Joss Whedon: The Biography (27 page)

On June 5, 1998,
Variety
had announced that Joss was diving back into another facet of the Whedon family business with an animated musical based on
Dracula
. Mutant Enemy was also developing several film scripts, including
Grampire
, a family comedy about “two kids who suspect their grandfather is a creature of the night,” and
Alienated
, a comedy about someone who is kidnapped by aliens only to turn the tables on his captors. Ultimately, none of those projects would come to pass, nor would
Cheap Shots
, a TV ensemble comedy that would have reunited Joss with his
Parenthood
boss Ty King. The series would have been set at a B movie horror production company; while still entrenched in genre storytelling, it could have been great fun if it farmed Joss’s early teen years for tales of low-budget storytelling.

Another TV project had a more promising future. As
Buffy
had developed a broader audience through its first two seasons, Joss started to think about how to expand the Buffyverse. The WB was interested in making a spin-off series, and making Angel the central character made the most sense. David Boreanaz had developed into a star on
Buffy
, and there was only so much more that the writers could wring out of the emotionally fraught Buffy/Angel relationship.

Joss and David Greenwalt had thrown ideas back and forth about an Angel-centric show. Nothing felt right until they began to explore the concept of alcoholism, and the fact that many recovering alcoholics go through the process of atoning for the mistakes that they have made. Angel’s story could be about seeking redemption for his past as an evil vampire, about atoning for the person he’d become but shouldn’t have. “Because,” Joss said, “none of us turn out exactly what we want to be.” Once they hit on that idea, Joss knew they had a show, and he started making phone calls about making an
Angel
spin-off a reality.

David Greenwalt was tasked with moving to the new series and getting it off the ground, just as he had done with
Buffy
. The challenge of developing the new show was to appeal to
Buffy
fans while creating a unique identity for the series and a new set of compelling metaphors to explore.
Buffy
was, for all its demons and apocalypses, the quintessential coming-of-age tale. It could explore the typical rites of passage of the young, everything from first kiss to first love to first sex, to first time getting drunk at a party. Angel, on the other hand, had been around for over two hundred years and was essentially an eternal twenty-eight-year-old. For many, their twenties are a time to make mistakes and learn who
they want to be and what they want to do with their lives. There aren’t the same rites of passage aside from muddling through to thirty and “growing up.”

An episode of
Buffy
’s third season previewed the issues of atonement and self-definition that the
Angel
spin-off would address—while also serving as a rare foray into the overtly Christian themes Joss had previously expressed a desire to avoid. “Amends” is a Christmas story in which Angel is confronted with the spirits of those he killed during his many years as a sadistic demon. At the end of the episode, tormented with guilt, he attempts to commit suicide by facing the sunlight at dawn—but he’s saved when a sudden snowfall blankets Southern California on Christmas morning. “It’s hard to ignore the idea of a ‘Christmas miracle’ here,” Joss said of the scene. “The fact is, the Christian mythos has a powerful fascination to me, and it bleeds into my storytelling. Redemption, hope, purpose, Santa, these all are important to me, whether I believe in an afterlife or some universal structure or not. I certainly don’t mind a strictly Christian interpretation being placed on this episode by those who believe that—I just hope it’s not limited to that.”

As
Buffy
continued with its third season, it brought Buffy and her friends to the end of their high school careers and confronted them with two new villains: Richard Wilkins III (Harry Groener), the cheerful, polite, and malevolent mayor of Sunnydale, and the rogue Vampire Slayer Faith (Eliza Dushku). As the season neared its conclusion, however, it was met with unexpected controversy.

In the eighteenth episode, Jane Espenson’s “Earshot,” Buffy develops telepathic powers after a fight with a demon and discovers that she can hear what everyone is thinking. As it starts to slowly drive her insane, she hears one person’s thoughts ring out in the school cafeteria: “This time tomorrow, I’ll kill you all.” She and the Scoobies quickly go to work to find out who is planning the massacre. While the perpetrator turns out to be a lunch lady who poisoned the school lunches, there is a side story in which Buffy finds fellow student Jonathan (Danny Strong)—a perpetually picked-on character, usually relied on for comic relief—in the school clock tower assembling a rifle. Initially, Buffy believes him to be the potential killer, until he explains that he only planned to kill
himself
, and she helps to dissuade him by sharing her frustrations with her own life.

This tale was not out of place for
Buffy
. Once again, Joss had taken his feelings of being an outsider when he was younger and made them into a story that viewers could identify with, even those who may not have felt quite so alienated. That moment when one realizes that all people, even the popular insiders, have their problems is a big moment of maturation. When Buffy confronts Jonathan, she explains that the reason his classmates do not notice his pain is because they are already consumed with their own problems. “It looks quiet down there. It’s not,” she tells him. “It’s deafening.”

Unfortunately, the message of the episode was overshadowed by real-life tragedy. A week before “Earshot” was to air, on April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, went on a shooting rampage. They killed twelve students and one teacher and injured twenty-one other students. Before they could be captured, the pair committed suicide, leaving behind the deadliest attack on an American high school in history.

Immediately the media focused on lax gun laws and violent media marketed to teens as possible contributors to the massacre. Much of the backlash focused on shock rocker Marilyn Manson and shoot-’em-up video games, but
Buffy
was called out for being an inappropriately violent show in a high school setting. And the WB was particularly leery of airing an episode with direct parallels to the shooting in its immediate aftermath.

Sarah Michelle Gellar pushed for “Earshot” to air as planned. She felt it was a great episode and would help those affected by the Columbine tragedy. But the network decided to pull the episode and play a repeat in its place.

Joss took to the Bronze posting board to discuss his feelings about the move:

On the inevitable subject, as far as pre-empting the ep, I agreed with the decision and when you see it you’ll agree, I think, that it was just badly timed. But it WILL air. I’m proud of it. It comments on that type of sitch, and obviously we come down AGAINST massacring people, but ANY comment after so desperate a tragedy would be offensively trite. Needless to type, this BLAME THE MEDIA thing makes me crazy…. It’s just a way of avoiding the
subject—and of making sense of something too ugly to deal with by latching onto a scapegoat. Sigh. (But it is Marilyn Manson’s fault.)

The episode would ultimately air as Joss promised—months later, right before the fourth season began. In the meantime, however, the WB made another scheduling decision about which Joss was far less understanding.

On May 25, mere hours before the second episode of the two-part
Buffy
season finale was set to air, the WB again pulled the new episode and replaced it with a rerun. “Graduation Day, Part 2” was to end with an epic battle at Buffy’s high school graduation, in which she and all her classmates battle Mayor Wilkins, who has been transformed into a sixty-foot-tall demon serpent. Apparently the WB was afraid that this premise might inspire another Columbine-style attack. Brad Turell, the WB’s senior VP of publicity, told
Entertainment Weekly
that “if anything [violent] had happened at any graduation anywhere, every news organization would’ve run
Buffy
clips.” Going even further to show that he didn’t seem to understand the show or the
Buffy
demographic, he later added, “At least we won’t be up against the final episode of
Home Improvement
.”

Fans were furious. As
Entertainment Weekly
reported, they created protest websites and sent petitions to the WB. The campaign Stand Up for Buffy raised more than $3,000 and ran ads in a Hollywood trade magazine. According to
EW
, “Even Elvis Costello riffed, at a June 2 concert in L.A., about God searching in vain for ‘the lost Buffy.’ (He then sarcastically praised The WB for keeping teens safe from unholy demons.)”

Unlike “Earshot,” “Graduation Day, Part 2” had been pulled too late to affect its broadcast in Canada, so Canadian fans were able to view the episode on schedule—and record it. They then shared their recordings with the rest of fandom, not an easy thing to do in an era before YouTube. The Bronze, as an international hub of
Buffy
fans, suddenly became a makeshift video exchange, where viewers who hadn’t seen the episode could connect with Canadian fans with multiple VCRs and a plethora of VHS tapes.

Also unlike with “Earshot,” Joss wholeheartedly disagreed with the WB’s decision and wasn’t going to take their decision quietly. In an interview with
USA Today
, he told fans, “OK, I’m having a Grateful Dead moment here, but I’m saying, ‘Bootleg the puppy.’” With Joss offering his blessing in a large, mainstream media outlet, what had been a quiet sharing of tapes across the border and beyond took on a life of its own.
The Bronze set up an underground railroad of sorts to get the tapes dispersed as quickly as possible. Impatient fans with money and no connections turned to eBay, while those with more technical savvy could find the episode posted online in RealVideo format, which required the video to be broken into several smaller segments that took hours to download. By mid-June, at least one leaked copy of “Earshot” was also making the rounds, disseminated via many of the same sources. (Joss would later post on the Bronze that his rallying cry got him into “hot water” with the WB.)

By the time “Graduation Day, Part 2” finally aired in the United States on July 13, 1999, even the most marginally Internet-savvy fans had already seen it. They knew that Buffy had led the students in a successful attack on the mayor in his demon-serpent form and headed off the apocalypse. They knew that although Willow had lost her virginity to Oz in the first part of the finale, she didn’t have to face the usual tropes of death or heartbreak afterward. And they watched Angel and Buffy’s mature but agonizing breakup, and Angel leaving Sunnydale, bound for his own series.

The WB was quite familiar with fan protests by this point. Fans of the series
Roswell
had sent them packages of Tabasco sauce, a favorite of the lead characters, to try to convince the network of its large base of support. But the fan network built up to bootleg and distribute “Graduation Day, Part 2” was more than a movement to show support for a series. It took people who had previously only had an online relationship and gave them an offline connection, as they gave their names, addresses, and trust to strangers who simply shared one thing: a love for
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. It transformed fans from quiet consumers into active participants in a series’ success. One fan wrote on the online newsgroup alt.tv.buffy -v-slayer, “We are the people. We have the Internet. We have the power. Any questions?” And it illustrated that Joss’s fans were eager to support
him
, not just the work he had created.

But Joss’s experiences with both “Earshot” and “Graduation Day, Part 2” were a reminder that even though he’d achieved creative control over the stories he wanted to tell, he was still beholden to the whims of network television. Anyone who works in Hollywood knows that he or she must deal with its quirks and shortcomings—the half-truths, the indiscriminate decisions seemingly based on whim and questionable facts. But Joss was in his third year at the WB and in the process of
developing a second series for them, so he felt respected and assured at the network. Nevertheless, he was always mindful of how fleeting and frustrating that relationship could be.