, passionate group of hardcore fans—exactly what the WB needed to get the attention of advertisers. “They hit a show that they thought had a perfect demographic, a perfect, good-looking cast, the perfect ‘not like any other show’ [aspect], something completely unique,” Solomon says. It seemed to hit all the buttons all at once, especially with teenage viewers. The ratings in the highly coveted eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old demographic kept rising, which meant the WB could charge more for commercial time.

  Buffy became a flagship show for the network. Not only did it renew the series for a second season with an order of twenty-two episodes (ten more than in season one), but it also began to refocus the rest of its programming in order to court even more of the teen market. Over the next year, it would roll out such teen-focused series as Dawson’s Creek (from another film writer newly transitioning to series television: Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter of 1996’s hit slasher flick Scream), Felicity (from future sci-fi mogul J. J. Abrams), and Charmed.

  Joss liked being on the teen network, and the fact that the WB’s new series seemed to be on a similar track as his own. But the network’s branding efforts meant that Buffy tended to be pigeonholed as a show strictly for a younger demographic. Many fans in their forties and fifties have come up to Tony Head over the years and said that they were hugely embarrassed to admit that they loved Buffy, because the show was not aimed at them. Head refutes that thought: “Part of Joss’s genius is that he encapsulates such a wide demographic—that’s the whole point about his writing. It was a disservice to him to try and polarize that and make it only to a young audience, to [the WB’s] detriment.”

  David Greenwalt agrees. “People who never watched Buffy or never understood it [would say] ‘Oh, Buffy, was that a kids’ show?’ They didn’t get it. The way Joss can guide a character through their paces—you won’t see it anywhere else. The way he wrings them out and gives them humanity, you want to cry with them and you want to laugh. You root for them—it’s like an old-fashioned movie experience watching his characters on screen.”

  The show’s burgeoning online community was something that Joss could point to as evidence that Buffy wasn’t merely a faddish teen phenomenon. At the end of each episode, the WB would advertise the show’s official website, www.buffyslayer.com (the URL would later change to www.buffy.com). The site had information about the series and characters, and included an “interactive” section with a chat room and two separate message boards where people could come to discuss episodes. One of those message boards was the Bronze, named for the Sunnydale nightclub where the show’s characters hung out. It would eventually become one of the largest single-show-oriented forums on the web.

  Today, many television producers and writers have their own Twitter and Facebook accounts where they both post their thoughts and communicate with fans. But in 1997, the main pop culture outlets were magazines such as Entertainment Weekly, and fans would need to wait each week to see if there would be news about their favorite shows. Instead of spoilers leaking out as scripts were filmed, the most information that fans could get were episode descriptions in the latest issue of TV Guide. None of those options were enough to forge a real connection between viewers and the people creating their favorite shows.

  The Bronze did just that—but first it created a bond among the community of “Bronzers” who frequented the site. In 1997, the majority of Americans still didn’t have a home computer, much less a permanent Internet connection, so many of the Bronzers either were fairly early adopters or worked at desk jobs with little supervision. Considering the qualifications—had a computer and access to the Internet, watched a high school show about vampires and demons on a small netlet (that wasn’t available in many areas of the country), and actually were willing to talk to strangers online—the board posters were a fairly small segment of the television-viewing public.

  Bronzers discussed Buffy episodes in great detail and took care to find out about the show’s writers and their specialties. “These are really, really smart people. I always say that Joss’s fans are going to be running the country at some point. They are,” Kai says proudly. “They’re organized. They’re smart.” They’re not just talking about how cute an actor is, she says. “These are people who are really paying attention to what all of Joss’s people are writing. It’s a completely different universe than what people think it is.”

  Chris Buchanan, who would later be president of Mutant Enemy, agrees. “So many of the people that I met over the years at conferences were super literate, super well educated and thoughtful. As much as the mainstream media would say that ‘it’s a bunch of nerds in their mom’s basement who don’t have a social life,’ I said, ‘Actually, it’s some really amazing people. One of the early people in fandom worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.’” There were also people who did live in their parent’s basement, but this was never seen as a bad thing by their fellow posters. People were judged solely by how they expressed themselves and participated in the community.

  The Bronze was a “linear message board,” where everyone posted to a single, chronological series of posts rather than an organized collection of topics. In the same conversation stream, a poster might discuss the most recent episode, the significance of a demon killed two weeks back, or the stress that she was having at work. “It’s a place where, in order to really fit in and survive, you must be a good written communicator,” said Mary Beth Nielsen, a frequent poster. “I think part of that stems from the fact that Joss himself is so witty and the show is so well-written.” It became such a highly developed community that almost a decade after it was shut down, several academic papers and sociological studies would be written about it, as well as a 2007 feature-length documentary, IRL (In Real Life).

  Once Buffy’s production team became aware of the board, they often read the commentary there to see how people were reacting to each episode. Joss followed the conversation regularly. “I remember him frequently talking about the board,” Dean Batali says. “He took what they said to account. He didn’t let them make the decisions, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that they didn’t have any influence.” Joss’s fascination with the Bronze made sense to Batali. “All of life is high school, isn’t it? You want to be popular; you want to know people are talking about you and liking what you do.” And it was the kind of popularity, self-selecting but devote
d, for which Joss was especially eager; “I’d rather make a show a hundred people need to see than a show that a thousand people want to see,” he once said.

  The actors, too, were amazed by the passionate online fan base that the show was developing. While waiting on official word on the show’s second-season pickup, Tony Head had called Alyson Hannigan to check in. She quickly asked him if he had a computer; he did, but he rarely used it. “Well, you have to go on and look up your character name, because there are shrines to you,” she told him. “We’ve all got shrines!” Head asked her to clarify, not fully understanding what she was saying. “There are people who post and talk about you,” Hannigan explained. “Go check it out!”

  “And so I did,” Head says. “I was absolutely blown away. I had never encountered anything like it. Now it’s probably two a penny, but at the time it was huge. Never, ever, ever encountered anything like it.”

  On the Bronze, reading turned into posting and soon Joss, a few of his actors, composer Christophe Beck, makeup supervisor Todd McIntosh, and stunt coordinator Jeff Pruitt were contributing to the conversation. Not surprisingly, the writers, too, checked in regularly to see what the fans were saying. Marti Noxon, who would join the series in its second season, was one of the first writers to post on the board. (She, like many on the board, chose a pseudonym: “Scout.”) For the writers, it felt like a gift to watch their fans discuss the show with one another—even when their reactions and responses were negative. “Some Bronzers hated everything every week. We knew them by name; we would go ‘Oh here he comes, he’s going to take thing apart,’” she recalls. “It was really in the early days of this feedback loop, and with the Bronze it was like being in the audience finally and seeing them appreciate that we’d been working hard, so it always felt great.”