Joss Whedon: The Biography (18 page)

Joss knew that the television landscape was ripe for a new series that addressed both female empowerment and universal teenage fears. But even though the opportunity had arisen for him to create exactly that, he wasn’t quite sure he was ready to go back to television.

It was Gail Berman of Sandollar Productions who had approached Joss with the idea of developing
Buffy
into a television series. Inspired by the recent film
Clueless
, Amy Heckerling’s witty modern retelling of Jane
Austen’s
Emma
set in a Beverly Hills high school, with its own unique and immediately quotable vernacular, Berman returned to Joss’s blonde, quippy teenager who is far wiser than her initial vapid appearance suggests. She wanted to pitch
Buffy
as a thirty-minute kids’ series à la
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
, to air in syndication, and was working her way through all the associated rights issues. She realized that 20th Century Fox had failed to secure the television rights for the film, so she was free to proceed without their go-ahead, and she obtained the necessary permissions from partial owners of the Buffy character Kaz and Fran Rubel Kuzui. One of the last contractual loose ends she had to tie up was that she had to offer the project to Joss, who had the right of first refusal if
Buffy
was ever redeveloped. Berman reached out to Chris Harbert, knowing that Joss was deeply entrenched in “big movie projects,” and explained that he just needed to decline the offer so that the project could move on without him.

It didn’t work out like that at all. “A couple of weeks later,” Berman remembered, “I got a call from [Harbert] and he said, ‘I talked to Joss about it, and the funny thing is, he is interested in it. Why don’t you guys get together and see if there’s something you find intriguing?’”

Joss was excited by the idea of returning to his beloved character and script, of course. But his previous experiences in television gave him pause. Still, he knew that he would be returning to the medium under far different circumstances than those that affected his tenure on
Roseanne
. He had earned himself some leverage as a highly sought-after script doctor, after all; he could dictate how he would serve on the show. If he came aboard as an executive producer, he would finally get the chance to direct. He would have more control over the creative aspects of the project. Joss realized that this was an opportunity to finally tell the
Buffy
story the way he had always envisioned it: instead of the
Power Rangers
–esque kids’ show Berman had originally envisioned, it would be the saga of high school as a horror movie.

Joss signed onto the project, and with such marketable talent aboard, Berman shifted her focus from a syndicated
Buffy
to a network-worthy
Buffy
. She and Joss readied their proposal for the networks’ 1995–96 pilot season, the yearly period in which writers and producers pitch roughly five hundred show concepts to network executives, of which seventy or so are bought and go through script development, before a final ten or twenty are given the green light to film a pilot.

Joss needed a pitch with current references that would connect with executives. In an essay he wrote for the
My So-Called Life
DVD release in 2007, he recalled, “When I pitched
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
, I told executives it was a cross between
The X-Files
and … and then I always took a moment to judge how smart they were. If they seemed like empty suits, I’d go with
90210
. It was a big hit. But if they seemed like they knew their business, I’d use another example. The example that every writer I know still references. The show that—forget what it did for my writing and my career—I’ll love the way you can only love as a youth: with fierce bewilderment and unembarrassed passion.”

The first meeting on their dance card was with Fox, where Berman felt
Buffy
could find a home as a solid coming-of-age drama in the family-friendly 8:00
PM
eastern spot. To augment his pitch, Joss prepared a short video; like the movie montages he created for Kai, it combined clips from the 1992 film, special effects shots, and “beautiful images” to demonstrate how different
Buffy
would be from the other series on television. Yet despite a strong showing by Joss, Fox executives passed, deeming the concept too close in tone to
Party of Five
. Berman next had Joss pitch the series to NBC, even though she knew it wouldn’t fit into the network’s schedule, which was populated with series aimed at twenty- and thirty-somethings after their runaway success with
Friends
. The meeting with NBC would be a good way for him to further refine the pitch before they presented it to a new network just launched that year: the WB.

By the time they got to the WB, the pitch had become more open-ended. Joss told the WB executives that at that point, he didn’t know what the format of the series should be. Hour? Half hour? More drama? Maybe comedy? Should it have a laugh track? But what he did know was the
Buffy
universe, which he “sketched … out in Dickensian detail, explaining what powers the various types of vampires, slayers, and watchers wielded, and why.”

The network had been searching for a drama with a teenage girl as the lead—they’d looked into picking up
My So-Called Life
when it was on the bubble at ABC, but it was beyond their budget. In fact, WB exec Susanne Daniels was looking for a female teen superhero series in particular, but she came into the
Buffy
meeting with a “slight bias” against the project: she was not a fan of the film and was wary of spending money to develop a series based on it. However, she was quickly won over by the fact that Joss’s pitch “was such a fresh and improved take from the
movie” and by “the emotionality that Joss was bringing to Buffy’s story and backstory.” Joss, she said, was unlike anyone else with whom the network had met, and the “overall vision that Joss pitched was more intriguing than anything I’d seen in the movie, and more compelling than other pitches I’d heard in our search for a strong young female character.” On the strength of the pitch, the WB bought a
Buffy
pilot script; 20th Century Fox came on to produce.

When the WB showed interest in
Buffy
and began talking about what the series could be, Joss came back excitedly to Chris Harbert. “It’s amazing that they’re really letting me take the reins. They’re really listening. They’re really interested in the way I want to do it,” he told his agent. To which Harbert replied, “Yeah, they have no idea what they’re doing.”

There was probably some truth to that. At the time, the WB was desperately searching for an identity. Both it and UPN, the other “netlet” that launched in January 1995, were drawing minuscule audiences compared to the major networks. Where UPN had tried to distinguish itself with a programming slate of sci-fi shows led by the latest series in the
Star Trek
franchise,
Voyager
, the WB had developed programming directed at a more urban market with
The Wayans Bros
. and
The Parent ’Hood
, both sitcoms featuring African American casts. But the WB was struggling in the ratings even compared to its fellow upstart.

To change all that, the network’s programming executives were willing to buck the conventional wisdom of the TV business—and hiring Joss was a big part of that. The WB was “the great square hole of television,” he would later proclaim. It was barely a year old and its programming executives had put their faith, and their money, behind someone who had a great story and knew how to tell it. After his disappointing experiences with the major networks, the chance to do what he wanted at this new netlet was very rare and very exciting.

At the time, most dramatic offerings on American television were medical and police dramas that eschewed season-long narratives for self-contained episodes about the medical emergency or crime of the week. Joss called this “reset television,” noting that these shows tended to have fairly minor consequences for the main characters, and any lessons learned were often swept clean in time for the following episode.
Cable channels had begun to develop original programming, but they weren’t nearly as acclaimed or as popular as today’s offerings by HBO, AMC, FX, and Showtime. Ongoing narrative arcs, with which Joss had been fascinated since his early years of watching British dramas with his mother, on American TV were mostly limited to soap operas—and the soaps tended to focus on relationship melodrama and shocking personal reversals rather than meaningful character development. A teenage vampire slayer from Los Angeles was about to change all of that.

According to Joss, “TV is a question, movies are an answer.” A movie lasts for only a brief period of time and has one goal: to tell a story from beginning to end and then get out. A TV series, on the other hand, needs to fill many hours, many episodes; it needs to make its story last. Thus, while Joss’s pilot script for the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
series picked up narratively where the
Buffy
film had left off, it made a number of changes to sustain the premise indefinitely.

As the story kicks off, a slightly younger Buffy Summers is beginning her sophomore year at Berryman High School as a transfer student from L.A. Buffy’s hoping to leave all of the “Chosen One” business behind, but a quiet new start isn’t meant to be when there’s a suspicious death on Buffy’s first day of school. As it turns out, her new Southern California home—which will be named Sunnydale in the series, with Buffy’s new school renamed Sunnydale High—is built on a Hellmouth, a portal between Earth and hell. The Hellmouth attracts not just vampires but all kinds of demons and spirits. Basically, if it’s supernatural and evil, it sets up shop in town, giving the writers carte blanche when it came to introducing new villains.

In another deviation from the movie, in which Buffy primarily fought vampires alone (as had all Slayers until her time), she quickly connects with two new friends, Willow Rosenberg and Xander Harris, who will become her confidants and evil-slaying cohorts. Willow is a shy girl, unsure and a bit awkward but full of confidence and excitement when it comes to book learning and computer hacking. She has been in love with her best friend, Xander, since kindergarten. Witty, geeky, and uncomfortable in his skin, especially around girls, Xander is basically Joss in high school.

Buffy also meets her new Watcher, Rupert Giles, who will guide Buffy’s development as well as serve as a father figure for all three teens. Rounding out the cast of characters is self-involved cheerleader Cordelia Chase, a walking, talking callback to the girl Buffy had been before the Slayer business came along. This odd band of characters—the shy girl, the boy whose strongest weapon is his ready wit, the snarky popular girl, and the repressed Brit, all following the most powerful girl in the world, who desperately wants to be anything but—would become the template for the chosen families so often found in Joss’s later works.

The WB was impressed enough by Joss’s script to give the go-ahead to film a pilot. As soon as the team got the green light, casting began.