Joss Whedon: The Biography (42 page)

The writers behind
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D
. Joss, in back; in front, from left to right: Jeph Loeb, Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, Jeff Bell.
Courtesy of Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen Whedon
.

The 2013 exhibit at Wesleyan University in honor of Joss Whedon.
Courtesy of Olivia Drake / Wesleyan University
.

On paper, the fall of 2002 was to be a banner television season for Joss Whedon. With
Buffy
on UPN,
Angel
on the WB, and
Firefly
starting up on Fox, he would have three series on as many networks. And his success wasn’t limited to TV. On Tuesday, September 24, the same day as
Buffy
’s seventh season premiere, Joss Whedon released a CD.

The
Once More, with Feeling
soundtrack album, from the independent music label Rounder Records, included all fourteen original songs from the
Buffy
musical. Although Joss had closely overseen every creative element of the musical, he left the marketing in the hands of new Mutant Enemy head Chris Buchanan. “My marching orders [from Joss] when I got to the company, literally the first day, were ‘I want to be able to go to Tower Records and have the original cast recording CD there,’” Buchanan says. When he started to ask about the musical rights, Joss reiterated that he was just concerned with Tower Records stocking the CD. The rest was up to Buchanan. “That was great; I think that made for a good partnership, because that’s what I took care of.

“Think about it—that’s from somebody who’s an incredible micromanager on the creative side. On the business side, he wasn’t at all, because he didn’t care about that. That gives me a tremendous amount of flexibility in accomplishing the goal, and it was a really hard process to do it, but I remember being able to say, ‘Hey, dude. Go to Tower Records. Your CD is on the shelf and it’s really good.’”
Once More, with Feeling
would sell 150,000 copies in the United States by December 2004—an impressive number for a soundtrack from a “cult” show. In the United Kingdom,
Buffy
merchandise had already been selling particularly well,
as DVD and VHS box sets were the only (legal) way for British fans to watch the series without dealing with the erratic scheduling and censorship of local broadcasters, but even so, everyone was surprised at how well the album sold internationally, especially in the United Kingdom and Germany.

“Once More, with Feeling” would go on to another life off the small screen. Taking a cue from
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
, fans began staging public screenings of the musical, where they could dress up like their favorite characters, sing along to the musical numbers, and shout out sardonic commentary. By 2007, it would become such an event that Marti Noxon and Joss attended a sing-along at the Los Angeles Film Festival. However, in October of that year, after 20th Century Fox received a bill from the Screen Actors Guild for unpaid residuals from the screenings, the studio pulled the licensing, putting an end to the events. Joss called the move “hugely depressing” and promised to do anything in his power to convince the studio to reconsider. “Of course,” he added, “the words ‘my power’ might confuse my gentle readers into believing I have any.”

In lamenting his powerlessness, Joss was perhaps recalling an earlier conflict with Fox’s broadcast arm, which led to the swift unraveling of one of his three TV projects for 2002. Joss’s struggles to keep
Firefly
flying are legendary among Whedon fans, and they all came down to one central problem: the Fox network didn’t get the series that it was expecting—a pithy
Buffy-esque
action series set in space—and didn’t know what to do with the series it actually got.

The first warning signs came in May, when the network was putting together its 2002–03 schedule for its “upfront” presentation, the annual meeting at which a network previews its fall schedule for advertisers. Fox was about to lose two of its flagship series,
Ally McBeal
and
The X-Files
, and it had two sci-fi shows on tap to fill the void left by the latter. A few days before the upfront, there was talk that the other series, the James Cameron–produced
Dark Angel
, would be renewed for a third season and placed on the fall schedule, while newcomer
Firefly
would be held until 2003 as a midseason replacement. But by the time of the Fox upfront on May 16, Joss’s series had been added to the fall roster and
Dark Angel
had been canceled.

With the good news came some more bad news. Gail Berman had scheduled
Firefly
in what is often referred to as the “Friday-night death slot.” Series often have a hard time attracting an audience in a Friday time slot, most likely because that’s when the coveted demographic of viewers ages eighteen to thirty-four are going out to start their weekend. Ominously, it’s the very slot into which
Dark Angel
was moved prior to its cancellation.

What’s more, before it could even premiere,
Firefly
needed a new first episode. Berman did not like what Joss had delivered in his two-hour pilot, “Serenity.” Fox executives outlined a list of reasons why they felt that it didn’t work, including that it was too dark and not filled with enough action to keep a younger audience engaged. Their complaints frustrated Joss, who had made the show he wanted to make—a story about people living on the edge and the small moments that make their lives meaningful. For him, the most important scene in the whole pilot was the one in which Kaylee is alone eating a fresh strawberry, a rare treat for those always on the move in a spaceship. “That’s what we do in our homes—we’re creating our lives, our ethics,” Joss said. “Whether or not we have a template or someone gives us money, everything we create, we do ourselves.”
Firefly
, he added, “is about these quiet moments in between the gun battles.”

Still, Joss did reshoots to address every one of the network’s doubts as best he could. To grab young viewers with action, he shot an opening war scene. To make sure the main character didn’t come across as too grim, he put in scenes in which Mal displayed a sense of humor. Fox remained unsatisfied. The network asked him to produce another episode with which to introduce the series—one that was less “
Stagecoach
in space” and more like an action-oriented futuristic spin on Sam Peckinpah’s violent 1969 western
The Wild Bunch
.

Joss and Tim Minear had two days to write a new premiere script. It needed to do all the heavy lifting of introducing the characters and setting up their situation that had already been done in the pilot, while also presenting a new, more action-packed story. They scrambled and produced “The Train Job”—which, compared to the original pilot, does provide a smoother welcome for those coming to the series through their love for
Buffy
and
Angel
. The episode immediately sets up Mal’s tendency to walk willingly into a fight when he could avoid it, Zoe’s unwavering support for her captain even when she knows he’s being stupid, and the
fact that our heroes will take as many hits as they dish out. By the end, it’s clear that while this crew of smugglers is not happy getting by with very little, its members will risk crossing a sociopath and losing out on a bounty in order to return needed medicine to those stuck in a situation far worse than their own.

The concessions the writers made in their “Train Job” script were early examples of the constant tug-of-war about the “darkness” of the show. Joss didn’t want everyone drawing their guns in every episode, and he certainly didn’t want Mal to be killing people indiscriminately. But he got notes that Mal needed to kill more people. “This is something that was problematic,” Joss says. “[Fox’s] insistence that it be less dark made it, on some level, more offensive. I wanted Mal to have to make really horrible decisions that were tough and that he would have to live with.” Fox instead said that they would like for Mal to shoot a guy and make a joke. So at the end of “The Train Job,” Joss had the captain kick a guy into the ship’s engine. As Joss puts it, “It’s hilarious! I just compromised my morality. Woo-hoo!”

He adds, “They tried to strangle it when it was in the womb. You forget, [creating a television show] is like childbirth. ‘Sure, I’ll squeeze another one of those things out! It doesn’t hurt, right?’ Well, of course, it does. None of them have been easy.”

In truth,
Firefly
was much darker in Joss’s imagination than it would end up being on screen. One of his first pitches, which he gave to Minear as he wooed him away from
Angel
to be
Firefly
’s executive producer, would never see the light of day. Joss explained that as a Companion, Inara has a special syringe. She injects herself before meeting a client, so that if she is raped, the rapist will die a horrible death. In this story, Inara is kidnapped by the savage Reavers. When Mal finally reaches the Reavers’ ship to save her, he finds them all dead. At the end of the episode, after she’s been horribly brutalized, Mal gets down on his knee and takes Inara’s hand, treating her with the respect of an esteemed lady (which he was usually reluctant to give her) as he takes her home to
Serenity
.

“It was very dark,” Minear remembered. “[Joss] said, ‘These are the kind of stories we’re going to tell.’” But as they had learned with
Angel
, they couldn’t start the series out with such grim and gritty tales without earning it.

Firefly
’s troubles didn’t end when the series finally made it to air. Episodes almost immediately began to be preempted by Fox’s coverage of the Major League Baseball playoffs. Then Fox started airing the episodes out of order, disrupting the character and story arcs that Joss and Minear had carefully planned out. But one of the biggest ways Fox mishandled the series was how it chose to market the show.

Instead of advertising
Firefly
as a space western or a gritty sci-fi show, the promotional campaign suggested that it was a wacky genre comedy—“the most twisted new show on television.” Several promos strung together jokes about a “flighty pilot” (Wash), a “space cowboy” (Mal), a “cosmic hooker” (Inara), and a “girl in a box” (River, referencing a plot point from the pilot episode the network refused to air), tied together with the tagline “Out there? Oh, it’s out there!” Another reduced the show’s complex premise to a tired cliché about a “band of renegades” for whom “the only thing that mattered was profit until they discovered something worth fighting for.” Much like the directors whom Joss had resented for mishandling his feature film scripts, Fox marketing was twisting Joss’s vision to fit their own, promoting
Firefly
as the Kuzuis’ campy version of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
if it were inhabited by the poorly realized mercenaries from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s
Alien: Resurrection
.