Joss Whedon: The Biography (9 page)

Tom even called in some favors on his son’s behalf. His literary agency, Leading Artists (a precursor to United Talent Agency), was willing to have someone read his scripts. Another young upstart, Chris Harbert, had just joined Leading Artists as an agent in 1988. After graduating from Boston University, Harbert had worked his way up from the mailroom at ICM before moving to Leading Artists. When he had Joss in for a meeting during his first year on the job, he was surprised by the length of the writer’s hair.

“It came down to about the middle of my back,” Joss says. “Yes, I was often mistaken for a rock star. Not anyone in particular, usually just sort of vaguely people thought I might be a rock star. I was asked to sign a Simply Red album by a record store owner.” Not knowing the lead singer’s name (Mick Hucknall), he declined, as he didn’t feel that he could inscribe it with “Signed, the guy from Simply Red.”

Harbert, who was a year older than Joss, had a distinctly different style. “Very ’80s, slick, like frat boy,” Joss said. “I’m like, there’s no way.” But once the initial shock over each other’s appearance wore off, Harbert signed Joss as his first client. They began a relationship that would take them through the ups and downs of Joss’s whole career, from his long, curly red locks to his current buzzcut. “He’s a really sweet guy,” Joss said. “Turns out I’m not, but he was. That was the plot twist.”

Joss spent the next year writing more comedy spec scripts. He wrote a script for
The Wonder Years
, which featured a storyline based on his own experiences of being mugged in New York City, and one for
Roseanne
. He wasn’t particularly interested in writing for a sitcom, but it was the format that he was most familiar with, since both his father and grandfather had been staff on sitcoms for most of their television careers. Even with all that exposure, Joss didn’t love the joke-joke-joke structure of sitcoms, which he felt wasn’t as interesting as when “something creepy happened, something real” occurred in an episode.

The underlying “something real” was what excited him about the new sitcom
Roseanne
. The series, which began in 1988, was quite different from anything else on at the time. Built as a vehicle for Roseanne Barr, a stand-up comic whose routines focused on her life as a “domestic goddess,”
Roseanne
told the story of a working-class family: Roseanne Conner; her husband, Dan (John Goodman); their three children, teenager Becky (Alicia Goranson), middle child Darlene (Sara Gilbert), and young D.J. (Michael Fishman); and Roseanne’s sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf). With
Roseanne
, according to Joss, Barr “changed the landscape of American television. She should be credited for having done it.”

Roseanne
drew attention to the hardships facing middle-class America during the 1980s. The looming threat of unemployment came up often in storylines, and the series dealt with its effect on the Conners,
who constantly struggled to make ends meet while still trying to achieve their dreams. It was a stark and honest series surrounded by prime-time dramas filled with wealthy families and their over-the-top materialism (
Dynasty, Dallas, Falcon Crest
) and sitcoms featuring well-off families who rarely fought (
The Cosby Show
). For Joss,
Roseanne
also “had a feminist agenda … it was real, and decent, and incredibly funny.”

So when staffing season came up in April–May 1989, the time during which shows look for new writers to read, interview, and hopefully hire, Harbert sent Joss’s
Roseanne
spec to the series. The usual rule is that a writer should never send a spec of a series to
that
series, since a show’s own writing staff can be particularly picky if a script fails to capture some nuance of the series’ tone. But apparently Joss’s script was good enough to get him a meeting with executive producer Jeff Harris. Soon after, Harbert got his client an offer to work on what Joss felt was one of the most important shows on television. The producer told him to bring in his no. 2 pencil on Monday, so Joss went out and bought a hundred no. 2 pencils. “I know he meant that as a metaphor—but what if he didn’t.”

The novice writer was brought on staff as a story editor for the show’s second season, which he quickly determined was “total chaos.” The chaos had its roots in the show’s first season. Barr had spent much of the early days of
Roseanne
sparring with producers Marcy Carsey and Matt Williams. They battled over writing credits, storylines, even wardrobe choices. Barr had fired most of the writers and production staff at the end of the first season, and the second season wasn’t starting off much calmer.

As Joss showed up to start work on the new season, Barr gathered everyone on staff and made a speech about how the tabloids were obsessed with her and had sources among the crew feeding them details of her personal life. Joss, who had heard about the tabloid drama and the staff conflicts, anticipated a speech that would bring everybody closer: “It’s us against the world, and dammit, we’ve got good work to do here, let’s all get it done.” Instead, Roseanne told the writers they had better keep their mouths shut or they would all be fired. It was a plot twist that he wasn’t expecting.

“It made me realize … that every time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things—connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect,” Joss said. “Connecting is the most important thing, and actually an easy thing to do. I try to make a connection with someone every time I talk to
them, even if I’m firing them…. People can be treated with respect. That is one of the most important things a show runner can do, is make everybody understand that we’re all involved, that we’re all on the same level.”

All the chaos on the
Roseanne
set actually worked in Joss’s favor. He was so junior that he wasn’t on Barr’s radar, so he wasn’t held responsible for her frustrations. He kept his job all year by keeping his head down and taking on all the writing assignments he could get.

That was unusual for a first-year writer. So unusual, in fact, that when a friend of his father asked if they had let him write a script yet, Joss told him he had already written four. “Because they just … they had nobody. I ended up writing six scripts that year,” Joss said, although he would only be credited on four episodes. “The other staff writer I know who’s done that was Marti Noxon. She did it in the second year of
Buffy.
”

Joss was getting an unusual crash course in television writing, and credits were stacking up on his résumé, but he was frustrated. Producers often rewrote his scripts—to their detriment, he believed—before they got to air. They backed away from important subject matter. His first assignment, the second episode of the season, had a premise that shocked and then excited him. The episode was to take on abortion: Darlene goes to visit her aunt Jackie only to find her incredibly drunk. Jackie admits that she had an abortion and hasn’t told Roseanne about it. Joss couldn’t believe that the episode they were starting him off on gave him something important to say and touched on the kinds of feminist issues he most wanted to explore.

A couple days later, the executive producer called him in and told him that he’d talked to the network and they decided that Jackie would have a miscarriage instead of an abortion. There would be no feminist message about a woman’s right to choose; now Jackie’s breakdown would be about an uncontrollable biological event. “It’s totally the same—do that,” an irritated Joss recalled being told. “Welcome to my dream and my first heartbreak.”

In the final version of “The Little Sister,” Darlene still finds Jackie drunk at home, but now she is drowning her pain over the fact that Roseanne doesn’t support her choice to become a police officer. Nary an abortion nor a miscarriage to be found in the story, although the
reasoning behind Roseanne’s lack of support does have some weighty emotional underpinnings: she doesn’t think Jackie is incapable of being a cop but rather fears that Jackie will be killed. The episode also delivers Joss’s first fight scene on television; the ending has Roseanne and Jackie wrestling, both comically and seriously, as Dan quips about making a sexy video from it all. It’s a small foreshadowing of all Joss’s wit-infused fight sequences to come.

Joss’s frustrations were relieved for a time when he wrote the script for the episode “Brain-Dead Poets Society.” Tom Arnold, another writer on the series who was famously engaged to Roseanne at the time, championed Joss’s work and covertly showed his script to her. “That was the first script of mine she actually read,” Joss remembers.

After reading it, Barr had lunch with Joss. “It was quite extraordinary,” he said. “The good Roseanne came to lunch. She got it and she was very excited about it, and it was a really fascinating time.” She asked him how he, a twenty-five-year-old man, could write a middle-aged woman with such authenticity. Joss responded, “If you met my mom you wouldn’t ask.”

In the episode, middle child Darlene writes a poem for her seventh-grade English class. When the thirteen-year-old tomboy is asked to read it at the school’s Culture Night, however, she balks. Roseanne, who wrote poems when she was younger, is excited to finally have a connection with her daughter and doesn’t understand the girl’s reluctance. Darlene fights to stay home and watch a basketball game with her father but eventually loses to her mother’s demands.

It was his first script that ended up on the television screen largely as he wrote it, and the episode foreshadowed the way he would address the uneasiness of growing up in
Buffy
. Another comparison can be drawn between Darlene’s desperation to keep her identity very separate from her mother’s and Joss’s own reluctance to follow his father into a television writing career.

In the finished episode, Darlene’s poem, “To Whom It Concerns,” starts from a sarcastic, apathetic place (“To whom it concerns, my ma made me write this / And I’m just her kid, so how could I fight this”), but ends on a beautiful, quiet note that cuts to a thirteen-year-old girl’s
desire to be heard, while still scared of the visibility that would entail (“To whom it concerns, I just turned thirteen / Too short to be quarterback, too plain to be queen. / To whom it concerns, I’m not made of steel / When I get blindsided my pain is quite real”). It is one of the most memorable scenes of the entire series—but this version of the poem wasn’t penned by Joss. The version in his draft was about basketball. “It was about Michael Jordan,” Joss explains. “It was prose, didn’t rhyme, it wasn’t about her emotions; it was actually just a poem.”

The young writer who fretted over unnecessary script changes had now seen his work rewritten for the better. Perhaps the simplicity of Darlene’s poem in his draft was a reflection of his own youth and inexperience. The man who would later stress to his
Buffy
writers that every story must be about the emotional journey, that no episode was “just about the monster,” still hadn’t gained the experience to know that such a pivotal poem couldn’t be “just” a poem.