Slayers and Vampires

by Edward Gross,Mark A. Altman

  JOSE MOLINA

  Howard’s involvement on Buffy was cut short because he got a pilot picked up which was called Strange World, which is a show that nobody ever saw, which explains why it lasted all of eight days on the air. We produced thirteen episodes and my first ever writing credit was actually on Strange World. But, because we did the thirteen episodes, that took him out of the Whedonverse for a while. But the minute the show got canceled, it was a similar situation again, where he was still on a deal and they were launching Angel and they wanted Howard to come and join Angel.

  HOWARD GORDON

  I left the show because I had a pilot that was shooting that got picked up. In a way, I came on as a consultant. I had an overall deal and in some ways Fox was servicing my deal, but it wasn’t a perfect match.

  JOSE MOLINA

  Let me give you the roster of the fucking heavy hitters that were there. Upstairs on Buffy you had Joss, of course; Marti Noxon; David Fury; Jane Espenson; Doug Petrie; Drew Z. Greenberg; Drew Goddard; Rebecca Kirshner; and Tracy Forbes. On Angel, by the time Firefly was up and running, you had Sarah Fain and Liz Craft, you had David Greenwalt, you had Tim Minear, Steve DeKnight, Jeff Bell, Mere Smith, and then on Firefly it was Joss and Tim, Ben Edlund and me and Brett Mathews, and Cheryl Cain was a story editor. So, you had kind of three murderers’ row of writing staffs. People who would go on to have huge careers.

  HOWARD GORDON

  The writing room really was a bunch of really smart people: David Greenwalt, Marti Noxon, Jane Espenson, David Fury—really good people. Joss would come in and gingerly look at the work that had been done. He was very good at not dismissing it outright, but kind of rearranging it or revising it. I have to tell you, it was a pleasure to watch him work. You would see it in his face when he sort of got it and everyone knew the process was moving the furniture around until Joss gets it, and when he did, it changed fast. It was the perennial marching back and forth, until the light went off and you could almost see the light go off. You’d wait for it. He created a great culture, and a great group of people who really respected him and got him and got it and were happy to be there.

  STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

  Joss was so great to be around. Look, running a show is a pressure-filled job. Nobody can be nice all the time. He had his good days. He had his bad days. He always loved his writers. He always said that, with his writers, you could be the best writer in the world and if you don’t get along with the family, he doesn’t want you there. He really considered it a family. At that time, obviously, he had Buffy. He had Angel. When I was on Angel, he had Buffy, Angel, and Firefly. I don’t know how you run one show that goes twenty-two episodes a year, but he was taking a stab at three. He must have never slept.

  JOSE MOLINA

  We all parked in the same parking lot and a lot of the times we would walk in at the same time. You get into the lobby and then the different people went in their different directions. The Buffy guys went upstairs, the Angel guys went to the left, the Firefly guys went up the stairs to the right. Then we would all sort of meet at various hours of the day out in the smoking patio, where even the nonsmokers would come out, because that’s where people were hanging out. So the three staffs got to know each other. Jeff Bell was there on Angel. And he actually became the show runner that year. But Jeff was not a smoker and he would come out. The Drews would come out every once in a while. Fury would come out to bum cigarettes, because he never had a pack on him because he was trying not to smoke.

  ELIZABETH CRAFT

  (executive story editor, Angel)

  The group of people we got to work with was extraordinary. We were just starting out and we were working with Joss, Tim [Minear], Steve DeKnight, and David Fury. Jane Espenson was upstairs and Marti Noxon. Drew Goddard was just starting on Buffy when we were starting on Angel, and Ben Edlund. It was just a great group.

  JOSE MOLINA

  It really became one big group of like-minded writers who were all desperately craving Daddy’s attention. Because by the time Joss was running three shows, he didn’t have enough time for any of us. Running one show is enough of an enterprise, running two is crazy, running three is certifiable.

  ELIZABETH CRAFT

  There was a façade over our office window, a Buffy [set] façade over it. We would constantly be having pigeons getting trapped there, and beating against our window. Another thing that added to the atmosphere of working on Angel.

  STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

  In the Angel episode where Fred dies, there was that argument that Angel and Spike were having about who would win: astronauts or cavemen? And the story behind that is Doug Petrie, who was working on Tru Calling at the same time, which was in the same building, came down one day and wrote on the [dry-erase] board, “Who would win, astronauts or cavemen?” We knew it was Doug, because he tends to throw up stuff like that. Would you rather be invisible or able to fly? So we were all in the room and Joss was there and we kind of looked at it and laughed and it ended up turning into a two-hour argument about who would win.

  It was a really heated argument, because that’s the kind of stuff we love. And, of course, when you’re in the room breaking the story, you’ll talk about anything except the story for as long as you can. It was such a fun time working with them. Sometimes I wanted to kill them, but most of the time, it’s just like family. It is just the best place ever to have grown up, just amazing.

  JOSE MOLINA

  We would always meet out in the smoking patio and the first question everybody asked was “Did you get him today?” “No, we got him yesterday; we’re supposed to get him later today.” “Oh no, he’s directing now we won’t see him for a week.” So we would always be comparing notes. “How are you doing? Are you ahead or are you behind? What’s the story you’re breaking?” Because we all knew everybody else’s shows and we all got each others scripts so that we would be up to date on what the other shows were doing. We would kind of collaborate and give notes and pitch in ideas. I don’t know how many ideas ever made it across staffs, but I had a ton of conversations with Craft and Fain and with Mere Smith, who were on Angel at the time. And with David Fury and you know, whoever came knocking. Sometimes creative, sometimes personal.

  The Mutant Enemy writers really became one team, which is interesting because when I was an assistant on Angel, I found out about this softball league called the Prime-Time Softball League. The Prime-Time Softball League is a league where all the TV shows play against each other. If you’re not on a TV show, you are not welcome to play in this league. So when I was an assistant on Angel, I had two shows to cull from in order to cobble together a team. And I brought it up to Joss and I was, like, “Hey Joss, how would you feel if we put the Mutant Enemy shows together and play in this?” And he was, like, “Great!” He was so into it for a non-sports guy. He paid for the jerseys and the hats out of his pocket. We were Team Mutant Enemy, and that was the beginning of the cross-pollination between Buffy and Angel.

  Funny story, though: I was in charge of getting the shirts and the hats and Joss was so upset when he saw the shirts and the hats, because they were so fucking ugly that when I came back for Firefly, he wouldn’t let me have anything to do with it.

  KELLY A. MANNERS

  I remember Joss on all fours, giving pony rides in the production office to Alyson and Sarah. It was hysterical to see this genius millionaire giving pony rides in the production office.

  DAVID FURY

  It was extraordinarily unique. There was no social media at that time, but Joss was one of the very first. He told me about “The Bronze,” the fan-site posting-board group. They took the name from the club in the show. Joss loved to engage the fans on the posting board with every episode. He said you’ve got to go on and try this. He was excited about this feedback he could get immediately, and the fact that they treated the writers like rock stars.

  When we would go onto the message boards, I can only describe it as being like throwing bread into a pond. Su
ddenly, all the ducks came in. You’d go on and I’m talking to dozens and dozens of people who were so excited to talk to me, to talk about the writing process, and the show. It was remarkable. It was great and an exhilarating time. I know Joss told the story of when they first went to Comic-Con after the first season and it wasn’t even what it is now. They went there and they were mobbed. It blew everyone’s mind at the time. They didn’t know anybody was watching. They didn’t know anybody cared.

  YOU GOTTA HAVE FAITH

  “Congratulations to the class of 1999. You’ve all proved more or less adequate. This is a time for celebration, so sit still and be quiet.”

  The third season finds Buffy lost and confused after season two’s heartbreaking finale in which she sends Angel—his soul restored at the last possible moment—to hell to save the world. But with the help of her friends, Buffy begins to slowly rebound from the tragedy until she learns Angel has returned to Sunnydale, a revelation that she hides from everyone else. One of the most exciting additions for the new season was that of actress Eliza Dushku’s Faith, a charismatic but highly unstable vampire slayer who was created in the aftermath of the death of Kendra the previous year. Initially appearing to be an ally, Faith becomes a formidable agent of the quirky Mayor Richard Wilkins, the season’s Big Bad, who is intent on completing a ritual that will allow him to ascend and transform him into a giant demonic snake. And by season’s end, the groundwork was laid for David Boreanaz’s Angel to be spun off into his own series.

  In addition to marking the final year of high school before graduation, the show continued to become even more serialized, eschewing many of the stand-alone stories that had typified the previous seasons.

  JOSS WHEDON

  (creator / executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

  Third season proved that there was life after Romeo and Juliet. How do we keep this fresh? Getting to explore Faith and the dark side of being a slayer and calling that whole thing into question was really exciting. Also, knowing that we had a countdown on high school stories when we’d only been in high school for two and a half years. There was discussion of whether we should be Saved by the Bell and they’re in high school forever, and the decision to have them graduate meant that for the first time we were going to get into some serious changes just in terms of the look and the feel and lineup.

  DAVID FURY

  (writer, season 3, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

  There was a change between season two and three. It was kind of that fractured quality. In season two, it didn’t seem to be quite coming together yet, and suddenly—and a lot of it was because of the Angelus story—by season three the show was so clearly defined. The staff seemed much more relaxed; there was a little bit more confidence there. The people who were there were just lovely, funny, great people. They were very nice and they were very cordial to me. I’d stop in and introduce myself and tell them I’d just read an episode they wrote or an outline. The thing in the third season that was different from the second was Joss now was more than just filling me in on what they were doing: he wanted me to read their scripts, he wanted me to read outlines, he wanted me to be completely up-to-date on what they were doing.

  JOSS WHEDON

  We knew that Angel was going to be leaving. Knowing we had limited time to play up both high school and the Angel-Buffy romance sort of galvanized us and made us pull out all of our stops with what we could do. We also dealt with the last great metaphor, sex. The bite in “Graduation Day, Part II” was a big deal.

  JOSE MOLINA

  (executive story editor, Firefly)

  Buffy started out very much monster of the week. There were definitely instances in season one and two of Buffy where you could watch an episode not having any idea of what the serialized story was and walk away having enjoyed it. The way you would a Star Trek for instance or The X-Files. Starting in season three, the season of Faith and the Mayor, it became the first season where if you missed an episode you were missing something because of the Mayor’s plot and Mr. Trick and Faith and what they were doing to help the Mayor’s plan. The show evolved kind of naturally into 80-20 monster of the week to being more 50-50, and by the time they launched Angel, the network wanted monster of the week and something that people could pick up without having seen anything else, and that, honestly, didn’t work.

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  (author, It’s About Power: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)

  Another relatively unused television tactic that the show helped promulgate was the use of long-story arcs. When the program aired in 1997, the most common form of storytelling was episodic storytelling, where the stories of each episode started and ended and never carried over into succeeding episodes. While Buffy was not the first show to break this stand-alone episode format, it was one of the few shows in the late 1990s that consistently used long arcs successfully with its “Big Bad” evil plans of the season. In this way, viewers became “addicted” to the show and had a reason to return since the completion of an episode did not mean the completion of a story line. This type of storytelling is now commonplace and a standard in television.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  (executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

  The networks were terrified of too much serialization at that time.

  THOMAS P. VITALE

  (executive vice president, Programming and Original Movies, Syfy and Chiller)

  Buffy was a binge-worthy show at a time when the only primetime shows with truly serialized story lines had been the nighttime soaps—earlier shows like Peyton Place, Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing, and Soap, and shows contemporary with Buffy like Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210. The X-Files waded carefully into serialized storytelling, reserving only a portion of episodes each season for mythology, but the majority of X-Files episodes were purely monster of the week; X-Files never fully embraced serialized storytelling.

  STEVE BIODROWSKI

  (editor in chef, Cinefantastique)

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer was definitely part of a trend toward what I would call tribalism, in which popularity was dependent less on churning out great episodes than on using continuing story lines to hook viewers, who began to see themselves as “insiders” who “got it” while everyone on the outside was hopelessly out of it.

  The X-Files fell into this trap a few years before Buffy. And a year after Buffy ceased production, Lost picked up this approach and ran with it big-time. David Greenwalt started Grimm’s first season with mostly stand-alone episodes, but now it’s totally into series continuity. The Walking Dead almost ritualistically pads its season with do-nothing episodes, knowing the audience will stick around because they’ve invested five years in watching the characters.

  STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

  (writer, season five, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

  Joss admits it himself that he works best in the serialized format. We had to try to strike some kind of balance, because the network really liked standalone episodes because they can re-air them. And when it’s serialized, the numbers for re-airing them are very low. So it’s that kind of balance. It was the same thing with Alias and 24—although 24 was designed that way. If it’s serialized to the point that we were, somebody just dropping in won’t understand what the hell is going on.

  JOSS WHEDON

  Something else that our audience seemed to eat up was our switching from stand-alone episodes to the episodic ones, the ones that prolong our running plot. We got that idea, actually from The X-Files, but it wasn’t like “Oh, let’s try it because it worked for them.” It was more like, we know what we want to do, we have continuing relationships and have things change, and have arcs for people. We wanted to do stand-alone monsters. The thing with The X-Files for us was that it just showed, yes, this can be done, and very efficiently.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  Even on The X-Files they said that even a regular fan is seeing every second or thi
rd show. Only the rabid people were seeing every episode. There was so much natural serialization of Buffy because we were so into the emotions of all the characters. We could do stand-alone episodes but that still had all the great Buffy-Cordelia conflicts. We serviced a lot of that kind of stuff. But you can’t all be just about feelings and stuff. You still need a villain and a crime.

  THOMAS P. VITALE

  Buffy broke ground in serialized television, especially for television aimed at a young adult demographic, which previously hadn’t been offered many quality continuing stories. After all, most primetime soaps were aimed squarely at an adult audience, not a teen–young adult audience. It can even be said that Buffy paved the way for all of the serialized superhero shows currently finding a teen and young adult audience on the CW. And like those CW superhero shows, Buffy appealed to both fanboys/fangirls as well as the general audience, and from a demo perspective, Buffy appealed to teens and young adults but also to a more mainstream older audience.

  DAVID FURY

  They offered [my wife] Elin and I a job for season three, but Elin decided to do sitcoms so he couldn’t offer me the job until he saw what I could do on my own. He allowed me to pitch stories for season three and that was a story that became “Helpless.” It was about Buffy turning eighteen years old and had to do with these tests that the Watcher’s Council puts slayers through on their eighteenth birthday.

  My original pitch was that Buffy was going to be drugged by Giles, but she was going to hallucinate and think that her friends had become vampires and she comes home and her mother’s a vampire. Basically, it was a way of taking away her support group—the family unit she has that’s the basis of her support—and how does she respond? Is she able to? How is she able to function along those lines? I pitched that and they liked it, but I think they had just come up with the episode “The Wish,” where Willow is a vampire and different people from her life are vampires, so they couldn’t do that. Joss came up with the idea of taking Buffy’s powers away.