Once his cast was set, Whedon was satisfied he had the right group. He liked all his original characters because they were “either parts of me or parts I wish I had. You know, I took a bunch of pieces and put them on a page and when these guys came in, they not only got them exactly, but since we’ve been doing the show together, have shaped them. So right now, the characters are a real hybrid with everybody bringing something to their character that wasn’t there before. Although the characters started off with me, now they belong to the actors and I just write to them.
“What Sarah brings to the part is her intelligence. At the same time, she’s got that hormonal goofiness that makes Buffy not just the Terminator. I’m very fond of everyone in this cast and I’ve worked with plenty of people I can’t say that about,” he laughs. “It’s not easy to find the right balance—people who are mature enough to do the hard work, but who still have that youthful energy that’s genuine. It’s not easy, but we got ’em.”
Executives at the WB were more than pleased with the work Whedon and his cast were doing. Susanne Daniels, then–executive vice president of programming for the network, was one of the series’ biggest boosters. “Every once in a while you meet a writer whose passion and vision just blows you away and that’s what happened when we met with Joss Whedon for the first time,” she says. “As soon as we saw his pilot script, we knew we had something unique, but it wasn’t until the casting process, when we met Sarah, that we knew we had our first potential breakthrough show. Buffy is really scary, it’s really sexy, and it’s really funny. We think it’s a show that has it all.” The WB, which was going after the same audience Fox went for in its early days, felt Buffy would appeal to their target demographic, the 18–34 age group.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted to some of the highest critical praise of any show in the 1996–97 season. People’s Tom Gliatto graded it a B+ and added these words of praise: “Sarah Michelle Gellar plays the part (originated by Kristy Swanson in the movie version) with the right degree of put-upon resentment, and the cast—including Anthony Stewart Head as school librarian—is as smooth an ensemble as you could wish for in an hourlong series. All in all, this looks like one of the brightest new shows of the season.”
The San Francisco Chronicle’s TV critic, John Carman, also lauded the show. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer is as surprisingly engaging as the film that spawned it. The Buffy role seems to have been altered a bit for Gellar. This Buffy is primed for martial-arts action, but she’s also notably nimbler in the cranium. It’s a decent role, and Gellar handles it with wit, confidence, impressive athleticism and a fetching off-center smile. Buffy takes itself just seriously enough to ladle moderate suspense between chuckles.”
Still, not everyone was enchanted with the series. TV Guide’s Jeff Jarvis was one of the few who faulted the show’s production values. “I can’t decide whether to praise Buffy for being different or to make fun of it for being so B-movie cheesy.”
But overall, the response was more in line with Kristen Baldwin’s brief critique in Entertainment Weekly: “Infinitely more entertaining than the cute but forgettable 1992 movie it’s based on, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is this midseason’s most distinctive and sharply written new show.”
Gellar felt the series was so different in execution and tone from the film that she never worried about people comparing one against the other. “I look at the series as being loosely based on the movie. In my mind, all we did was take the idea of Buffy, not the story or the character. Joss’s vision for Buffy was something a little darker, a little more on edge, a little less camp. It’s really a brilliant idea, that the scariest things in life are things that are based in reality. What scares you the most are things that could possibly actually happen.”
Gellar says the original high school setting was the perfect jumping-off place for the series because “I think high school scares everyone. When I was in junior high, I didn’t know where I fit in. I tried to be a jock, then I tried to be cool, but I couldn’t find my place. I think that no matter how popular you are, or how unpopular you are, high school is a scary place and it is one thing that everyone can relate to; it’s one of the few things that everybody has experienced.
“While people might not always relate to the horror aspect of Buffy, the situations in our story lines are ones people can relate to—loving a friend, being at an age when you’re having problems with Mom, wanting to be an adult and a child at the same time.”
That said, Whedon has been adamant about not letting the series become an issue-of-the-week soapbox. “We are not going to get terribly or overtly issue-oriented. The horror isn’t just, monsters attack and we fight them. The horror and the stories have to come from the characters, from their relationships and fears—otherwise, it won’t really be interesting … What I want to get at is the incredibly operatic reactions to small emotional things, to get into the characters’ interior lives, even though it’s a show with big, horned demons. As I’ve said before, there will never be a Very Special Episode of Buffy.
“The thing that ends up scaring me the most is people. I think the best stuff happens not just by having a monster show up, but when we remember the sort of human relationships people have that are really twisted and scary, and then extend them into horror stories. That’s when things really disturb me—when it’s somebody’s parent or somebody’s friend who is turning into something horrible—because it brings up issues that are real, and therefore, very scary.
“In the series, we have taken real-life situations that reflect a grotesque parody. When I get together with my writing team, I ask them, ‘What is your favorite horror movie? What’s the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you? Now, how can we combine the two?’
“What’s fun about the show is that we never know from scene to scene which way it’s going to go. A scene that starts out very dramatically could end up quite funny, or something truly horrible could happen in it. We don’t do, ‘Okay, now here’s the funny part and now here’s the scary part.’ We never really know what’s going to be highlighted until it’s over.”
To Gellar, it doesn’t matter what direction the scenes take. “I love all genres—comedy, horror, action, drama—and what I think is so wonderful about our show is that we have all of those different aspects,” Gellar observes. “It’s interesting when you go from being a child actor to an adult actor. All My Children was really that transition for me, and Buffy is really a wonderful opportunity for me to play someone a little closer to myself and situations I’ve been in—minus the vampires.”
Nicholas Brendon, who plays Xander, likes a more macabre aspect of the series: “One thing that I like about the show is that in every episode, somebody dies—and you never know who it’s going to be. I mean, you could have a bond with, say me—and then I’m dead. Not that Joss would actually let that happen. So if someone is in danger, they might actually die and not come back, which I think is nice.”
Whedon says it was always his intention to introduce characters that wouldn’t make it through the end of the season. “Not that we feel we have to kill someone every week, but we like to let people wonder. We like to show people that the peril here is real, that the horror is real and there’s something at stake.”
“But it’s not what you might expect,” Gellar points out. “It’s not the person you think will die who does.”
While some have wondered whether some part of Buffy’s success might be a case of lucky timing, Whedon says the premise is timeless. “I have no doubt Buffy would have gotten on the air whenever it was pitched. I think horror shows have an important place. People need horror stories. They need the Big Bad Wolf and they need something to latch on to, something to project their fears onto. Life’s horrible. It’s scarier than ever. We are never going to live forever, there is no God … so we’ll always need these stories for an outlet. But horror had disappeared somewhat in movies which is why it is showing up on television. And it hadn’t been on television f
or a long time, either. It was The X-Files that sort of brought it back again.”
The second season of the series picked up where the first ended, with lots of critical raves and ever-improving ratings. Of course, ratings are a relative thing, and what was positive for the WB would have been considered disastrous for one of the Big Four networks. But Buffy had become the WB’s highest-rated show and, more importantly, its most recognizable and talked-about series.
There was some tinkering going on with the show itself. The producers had decided to up the romance quotient, in order to broaden the focus from being strictly suspense and action, and to attract even more women to the show. As a result, the star-crossed romance between Angel and Buffy became the emotional cornerstone of the second and third seasons, until David Boreanaz was given the Angel spin-off series and his character left Sunnydale in the third-season finale.
A New Home
For five seasons Buffy exceeded all expectations the WB had for it. Sarah Michelle Gellar became a movie star and a fixture on magazine covers everywhere and Web sites devoted to the series and its stars became ubiquitous. More importantly, the show helped the WB establish itself as the network for young-adult females, a sought-after demographic by advertisers. Many at the network credited Buffy for helping make the network. The show had also earned the network critical praise by earning Emmy and Golden Globe nominations and making the “10 Best” lists of critics from Time, TV Guide, and USA Today during its fifth season.
But sometimes shows can become victims of their success, and during the 2000–2001 season the WB sought a minimal license-fee increase to be paid to the producing studio, 20th Century Fox, at the end of the original five-year contract. This was unusual because any show that is on the air that long and is up for renewal usually expects and gets a hefty increase in license fees. To completely understand the bad blood brewing, it’s important to know that the 20th Century Fox studio is part of News Corporation, which owns not only the Fox Network but several UPN affiliates as well. The studio balked at the request to lower its license fees—which is the money the network pays the production company for the privilege of airing the show—and let it be known they would be amenable to moving Buffy to another network if a deal could not be worked out with the WB. Immediately, UPN expressed interest. Because both outlets were vying to become the fifth major network, UPN and the WB were bitter rivals, and the tug of war over Buffy soon turned ugly.
At the end of the fifth season, the WB was paying $1 million per episode. 20th Century Fox wanted more than $2 million, citing the program’s continued ratings strength and high production costs. In a war of words played out in the press, then CEO WB Network Jamie Kellner accused the studio of asking for too much and made a final offer of $1.8 million an episode.
While the television community watched the situation with interest, emotions ran high among Buffy’s cast and crew. The more Whedon listened to Kellner downplay the show’s importance to the network—Kellner saying, “It’s not our number one show”—the more the usually easygoing writer burned. “It makes me angry to see this show belittled,” Whedon said at the time. In retrospect, he admits, “I was just so turned around by the whole thing.” The only time he lost his temper was while filming the fifth-season finale and the WB wanted to honor the show by bringing press on-set for a photo opportunity and a celebratory cake. “The whole thing made me so angry, I had to stop shooting,” says Whedon. “I was like, ‘Shut it down! I just can’t be here right now!’”
Gellar was equally passionate, and in an emotional moment lashed out: “I will stay on Buffy if, and only if, Buffy stays on the WB. And you know what? Print that. My bosses are going to kill me, but print that. I want them to know.”
Reporters did print it and her producers quickly pointed out the error of speaking before thinking. Gellar did a quick about-face and retracted her statement, saying she would stay with Buffy no matter where it ended up. When the WB refused to budge past their $1.8 million–per–episode offer, the studio made the deal to bring Buffy to UPN, which ordered forty-four episodes to be shown over the course of two years, with a license fee of $2.3 million per episode.
The WB released this official statement: “20th Television has made an inauspicious decision for the television industry by taking one of their own programs off of a nonaffiliated network and placing it on a network in which they have a large vested interest, through their acquisition of Chris-Craft and public comments that Fox and UPN are discussing ways to merge. The WB will continue to develop successful, innovative programming that delivers a high concentration of young adults and teens. We wish Sarah, Joss, and David Greenwalt well.”
Sandy Grushow, the chairman of the Fox Television Entertainment Group shrugged off the accusation, saying it was simply a business financial decision. “If News Corporation didn’t own a single UPN station we would have made the exact same deal,” Grushow said. “We believe that there is enormous upside potential at UPN and, given their passion for the show, given their commitment for the show, we believe they have every opportunity to raise the bar for Buffy.”
UPN’s then–chief executive Dean Valentine said the acquisition of Buffy would start a new era for the fledgling network: “We are incredibly pleased to have Buffy the Vampire Slayer on UPN, not just because it is one of the best shows on the air and represents a new era in UPN’s life and direction, but more importantly because Joss Whedon is one of the finest writers and producers in television. Our main motivation for pursuing Buffy so aggressively was to be in business with Joss and with 20th … and we’re very pleased to have that opportunity.”
Gellar tried to explain her earlier outburst: “I love this drama! Of course I had loyalties to the WB. Look at what they’ve done for me and the show. You have to understand that for five years we had a home. We had a place where we were supported, where we were able to make the show creatively the way we wanted to make it, and the thought of making a move was scary. So of course my first reaction was, ‘You want to be where home is.’ People ask me if I regret the comment. You can’t regret the way you feel. Change is scary. But sometimes change can be for the better.
“Unfortunately, the WB didn’t want to make the show the way we wanted to do it. They didn’t want to give Joss what he needed to make the show the way it has to be made. And UPN has been incredibly supportive, I think, to make everybody feel incredibly welcome as a whole. And I think they’ve given us a new excitement about the show. It’s like getting to start fresh, so I’m nervous and I’m excited.”
The one-hundredth and final WB episode of Buffy aired May 22, 2001. It was promoted by the WB as the series finale instead of the season finale—a move that fans couldn’t help but interpret as an attempt to make viewers think the show had been canceled instead of just moved. But they did put a message at the end of the episode thanking the cast and crew for the five years at the WB. In the end, once the recriminations stopped, the move proved beneficial for all concerned. The WB had the money and time-slots to pursue new, less expensive dramas and comedies, while UPN was suddenly attracting a whole new audience. Most importantly, Buffy was guaranteed the opportunity to keep delivering its unique blend of chills and laughs for at least two more seasons.
However, even though Sarah Michelle Gellar is contracted only through the 2002–03 season, there has already been talk that it’s possible the series could go on without her past a seventh season. The most persistent rumor is that Buffy’s sister, Dawn, could be the next Slayer, although that could only happen if Faith, the once–rogue Slayer who is now in jail, dies, since the Slayer line now goes through her character.
“The show will run as long as it is good,” says Whedon. “It is possible that maybe the show stops after seven years. What I do know is that these guys are capable of so much, and the writers have so many ideas, that the show potentially could run for a way, way long time. Eventually there will come a burnout where creatively we’ll just be too tired. But right now we’re feeli
ng more creative than we have been, so contracts really aren’t the point. Contracts get resolved or they don’t. People move on or they don’t. What matters is that I have another hundred stories to tell, and the people I want to tell them with.”
Joss Whedon
There’s no question that Joss Whedon has a fertile imagination. He has conjured up some of the most inventive screenplays in recent movie history, from the genre-bending Buffy the Vampire Slayer to his Oscar-nominated work in Toy Story. His talent is unquestioned. The question is, just what happened to this guy in childhood that so skewed his way of looking at the world?
“Yes, I was a strange, unlovable child,” laughs Joss. “I was afraid of the dark and had a very vivid imagination. A lot of things scare me. Actually, everything scares me. I think the thing I was most afraid of was my big brother. So if you see big brothers being eviscerated in some show of mine, you’ll know where that came from.
“The truth is, I like monsters. The thing I like best is when the monsters jump out of the closet or when there are demons with horns. If it’s a cheesy horror film, I’ve probably seen it.”
Admittedly a painfully shy adolescent, Joss spent much of his youth escaping into reading—comic books like Spider-Man, Dracula, and The Fantastic Four, and authors Frank Herbert and Larry Niven. “A lot of kids get into comic books, but with me it was deeper, more consuming than with other children. While they were outside playing, I’d be tucked away inside the house with a stack of comic books to read.”
Born Joe Whedon on June 23, 1964, he was raised in Manhattan and attended high school at the exclusive Riverdale School in New York, which Joss hated. “Girls wouldn’t so much as poke me with a stick,” he remembers. During his senior year, Joss transferred to Winchester College, an all-boys school in England that was built over six hundred years ago and is renowned for its academic qualifications. It was during college that he took the name Joss, which means “luck” in Chinese. It was also when he discovered the power of humor. “I started quoting Monty Python routines and they accepted me,” he jokes. “Actually, I studied the classics and saw a lot of movies,” says Joss of his time there.
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