Joss Whedon: The Biography (51 page)

July 2005 was a good time to be a
Firefly
fan. Indie publisher Dark Horse Comics released the first book of a three-issue tie-in comic,
Serenity: Those Left Behind
. The Sci Fi Channel (which was owned by NBC Universal) brought the original
Firefly
episodes back to television, airing them right before its hit series
Battlestar Galactica
. And at San Diego Comic-Con, Joss showed the final cut of
Serenity
, which he had just finalized the day before.

In August, Joss went in front of the camera for the latest entries in
Serenity’s
viral media campaign. The “R. Tam Sessions,” a series of five short videos, was a prequel to
Firefly
that shed light on River’s life before Simon rescued her. The grainy videos show interviews with River at the Alliance “learning facility” where she studied and was then experimented on, depicting her transformation from the sweet, brilliant girl that Simon remembered growing up with to the mentally unbalanced young woman we meet on the series. Although he’s only shot from the back, Joss played the counselor interviewing her.

Joss and the cast also visited several other countries to promote the film. As the film’s lead, Nathan Fillion was well aware of how essential he was to the marketing of the film. He was humbled by this new big-screen role. “Until Joss Whedon and
Serenity
came along, I was never considered for a lead,” he says. “I had some small parts, some small roles in films, but no one would give me a crack in this town. I would go in to audition for something, they’d say, ‘He’s very good. We don’t know if he can handle a lead.’ Unless someone lets me, no one will. I’ll never get that chance. I was here for five years before Joss said, ‘You are the guy. I’m gonna give
you the chance.’ Joss Whedon opened a lot of doors for me. He was my champion. He was my mentor. I owe so much to Joss Whedon.”

Fillion’s appreciation did not color their friendship with too much gravitas. While bouncing from city to city in Europe on the promotional tour, he and Joss came up with superhero alter egos Strong Man and Brain Boy to play with. “He would take pictures of me, standing big, chest out, with my hands on my hips looking into the future,” Fillion remembers. “And him, kind of crouched down next to me, pointing at his head like he’s thinking really hard. Concentrating. ‘Tell you what, Brain Boy. With your brains, and my not-so-brains …’ He loves to play.”

After a screening in Sydney, Australia, the tour took a more serious turn when a fan asked Joss what he had against being a Christian. He replied with what was, up until then, his most detailed and straightforward treatise on his atheism:

I don’t actually have anything against anybody, unless their belief precludes everybody else. I am an atheist and an absurdist and have been for many, many years. I’ve actually taken a huge amount of flak for that. People who have faith tend to think that people who don’t, don’t have a belief system and they don’t care if they make fun of them. It’s actually very difficult: atheists are as a group not really recognized by the American public as people to be taken seriously. This does not mean that I rail against religion; however, the meaning of life and the meaning of what we do with our lives is something that is extremely important to me…. I think faith is an extraordinary thing. I’d like to have some, but I don’t, and that’s just how that works….

There’s one other thing I would mention, which is from
Angel
, actually. One of the few times I really got to sort of say exactly what I think about the world was in the second season of
Angel
, episode sixteen [“Epiphany”], when [Angel had] gone all dark, because he does that, and that he was getting better, and he basically decided—he’d been told—“The world is meaningless, nothing matters.” And he said, “Well then, this is my statement: nothing matters, so the only thing that matters is what we do.” Which is what I believe: I believe the only reality is how we treat each other. The morality comes from the absence of any grander scheme, not from the presence of any grander scheme…. So the answer is: “Nothing, unless you’ve got something against me.”

Back home,
Serenity
had a red-carpet premiere on September 22. Universal invited some of the fans who had done exceptional work to promote the film and gave them the chance to walk the red carpet as special guests. Those fans were probably among the many who purchased tickets for midnight screenings on the night of the film’s September 30 release.

The reviews for
Serenity
were generally positive, even from critics that hadn’t been deeply entrenched in
Firefly
fandom. With the encouraging critical reception and the roaring fandom support, box office expectations were high—especially for a weekend with little competition. However, the final numbers were disappointing.
Serenity
took in $10.1 million on its first weekend, eventually earning just $25.5 million domestically. The worldwide total was $38.9 million, which barely met the film’s $39 million production budget and didn’t begin to cover the marketing costs, which were upward of $30 million. Any hope of a big-screen sequel was dashed.

It seemed as though the film, while a storytelling success for Joss, failed to pull in non–
Firefly
fans, just as he’d feared. Universal had granted him creative control, his biggest budget ever, and a strong marketing push, but again he’d created a work that spoke mostly to a devoted niche audience. What would it take for the cult auteur to find mainstream success?

As Joss was shepherding his beloved
Firefly
toward its rebirth on the big screen, he fell hard for a new TV drama:
Veronica Mars
. UPN’s neo-noir mystery series follows the eponymous teenage sleuth (played by Kristen Bell) who faces the daily pressures of high school life while simultaneously investigating cases for her private investigator father and her fellow students and attempting to solve her best friend’s murder. The series, though low-rated (ranking 148th out of the 156 series of the 2004–05 season), was highly acclaimed, landing on a number of “best fall television” lists. Joss had been wrapped up in production for
Serenity
, so he came late to the series, but once he discovered it he was almost immediately consumed by it. By August 2005 he’d watched the whole twenty-two-episode first season in a “crazed Veronica Marsathon,” and he took to Whedonesque to declare his love:

Joss Luvs Veronica….

Best. Show. Ever. Seriously, I’ve never gotten more wrapped up in a show I wasn’t making, and maybe even more than those. Crazy crisp dialogue. Incredibly tight plotting. Big emotion, I mean BIG, and charismatic actors and I was just DYING from the mystery and the relationships and PAIN, this show knows from pain and no, I don’t care, laugh all you want, I had to share this. These guys know what they’re doing on a level that intimidates me. It’s the Harry Potter of shows. There. I said it….

Some of you may already be all up on this, and some may disagree, but I’m urging peeps to check it out, ’cause there is great TV afoot, and who doesn’t want that? Thank you for your time.

The news quickly spread to the
Veronica Mars
writers’ room, where the staff was working on the show’s second season. Series creator Rob Thomas remembers the excitement everyone felt as they gathered around to read Joss’s post; it was a benediction of sorts from one cult phenomenon to the next. “We’re both sort of writing in the ‘Heathers’ school of stylized teen dialogue, pretty quippy and bantery,” Thomas said. “We both imposed metaphors on a high school setting. He did high school as a horror show, and we’re doing high school as a noir piece. In our own ways, we re-imagined high school to fit a distinct style of storytelling.”

And like
Buffy, Veronica Mars
was a phoenix rising from the ashes of another acclaimed series that had been canceled way too soon. Just as Joss was still reeling from the cancellation of
My So-Called Life
when he developed his iconic show, Thomas felt the need to create his own teen show to ease the pain of the swift cancellation of NBC’s
Freaks and Geeks
(1999–2000). “The most beautiful final episode of a show ever,” he says. “That one killed me. When [the show] got canceled, I felt like it was the death of a small-story television. I can get a sexy soap opera like
Gossip Girl
on—but to just get a show about normal teens with small stories like
Freaks and Geeks?
It wasn’t going to last. And they weren’t going to take their chances with another one.” The fact that Veronica, like Buffy before her, found a home not on one of the big four networks but on one of the smaller netlets speaks to the truth of Thomas’s statement.

Even by the more modest standards of UPN,
Veronica Mars
was hardly a breakout hit, so the Whedon love was much appreciated. Joss continued to bestow praise on the series, writing a review of the season-one DVD set for
Entertainment Weekly
, in which he characterized the show as much more than just a modern update of the treasured Nancy Drew tales that he’d shared with Kai on their cross-country trip:

Last year, Veronica Mars’ best friend was murdered. Some months later, she was drugged at a party and raped in her sleep. Welcome to the funniest and most romantic show on TV…. The teen-soap element of the show is just as compelling as the season-long murder mystery. Nobody is who you think they are. Everyone shifts, betrays, reveals—through their surprising humor as well as their flaws. The show is filled with deft, glorious wit. Creator Rob Thomas and his scribblers give
VM
more laughs than many sitcoms, and they never grate against the emotional brutality…. What elevates it is that in
a TV-scape creepily obsessed with crime-solving,
VM
actually asks why. It knows we need our dose of solution as a panacea against the uncontrollable chaos of life’s real mysteries. And it shows, feelingly, that having the answers is never enough.

Joss also called out Enrico Colantoni’s role as Veronica’s father, disgraced former sheriff turned private investigator Keith Mars, dubbing him “the world’s greatest dad. (Seriously. Greatest. There should be a mug.)” Keith is indeed Veronica’s rock throughout the series, and their bond is one of the best father-daughter relationships ever realized on screen. Keith also stands out against the long line of
unsupportive
fathers in Joss’s own work; even as his series celebrate the value of chosen family, blood relatives and particularly fathers are more likely to be portrayed as absent or abusive.

Even so, the similarities between
Buffy
and
Veronica Mars
were striking, including witty writing and a smart girl hero. Rob Thomas’s show seemed sure to appeal to many fans of the earlier series, if only they would give it a try. By the beginning of its second season, the show had already cast former Whedonverse actors Alyson Hannigan and Charisma Carpenter in recurring roles, but it wasn’t until Joss went public with his love that Thomas thought of the ultimate way to reach more of the Whedonverse audience. Through his friend Marti Noxon, Thomas had met Joss a couple of times, and he knew that he had a background in theater. Thomas figured that it wouldn’t be totally strange to ask Joss to take on an acting role in the show.

Joss took him up on the offer. In November, he played a car rental agent in the episode “Rat Saw God.” Thomas was impressed with his skills in front of the camera. “Trust me, I cast guest star actors all the time who I find myself having to cut around. It’s a little nerve-racking to cast a writer in a role and think, ‘Oh, we can’t have a real scene,’” he says. “It was really remarkable—he was great.” Star Kristen Bell agreed: “Joss is such an intelligent guy and he gets the show completely and he was just very funny. It was so cool to have him on set because we’re hopefully following in his footsteps, and he really knows how to write for cult fans.”

In addition to drawing his fans’ attention to
Veronica Mars
, Joss had another lasting effect on Thomas. He took note of how Joss stood out as “a face of a series” at a time when most writers and producers were unknown, and he was inspired by how willing Joss was to engage in
conversation with his fans. It’s an example he would still be following almost a decade later, when he reached out to the
Veronica Mars
fan base to help resurrect the long-canceled series in another medium.