Joss Whedon: The Biography (28 page)

Joss had decided long ago that financial security was an important goal, and he wasn’t going to get blinded by his multimillion-dollar deals and blow a lot of money on toys. “Joss had an old black Toyota Supra convertible,” Nicholas Brendon, who played Xander, recalls. “I think he had it when he was writing for
Roseanne
.” His new show had become a hit, but Joss “was still driving this little black Supra around. Meanwhile, the cast is all driving around Land Cruisers, BMWs, and here comes Joss, the creator of this empire, in his little Supra. He was really very, very modest.”

The financial modesty also served another purpose: to keep him from having to take a job just to be able to pay the bills. He wanted to always be in the rare position to walk away from a project that he didn’t believe in. He believed in
Buffy
, but as his recent experiences had illustrated, he still didn’t have full control. That would require complete autonomy over all aspects of production and distribution, which was something he hadn’t achieved—yet.

Angel made it through losing the love of his life, a near-apocalypse, and the WB hysterics and landed in a place filled with more drama than all three wrapped together: Los Angeles.

Joss and David Greenwalt had decided to set the series in L.A., a few hours down the road from Sunnydale. As with
Buffy
a few years earlier, Joss introduced the network to the new setting not in a full pilot episode but with a short presentation tape. This time, however there was no full story to be told—the six-minute pitch tape is narrated, often directly to the camera, by Angel as he explains his past through clips from
Buffy
. A handful of new scenes show off the new setting, introduce Doyle (Glenn Quinn), a half-demon who will receive regular visions of damsels and dudes in distress for Angel to rescue, and hint at the series’ eventual Big Bad: the evil law firm of Wolfram & Hart, which both defends and employs unscrupulous and often otherworldly clients—many of which will be sent to kill Angel over the course of the series.

Another familiar face makes an appearance in the pilot: Buffy’s tart-tongued high school rival, Cordelia Chase. The producers had made the choice early on to bring Cordelia into this new corner of the Buffyverse. “When Joss [brought up the idea] to spin off
Angel
, the first thing I said was that we’ve got to bring Charisma Carpenter,” Greenwalt says. “We’ve got to have that comic relief.”

The visual pitch convinced the WB to order an initial thirteen episodes of the series in June 1998. However, at this point Angel had yet to appear in the third season of
Buffy
, which would lay the groundwork for the new show. Once the spin-off deal was confirmed, David Boreanaz’s representation called and wanted more money for his role on
Buffy
. “David was a great guy, and one of my favorite guys, but this didn’t have anything to do
with him,” Greenwalt explains. “It had to do with his representation. They wanted a huge amount of money for him that would have been impossible for us to meet, because we were still little shows. We didn’t have
The X-Files
’ budget, certainly.” People gathered in Joss’s office, worried that Boreanaz would not be available and the show would not happen.

“Joss sat very quietly and he said, ‘I want you to call the agent. I want you to tell them we’re going to add a new character to
Buffy
called “Bob Fanooti, Demon Hunter” and we’re going to spin him off into his own series,’” Greenwalt recalls. “There’s a Michael Corleone side to Joss, which is, if you want to play rough with him, don’t fucking cross him and do something immoral or bad to him, because he’s a very smart guy who thinks things through—he responds rather than reacting.” It took just one phone call for Boreanaz’s representation to come around.

Over three seasons on
Buffy
, Joss and Greenwalt had built a strong team of writers who understood the voice and the tone of the show.
Angel
was planned as a darker series with more adult themes, but the tone would be very much the same, so it made sense to hit the ground running by enlisting
Buffy
writers to script episodes of the new series. They did hire a few dedicated
Angel
scribes—the most notable of whom, like Marti Noxon, needed to be convinced to apply.

Tim Minear was already an experienced staff writer, a veteran of the
The X-Files
and ABC’s romantic comedy take on Superman,
Lois & Clark
. About a year earlier, he had met with Joss on
Buffy
and pitched some ideas. If a spec script is a writer’s audition to get in the door, the meeting with a producer is his or her one chance to shine. While Joss was “blown away” by Minear’s talent, his demeanor during the pitch convinced him that Tim Minear was the angriest man he’d ever met. Joss felt that he couldn’t spend a significant amount of time in a room with someone so full of rage. On
Angel
, however, Joss had given David Greenwalt his blessing to run the writers’ room as he saw fit, and Greenwalt wanted Minear.

However, Minear was not terribly keen to do
Angel
. “I frankly didn’t think it was that good,” he says. “I didn’t think it even remotely compared to
Buffy
—it felt like a pale knockoff to me.” He also hadn’t enjoyed his recent staff experiences. “I was coming off
The X-Files
, where they didn’t let me do anything,” Minear remembers. “Interestingly enough,
the show that I never dreamed I would actually get a job on, the only show I watched, had hired me”—but his year on that show “was miserable. I was never on the inside with that group, no matter how hard I tried. I was coming from
Lois & Clark
, where they couldn’t give me enough to do, to the show of my dreams where they wouldn’t allow me to do anything. I just got so frustrated that I actually quit. The inertia at
The X-Files
was too stressful. So I quit at the end of the year with nowhere to go, but I felt great about it.”

After that, Minear had turned down an opportunity to create a syndicated show for Tim Burton based on the
Oz
books. Greenwalt pursued him for the
Angel
writing staff, but Minear turned down several of his offers until former
Buffy
producer Howard Gordon, who was returning to the Mutant Enemy fold himself after the cancellation of his Fox series
Strange World
, urged Minear to join him in the
Angel
writers’ room. Gordon was a fan of Minear, having previously hired him to write for
Strange World
. The series didn’t last long, but he learned Minear’s voice, and knew it could sing in the key of Whedon.

“Marti Noxon, Jane Espenson, and David Fury really sang in that key and I never felt like I quite sang in that key,” Gordon explains. “That tone was very tricky, so singular and so specific to Joss—the irony and the ability to turn on a dime between emotion, comedy, and scary is really a hard degree of difficulty. You see it when people try to imitate it—it is just so counterfeit. I think all of those writers that have flourished were very funny. There was a kind of intelligence, too. A cleverness and also a love of language. I don’t think you could write
Buffy
and not love language—and maybe that goes to anybody who is a writer, but even more so with people on
Buffy
.”

Gordon told Minear, “ ‘Trust me. I don’t sing in this key but you do, and I guarantee you are going to thrive in this and this is going to be where you cut your teeth and learn.’ I knew that it was going to be a great match. It was like knowing two people who fall in love, and even though you like the girl yourself, you knew you could never get her. I knew Tim would be great, and it happened just as I imagined it would.”

Minear signed on to Joss’s new show, but it was hardly love at first sight.
Angel
might have been designed to be a more mature show than
Buffy
, but sometimes it seemed as if the writers were still in Sunnydale High. The Mutant Enemy building had two floors, with the
Angel
offices downstairs and the
Buffy
team upstairs. “There were the freshmen,”
Minear remembers, referring to the the
Angel
staff, most of whom were mid- or lower-level writers, “and then you had the upperclassmen—the
Buffy
writers who had been with Mutant Enemy for a couple years or more. Everybody had been ‘attending classes’ there for years before we got there. We’re the new class coming in, and David [Greenwalt] felt way more comfortable with the old class. So while we were his writing staff for
Angel
, for the first several episodes of the show, they had
Buffy
writers writing those scripts.”

While it was understandable—the
Buffy
writers were familiar with these characters, and Joss and Greenwalt were familiar with the writers—the
Angel
writers were a little disconcerted. They felt that while they were breaking and rebreaking stories for what seemed like interminable weeks, the staff of another show was doing the real work. “Jane Espenson wrote an episode, Doug Petrie wrote an episode, David Fury wrote an episode, and Greenwalt wrote an episode,” Minear says. “All these other writers were writing the episodes and we’re sort of not getting our turn at bat, and that’s making us feel like the redheaded stepchildren.”

Adding to that stress, Joss seemed to spend more time on the
Buffy
floor. “As gregarious, entertaining, and as brilliantly as he can hold a room full of people’s attention, he’s also oddly shy,” Minear says. “He didn’t really know us, and there was a whole bunch of people there that he knew, that were sort of like his extended family, which were the
Buffy
people, so I think it took a while for him to warm up to us.” At first, in fact, “Joss didn’t like me,” Minear recalls. “I didn’t like Joss. He wouldn’t talk to me, he wouldn’t look at me.”

Angel
’s premiere episode, “City Of,” opens with a voiceover that both immediately acknowledges the series’ connection to
Buffy
and informs viewers that they are now in a new world:

Los Angeles. You see it at night and it shines. A beacon. People are drawn to it. People and other things. They come for all sorts of reasons. My reason? No surprise there. It started with a girl.

Then Angel comes into view, sitting at a bar, nursing a drink, and drunkenly attempting to make conversation with another patron. Soon it becomes obvious that the inebriated monologue was just for show as
Angel follows a couple to a nearby alley and protects a blonde girl—but not
that
blonde girl—from a vampire attack. When she tries to thank him, he sees the blood on her forehead and growls at her to leave, then returns to his apartment, alone.

“We wanted a much darker show and for it to be different in tone from
Buffy
…. [It] is set in Los Angeles because there are a lot of demons in L.A., and a wealth of stories to be told,” Joss said. “We also wanted to take the show a little older and have the characters deal with demons in a much different way.”

However, the initial cut of the premiere went so far into the dark that a portion of it never saw the light of day. “One time, Angel arrives too late to save a girl who’s been attacked by a vampire,” Greenwalt describes. “She’s dead, and he starts licking the blood off her. We scared the bejesus out of the WB.” The moment was removed from the final cut. The script for the second episode was even darker in tone: “Corrupt” was to introduce Detective Kate Lockley (Elisabeth Röhm), a police officer who has gone undercover as a prostitute and become hooked on crack cocaine. The WB shut down show production for a few weeks, and the episode was completely rewritten. “They were right, because we hadn’t earned that level of darkness in the show,” Greenwalt says.

The writers pulled back from simply being “dark” and struggled to refocus the series. The basic premise remained the same: throughout the third season of
Buffy
, Angel was looking to atone for his murderous past, and he finds a calling in Los Angeles to help the helpless. “Buffy is always the underdog trying to save the world,” Joss said, “but Angel is looking for redemption.” Unfortunately, that premise was expressed through largely episodic storylines in which Angel either chased after the subject of one of Doyle’s visions or took on a paying client as a supernatural private eye. Joss joked that it felt like “Touched by an Equalizer”—a mix of
Touched by an Angel
, a wholesome drama about angels who are tasked with a “case” to bring a specific person a message from God, and
The Equalizer
, a 1980s drama about a retired intelligence officer who provides service as a protector and an investigator, free of charge, to people in trouble. Joss found these types of stories more difficult to write than
Buffy
’s episodic “monster-of-the-week” tales, so he moved the series away from the weekly case format and “turned it into another ensemble soap opera drama with monsters in it.”