Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  “USA Today did an article about Internet and television, like how influential the Internet was for TV,” he remembers. “I was quoted saying something like, ‘I actually think that the Internet communities are going to be able to make or break a show.’ They kind of hung me out there like the optimist of ‘This Internet thing’s gonna work.’ Fox, to their credit, said, ‘OK, if you want to. Yeah, great, knock yourself out. Go and get this thing rolling.’ They let us put a lot of video and stuff up before the show aired, which was not done at the time.”

  The official message board was poorly designed and wasn’t terribly user-friendly, but it quickly became a central location for people to express their love for the series, pore over the episodes, and discuss the characters. Another common topic: the ratings. In recent years, television viewers had become savvier, checking the Nielsen ratings after each airing to see how their favorite shows were faring. For Firefly, it wasn’t looking good.

  Another place to follow all things Firefly was the new fan site Whedonesque.com, a sort of clearinghouse where people could share news and updates about anything Joss Whedon–related. Caroline van Oosten de Boer and Milo Vermeulen had launched the site in June, and it quickly became a source of breaking Joss news, CNN style. The simple text site linked to articles and videos about Joss’s projects new and old, as well as projects from other Whedonverse writers, actors, and crew. Once someone was in a Mutant Enemy project, he or she was brought into the fold and soon learned that acceptance came with a passionate and supportive fan base. “Without Whedonesque, Joss wouldn’t even know what was going on in his own life,” Kai says. “He goes there to find out what’s going on with his friends. Whedonesque is like his Day-Timer [appointment book].” For Firefly fans, Whedonesque was the place to read everything from cast interviews to ratings breakdowns to the latest on the fan movement to “save” the show.

  By November, several cast members were posting messages directly to fans on the official Firefly site, while Kai reached out to the webmaster at another fan site, JossWhedon.net, asking for help in getting the word out about the show. Soon after, a fan-led campaign called “Firefly: Immediate Assistance” mobilized, and an army of fans calling themselves Browncoats after the show’s rebel resistance organized to plead for Firefly’s continuation. They sent postcards to news outlets asking journalists to cover Firefly in their columns, raised funds for the placement of a fullpage ad in Variety, and organized viewing parties throughout the United States. Mutant Enemy kept in touch with the fan organizers and even provided the hosts of viewing parties with publicity photos and a copy of Nathan Fillion’s recipe for seven-layer bean dip.

  On December 9, the Variety ad ran, featuring the headline YOU KEEP FLYING, WE’LL KEEP WATCHING. Joss posted his thanks on the fan site Buffistas.org:

  I’m only posty for a moment to say … (starts to cry …) I promised myself I wouldn’t cry … That Variety ad … I have the coolest fans ever. So classy, so passionate (the ad AND the fans), I must be doing something right. Or paying Tim to do something right.

  Unfortunately, despite the passion of the series’ creators and fans, the campaign hadn’t convinced many other viewers to tune in to Fox on Friday night. By mid-December 2002, Firefly was averaging 4.7 million viewers per episode—more than even the highest-rated episodes of Buffy and Angel but a dud by Fox standards at the time; the series was expected to pull in almost triple that amount. With three of its fourteen episodes still unaired and two of them still in production, Firefly was canceled.

  The official news of the cancellation came on Thursday, December 12, 2002, while they were filming the episode “The Message.” In it, a former soldier (Jonathan Woodward) who served with Mal and Zoe in the war with the Alliance has his corpse sent to them with the request that they bring him home. The taped message that he includes with his body recalls an oft-quoted mantra of their unit but breaks off early: “When you can’t run anymore, you crawl, and when you can’t do that …” Mal and Zoe silently acknowledge the missing ending to the line and, always loyal to their men, decide to honor his request.

  “We were on the bridge shooting,” Tim Minear says, “and Joss showed up on the set and he pulled me aside and he’s like, ‘They just canceled the show.’” Joss then asked if he should announce it while everyone was gathered or wait until shooting was done. Minear said to tell them immediately and they’d all wrap for the day.

  “I’ve never seen him so mad,” Adam Baldwin recalls. “He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t have good news. They pulled the plug and this is the last episode. And I wanted you all to know immediately.’” After Joss informed his cast and crew, nobody felt like working, so they all went to Fillion’s house to get drunk and drown their broken hearts.

  “It was right before we were going to break for hiatus and go home to our families for the holidays,” Jewel Staite recalls. “We all had a good feeling that we were the underdog that year, but it always felt like our impending cancellation was just looming over our heads, and I think we were all waiting for some sort of shoe to drop. It was still devastating, though. Kind of like when you jump off a diving board, and instead of going headfirst in the pool, you twist your body the wrong way and hit the water with your belly instead. It felt like that.”

  But they still had to finish production on the remaining episodes. The next day everybody was hung over, and the first thing they had to shoot was a scene in which Mal, Zoe, and Inara sit around the dining room table laughing hysterically as Mal tells funny war stories about their comrade. “We’ve just been canceled and they have to pretend like they’re having a laugh,” Minear remembers. Ultimately, Joss and his cast and crew decided that joking around was exactly what the situation called for. They were going to have the best time they possibly could have, and then it would be over. “We would screw things up, you know—like, not get something right—and the joke was always ‘What are they gonna do, cancel us?’” says Morena Baccarin.

  Baccarin also recalls how during the later days of filming, Joss helped her reach a deeper emotional truth and find an emotional release. In “Heart of Gold,” Inara tells Mal that she will be leaving Serenity. “I understood how that scene was really sad, and I did it a few different ways. Joss said, ‘That’s really, really good and we have those takes, but now try one where you have to put on your best face and you have to pretend that you don’t give a shit that you’re leaving, because if you show him that you care, he’s going to convince you to stay.’ That brought a whole other layer to that scene—it made me sadder, it made me have to fight harder against showing that, which in turn made me cry,” she says. “You know, it was like the oldest trick in the book, you know—don’t cry, and you cry. But it was such a great piece of advice.”

  On the last day of shooting, the cast and crew had to finish scenes for both “The Message” and “Heart of Gold.” When filming an episode of a TV series, on the last day of a guest star’s shoot, the assistant director will announce that it’s “a wrap” for the guest star. Everyone will clap, and the guest star will thank everyone and go home. Ordinarily, the regular cast members don’t get such a send-off, since they’ll be back the next week. But on this day, there was nothing to come back to. So every time an actor shot his or her last scene, the assistant director declared, “That’s a Firefly wrap” for him or her. The rest of the cast and crew applauded, the actor gave a sad speech, and then it was onto the next scene. But no one left when they were done. They all waited for the others to be finished, because, like on Serenity, the cast and crew of Firefly had become a family.

  At the end of the day, Tim Minear headed home, emotionally exhausted. “It’s Friday. The show is finished. They are now tearing down the spaceship,” he recollects. “I get home, turn on the TV, and what’s on TV? The pilot. They’re finally airing ‘Serenity.’”

  The spaceship was being torn down, but bonds of its crew were stronger than ever. Many cast members talked about the fact that not only was Mal the captain
of Serenity, but Nathan Fillion was also like the captain of the cast. They called out his wonderful disposition and how well he worked with everyone, and said that they looked to him as a leader behind the scenes as much as on camera.

  “God bless them for that,” Fillion demurs. “I don’t know how much responsibility I can take for that; I don’t know how much credit I can take for that. I was grateful to be there—not only to have a job, I had to tell the story I was telling. I was thankful for each and every one of them. I was surrounded by talented, wonderful people. What could you be except happy?

  “They’ve said these things about me being a leader. I say, they carried me. I didn’t have to do the work to be a captain, because when I walked around, they treated me like the captain. I was on a spaceship, dressed like a space cowboy walking around. Everybody had their own attitude toward me and authority itself. I didn’t have to do any work. I just had to listen, I just had to watch them. I just had to be there. It’s funny how our perspectives are different. I didn’t feel like the leader. That’s actually another thing that my adventures with Joss Whedon have taught me: pick the right coattails to ride. There are some amazing, incredibly talented people who are kind and generous. Grab ’em! Grab ’em.”

  The Firefly cancellation hit Joss hard. “I promised these [actors] that if this was good it would go,” he later said. He kept telling the cast that it wasn’t over, that he would take the show somewhere else. “I went crazy; I would not accept cancellation,” he said. He had a production deal with Fox and got together with Minear, agent Chris Harbert, and his lawyer in hopes of finding a way to continue the story. “Joss was so dedicated to the show,” Adam Baldwin recalls, “and so heartbroken, as we all were, that when it went down he was going to try to keep some of the sets, and put them up in a warehouse and keep filming on his own. That just wasn’t in the cards. But he kept fighting.” The cast was sad that Joss seemed to be in so much denial. “I love him,” Baccarin says, “but I was like, ‘This show is gone. Nobody wants it. It’s dead.’”

  As his series ended, another story in Joss’s life was just starting. Five days after Fox announced that the show had been canceled and two days before it finally aired the pilot, Kai gave birth to their son, Arden, on December 18, 2002.

  Though it was a new beginning for Joss, it was perhaps not quite an ending for Firefly. After the series was canceled, actor Alan Tudyk took an item from the set: the recall button from the episode “Out of Gas.” In the spirit of the crew and their love for their captain, he sent it to Joss, with the instruction to hit the button when his miracle finally arrived.

  19

  END OF (BUFFY’S) DAYS

  In a November 2002 interview, Joss described the differences among the sets of his three shows: “Every set has its own sort of tenor. The thing about Firefly is … that this whole cast … they’re extremely kind and professional, and they get along, and they help each other, and they work hard. I’m not saying my other casts don’t work hard. And some of them get along, and it’s great. But there’s a star, and then there’s the ensemble. And there’s tensions on the set…. It’s not one big happy family. It seldom is on a television set. [In Firefly,] I’ve got nine people, all of whom are great in a scene … all of them doing their best to help each other out. It’s early on still. But they really feel like an ensemble [more] than any bunch I’ve worked with.” Today, Joss’s comments—which even with his vague attempt at being diplomatic imply significant tensions on the sets of Buffy and Angel—would have spread like wildfire through social media and become gossip fodder among fans and industry insiders alike. But at the time, they were barely noticed. Perhaps that’s why the talk of canceling Buffy came as a shock to many.

  The series was in the middle of its seventh season, the end of which would mark the expiration of both UPN’s and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s contractual obligation to the series. While Buffy’s ratings were down to roughly 3.8 million viewers per episode from the 4.6 million of the previous year, UPN execs were still very interested in renewing the series, because it still did well in the key demographic of eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds. However, it seemed unlikely that the story would continue without its lead, and Gellar appeared ready to move on. Joss and UPN discussed several options, including continuing with Gellar in a recurring role and spinning off an entirely new series without her.

  In February 2003, Gellar narrowed their options when she told Joss that she would not be returning to her defining role. It was a decision many months in the making, starting with a conversation she’d had with Joss at the beginning of the season. “We both kind of felt that this was the end, that we should make that decision and say it publicly. And then … we didn’t. We didn’t even talk about it for a while,” she said. Perhaps Joss didn’t want to talk about it because he was consumed with the pressure of overseeing three television series each week and he chose to delay the inevitable. But he could put it off no longer.

  On February 25, 2003, Variety announced that Gellar would not return for an eighth season. Three days later, Entertainment Weekly published an interview in which she explained why she thought it was the right time to bow out of her defining role. After the darkness of season six and the criticism that followed it, Gellar said, she and Joss felt that the series was back on its game in season seven. “A lot of people were ready to tear us down [in season six. So when] we started to have such a strong year this year, I thought, ‘This is how I want to go out—on top, at our best,’” she said. “It feels right, and you have to listen to that. The show, as we know it, is over.”

  The public impression that Buffy’s end was a mutually supported decision, however, started to fray a month before the finale was set to air, when Gellar’s husband, Freddie Prinze Jr., told the press that the reason she walked away was because she hadn’t been thanked enough for her contributions. “A lot of people owe Sarah a lot for doing that show and she doesn’t always get the credit she deserves,” he griped. “She’s a very strong woman, because she deals with a lot of nonsense, and instead of that nonsense, she should be thanked—and she’s not…. If that environment would have remained the way it [was] six years ago, she would go back, because she’s loyal. But things change, and people’s egos get in the way sometimes. They make poor decisions.”

  Joss later blew off Prinze’s comments, saying that he had never seen Prinze on set, so he didn’t know what he could be referring to. He did acknowledge a little more publicly this time that there were tensions on the set: “Not everybody was best of friends, and in fact we did not link arms and sing ‘La Marseilles.’ But we made the show as well as we could for seven years, and you know, everybody made it together.”

  Tensions weren’t helped when Alyson Hannigan claimed that she’d learned of the cancellation from Sarah’s interview. This exasperated Joss, who later said, “There was a whole thing about it being in Entertainment Weekly and the crew wasn’t informed and everybody was unhappy, and I was just like, ‘There was somebody who didn’t know?’ Some of the actors were upset and I said, ‘You guys I’ve talked to specifically about this.’ The crew I actually went and apologized to. I said, ‘I don’t know how this isn’t already public knowledge and I apologize if you guys felt the carpet pulled out from under you.’ But I kicked the actors off set before I did it because they knew.”

  It was the end of an era, and while it was difficult for fans to hear, it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise. From its first episode, season seven seemed to be taking the series full circle. The show with the initial driving premise of “high school is hell” brings Buffy back to a rebuilt Sunnydale High as a counselor. While prior seasons drove the characters apart, this one focuses on reunification and redemption: after trying to end the world, Willow returns from an enforced sabbatical with Giles in England, anxious to reunite with her friends and keep her powers under control, while a newly ensouled Spike holes up in the school’s basement, tormented by guilt for all his evil and murderous actions.
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  The Big Bad of the season is the First Evil, originally introduced as Angel’s tormentor in the third-season Christmas episode, “Amends.” The First is a living embodiment of evil, incorporeal but omnipresent, which has existed since the dawn of time and plans to be the only thing standing after the world ends. It usually takes the appearance of dead people, allowing the series to revisit departed friends and foes such as Joyce, Warren, and Mayor Wilkins, but it also takes the form of Buffy herself. It has realized that Buffy’s death and resurrection caused a glitch in the Slayer line, allowing it to find all of the Potentials, the girls all over the world who have a chance of being called as the next Slayer when the previous one dies. It sends its agents—eventually including a misogynistic preacher named Caleb (Firefly’s Nathan Fillion)—to kill each Potential.

  The role of Caleb required Fillion to shift gears from swashbuckling hero to sinister serial killer, a change that pushed him out of his comfort zone. Previously, the actor had often lost out on villainous roles because people felt that he came across as “too nice.” And perhaps there was some truth to that; Fillion credits Joss with finally teaching him the proper tenets of villainy. “Villains don’t think they’re evil. Villains don’t believe they’re the bad guy. Villains believe in what they’re doing. Villains think they’re righteous, and that’s what makes them dangerous,” Fillion explains. “There’s a trap in wringing your hands together and going ‘Mwahaha’—that’s not villainy. The villainy to be afraid of is the villainy you don’t see coming. He’s sweet, he’s pleasant and polite. He sneaks up on you. And you don’t know he’s a villain until he’s got a knife buried in you. Now that’s a villain.”

  The stage was set for a definitive showdown, but exactly how would Joss bring a satisfying end to the series and character that had changed his life? Killing Buffy wouldn’t work—he’d already done that a couple times. He realized that he could convey a new message through the Potential Slayers, girls who had yet to go through Buffy’s journey of receiving power and then learning how to deal with it. Throughout the final season, the Scooby Gang tracks down the Potentials and gives them shelter in the Summers home. As the First’s plan to wipe out the entire Slayer line comes to light, Buffy is joined by her fellow Vampire Slayer Faith, and together they train the girls in preparation for an epic final battle.