Joss Whedon: The Biography

by Amy Pascale

  Nick Lowe, then–assistant editor under Marts, remembers a particularly frantic time when Cassaday was about a day away from finishing an issue and they desperately needed a script. The next day, he got a fax with handwritten pages—Joss’s computer had crashed and he didn’t have one to use, so he’d written the script out in longhand. “The craziest thing was that while the handwriting wasn’t the neatest, it was really clean,” he says. “So he either did a whole handwritten draft or he just had it all in his head exactly how he wanted. There were only a handful of things scratched out on that whole thing. It was nuts.”

  From December 2003 to February 2004, Joe Quesada teasingly denied the “rumors” that Joss was taking over the X-Men series. Then, on February 18, Marvel announced that Joss and Cassaday would launch the new Astonishing X-Men, to the great excitement of Whedonverse fans.

  Joss’s first Astonishing X-Men arc, “Gifted,” introduced the idea of a “mutant cure.” It explored a very simple but very profound premise: “What if somebody had a cure for your being different? Would you take it?” The premiere issue hit the street on May 26, 2004.

  Kitty Pryde was a core member of the X-Men team from the first issue, and shortly thereafter it was revealed that Colossus wasn’t dead. Joss ensured that the storyline in which the beloved character was resurrected was emotionally driven and character-centric. Each issue still featured a lot of action, but Marts felt that the strength in Joss’s run was how he handled the relationships between the characters. Readers immediately felt the love and affection Joss had for them. “More than the plots themselves,” says Marts, “when people talk about Astonishing X-Men and his run on it, that’s mostly what people remember—that it was a time where we fell in love with these characters again and we cared for them. We laughed and cried along with them.

  “That’s exactly what a publisher and editor is looking for: someone like Joss with a great creative vision to come in and to breathe new life into these characters that we all love and to do unexpected things with them and to take chances with them and to really bring the readers on this journey where hopefully we get some laughs and tears, some anger, some frustration—but in the end, this feeling that, wow, we accomplished this great journey together with these characters and we’re so satisfied with the story.”

  Nick Lowe was impressed by how Joss was able to service preexisting character arcs and hit “fan buttons,” while at the same time he injected a lot of new characters and new life into the X-Men’s world. “Joss’s run was a pitch-perfect mix of old and new that no one before him had accomplished,” he says. “He played with the Kitty Pryde / Colossus relationship, messed with the Danger Room, continued the Cyclops / Emma Frost relationship, but he and John Cassaday also created Breakworld and S.W.O.R.D., which are still big parts of the Marvel U. And Agent Brand, the head of S.W.O.R.D., is still one of my favorite characters in the Marvel U.”

  IGN.com called Joss’s first run the “best X-Men title published in over a decade” and praised his ability to write believable team dynamics while letting each character shine in his or her own unique way. Astonishing X-Men won the prestigious Will Eisner Award, the “Oscars for the comics industry,” for Best Continuing Series in 2006.

  But his tenure was not without its criticism—mostly for its delays. Joss’s contract with Marvel was to produce twelve issues in one year. But starting with issue #6, they started coming out every month and a half, pushing the final issues to September 2005 (issue #11 came out two weeks after #12). Astonishing X-Men started a new arc in February 2006, which was not as well received as “Gifted.” Marts left Marvel for rival DC Comics in August 2008, while Joss and Cassaday continued on the project through issue #24, ending their run on January 23, 2008.

  Joss had breezed into his Astonishing X-Men run with his own fan base built up over three television series, but with some wondering whether his interest and ability would translate to the pages of a comic book. When he left, he’d proven himself in yet another medium—and paved the way for future forays into the Marvel universe.

  21

  NOT FADE AWAY

  By late 2003, a year after its cancellation, Joss was still fighting for Firefly. Although fan campaigns hadn’t succeeded in getting the series renewed, the community sent a stronger message with their wallets, when the Firefly DVD set was released on December 3, 2003. Fox hadn’t even been sure they were going to bring the series to DVD at all; prior to that point, few series had been released on home video if they hadn’t at least lasted a full season. But the studio took a chance on the release, and as the numbers started coming in, it found that the fans were buying the DVDs in droves. They stepped up to support Joss and his Firefly team, jumping at the chance to finish the line from “The Message”: “When you can’t run, you crawl, and when you can’t crawl—when you can’t do that …” “You find someone to carry you.” The Browncoats were carrying Firefly home.

  The strong DVD sales demonstrated that there was a real commercial value to the property—something Mutant Enemy had been saying all along. It gave Joss an opening. He also had another card he could play: the head of Universal Pictures at the time, Mary Parent, wanted to be in business with Joss. “She would come in and offer him work on movies and ask him what he wanted to do,” Chris Buchanan says. When she first approached him, Joss would tell her that he had three shows on the air and didn’t have time to do anything. “To her credit,” Buchanan continues, “when the show got canceled, which was a very dark moment for all of us and the next period of time was not good, Mary came to Joss and [asked what he wanted to do].” Joss told her that he wanted to do a Firefly feature film.

  Joss also reached out to Barry Mendel, a producer who had worked with M. Night Shyamalan on The Sixth Sense and Wes Anderson on Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. At the time he was producing Steven Spielberg’s Munich under a deal with Universal. Mendel let Parent know that he was on board for the Firefly movie. She in turn told Joss that if they could keep the budget within a certain range, and if Universal could secure the rights from Fox—which could prove tricky, since Fox would have to agree to let a property that it had spent tens of millions of dollars on go to another studio—then they could do the film.

  As the chances for Firefly’s revival were unexpectedly rising, Joss’s last remaining TV series met with an equally unanticipated reversal. On February 12, 2004, Joss was hanging out with one of the Angel actresses, Amy Acker, when he told her he’d be meeting with WB CEO Jordan Levin for dinner. She was concerned, asking if Levin was planning to cancel the show. Joss allayed her fears—after all, there’d been no long lead-up or public war of words as there was at Buffy’s end—and the two joked about it.

  Joss called her a little later. “So, [Levin] canceled the show,” he told her. “I don’t really know what happened.”

  Things had shifted greatly in the Angel universe during its fifth and final season. Angel and his friends agreed to take over the Los Angeles branch of Wolfram & Hart, trading their lives as scrappy underdogs for the corridors of corporate power, their complicated serial entanglements for more episodic adventures. And since Buffy had finished its run on UPN, the WB wanted to bring a fan favorite back into the fold: James Marsters’s Spike.

  There was a bit of upheaval behind the scenes as well. Tim Minear chose not to return for season five, signing on instead as the showrunner of the new Fox series Wonderfalls. The day-to-day running of Angel fell to Jeffrey Bell, who had been promoted to co-executive producer the previous season after Minear moved to Firefly, and David Fury, who had split his time between Buffy’s last season and Angel’s fourth but now also moved up to co-executive producer on Angel. Although the two had more than six combined years writing and producing in the Buffyverse, they found that being on top didn’t go as smoothly as they initially hoped.

  “Unlike early Buffy seasons, or even seasons of Angel when there was a consistent hierarchy like with Greenwalt and Minear, we weren’t really able to map out the seas
on the way we really wanted to,” Fury said. “Jeff Bell and I pretty much mapped out a season where we could see how it would work and we were planning on doing that, but once Joss came into the mix [and] put his own mark in it, unfortunately, it blew a lot of our stuff out of the water.” And “ultimately, a lot of the direction of the series went by Joss’ whim—as it should, it’s his show.”

  The writers also had to deal with a decreased budget from the WB—though their limitations forced them to push themselves creatively. One memorable episode was “Why We Fight,” which flashed back to Angel’s adventures aboard a sinking German U-boat during World War II. And for Angel’s one hundredth episode, they decided to do a big story to celebrate the milestone.

  Bell and Fury reached out to Charisma Carpenter, asking her to return as Cordelia for the hundredth episode. Though she still harbored resentment over how she’d been let go from the series, she agreed, knowing that the fans, and Cordelia herself, needed closure. Carpenter just had one stipulation: if she came back, she didn’t want them to kill off her character. Once she had their assurances that Cordelia would make it through the episode firmly on the mortal coil, she signed her contract. Then they told her that Joss planned to kill Cordy in the episode after all.

  “I started bawling: ‘I knew you guys would do this to me, why did I agree to do this?’ … I felt totally betrayed,” she recalled. “It’s such a big part of my life and it was just so awful to think about her dying. And it was shocking and I was sad and I grieved, and then I’m like, ‘I’m not doing this!’”

  Fury asked for a chance to explain Joss’s idea for the episode: Angel decides to quit his job running the evil law firm, because he feels that he’s failed in fighting the powers of darkness from within, that he’s just helping the evil get more evil. But before he can officially resign, he learns that Cordelia has miraculously awoken from her coma. After a joyous reunion, she explains that she’s been brought back to keep him from going off-track. Battles ensue, as they always do, and Angel makes peace with his new position, knowing that he can succeed, especially with Cordy by his side. But it turns out that her return was one last favor from the higher powers of the universe, and she can’t stay. “I’m just on a different road, and this is my off-ramp,” she tells him. “We take what we get, champ, and we do our best with it.” They share one final kiss, broken off when Angel needs to take a call. It’s the hospital, reporting that Cordelia has died without ever waking from the coma. He looks back to find that she’s gone.

  Carpenter was still heartbroken that the writers had blindsided her with such deliberateness. But she was won over with the poignancy and levity of her exit. “I heard it and I was like, ‘Ugh, that’s good. Joss is good,’” she said. “That’s the story. It sucked that I died but I really felt it was a hell of a way to go.”

  And it was. The episode, credited to David Fury, reflects the best of Joss’s work—poignant and funny, drawing viewers even deeper into their emotional connection with the characters and leaving them with a deep yet glorious heartache. The final scene between Angel and Cordelia is a beautiful, bittersweet moment of closure for Carpenter and Cordelia, and for the fans who felt she was cheated out of a proper ending in the previous season.

  When “You’re Welcome” aired on February 4, 2004, the landmark episode was celebrated with much press fanfare. So it was a shock to many when the series was canceled just over a week later. Even Variety was confused: “Move on the surface is a head-scratcher: [Angel] is the net’s second highest-rated hour among viewers 18-34 … and fourth among auds 12-34. Its numbers have been solid this year, even against brutal competish on Wednesday night.” Ratings for the season averaged 3.97 million viewers, up from 3.65 million the year before, and there was much critical acclaim for the new direction of the series.

  According to David Fury, Joss had actually gone to Levin to ask for an early pickup in light of the season’s ratings spike and positive critical response. “Joss did not want his writers to lose out on job offers from other shows if ANGEL wasn’t coming back. The prior year, some writers turned down offers, and could have ended up jobless if ANGEL was cancelled…. He didn’t think it was fair to them to wait to know if they had a job for a sixth season.”

  But why did the WB cancel a show that may have aged but was aging well? Speculation abounded, zeroing in on the fact that the WB was developing a pilot based on the 1966–71 ABC series Dark Shadows. This reboot, a dark and stylized soap opera with vampires, werewolves, and a parallel universe, had been bought from John Wells (ER, The West Wing) and the original series’ creator, Dan Curtis. Perhaps the WB wanted to avoid putting two vampire shows on the fall schedule—though it ended up being a pointless consideration, as the Dark Shadows pilot was not picked up. And the two dramas the WB did order for the 2004–05 season, Jack & Bobby and The Mountain, barely made it a full season, making Angel’s cancellation seem even more ill advised.

  However, the WB was also looking to cut its budget and join the other networks in the reality show game. UPN had found success the summer before with Tyra Banks’s kitschy and compelling competition series America’s Next Top Model. The WB’s offerings didn’t catch on as strongly in the pop culture zeitgeist, but reality series are cheaper to make than genre shows that require special effects and monster makeup.

  Levin had learned from predecessor Jamie Kellner’s questionable decision to attack the other side when Buffy was in renewal negotiations between its fifth and sixth seasons—he was far more respectful as he explained his decision. “This isn’t about the WB bailing out on one of its top shows,” he said. “The show had a loyal core following, but it didn’t have a tremendous amount of new audience upside.” He noted that the series didn’t do well in reruns, and while he knew that fans would be unhappy, the network was considering its schedule as a whole. “We have a lot of veteran shows that are aging, and we’re going to have to make room for new programs.”

  The night the news came out, Joss took to BronzeBeta.com to share his feelings about the cancellation:

  Yes, my heart is breaking.

  When Buffy ended, I was tapped out and ready to send it off. When Firefly got the axe, I went into a state of denial so huge it may very well cause a movie. But Angel … we really were starting to feel like we were on top, hitting our stride—and then we strode right into the Pit of Snakes ’n’ Lava. I’m so into these characters, these actors, the situations we’re building … you wanna know how I feel? Watch the first act of “The Body.” …

  I’ve never made mainstream TV very well. I like surprises, and TV isn’t about surprises, unless the surprise is who gets voted off of something. I’ve been lucky to sneak this strange, strange show over the airwaves for as long as I have. I don’t FEEL lucky, but I understand that I am.

  Thanks all for your support, your community, and your perfectly sane devotion. It’s meant a lot. I regret nothing (except the string of grisly murders in the 80’s—what was THAT all about?) Remember the words of the poet:

  “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN’ SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn.”

  It was a reminder of the special relationship between Mutant Enemy and its online fans that in a few short years would be gone. “I miss those days, to be honest with you,” says writer Drew Goddard, who’d started as a fan of the show, joined the Buffy staff in season seven, and gone on to write for Angel in season five. “It still felt like this sort of weird clubhouse that only the people in the club knew about—and no one else cared about. We all had so much fun. I could post things on the Bronze and not worry about other people quoting those posts in the news. It was just sort of acknowledged, like, ‘Oh, no. This is private. This is just for the people that are here.’

  “Which doesn’t happen anymore,” he explains. “I see people posting on Twitter, and now they’re quoted in news articles. I miss those places where it felt like it was just
for us. I don’t think those exist anymore.”

  “Smile Time,” the first episode to air after Angel’s cancellation was announced, prompted a new outpouring of criticism that WB was axing such a clever and innovative series. In this episode, Angel gets turned into a puppet—an idea that arose from Joss’s longtime desire to do an evil Sesame Street episode. He’d had Muppets and “Muppet people” in his life from the time that his father worked with the Children’s Television Workshop, and he had some very intense convictions about them: “I thought Muppets were cool. Now, I’m not talking about the ones that had their own show, I’m talking the Sesame Street ones. I was one of the people that felt that Kermit was a sell-out when he started his own show. I was never really into it. Fozzie Bear is just a wannabe Grover,” he said. “I always thought there should have been war between the East Coast and West Coast Muppets…. They were a serious part of what I remember from my youth…. Does my son have a Grover? Yes he does. Because Grover is the finest of all of them.”

  In “Smile Time,” Angel investigates a popular children’s TV show after learning that its puppet stars are stealing the life force of their young viewers. While poking around the studio, he inadvertently activates a spell that turns him into a puppet. The episode was written by Joss and Ben Edlund (The Tick, Firefly, Supernatural) and directed by Edlund. It is replete with slapstick puppet humor, fight scenes, and catchy songs.

  “That was great, entertaining television that, like all good Joss Whedon things, has this great emotional core to it,” Fury said. “As silly as it is, it’s got this great little story about self-esteem in there.” “Smile Time” was later nominated for a 2005 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.