Joss Whedon: The Biography (22 page)

Their first Thanksgiving together had been a brand-new experience for Kai. She was used to the stressful days of her family gatherings and had seen the holiday as one filled with unavoidable drama. Joss’s emotional connection to the day was far, far cheerier, filled with memories of Shakespeare readings led by his mother. He told Kai that he’d take care of everything and spent the day cooking, singing along to show tunes. “Everything’s casual. It’s the most wonderful holiday and it’s all because of him,” she explains. “Thanksgiving is his favorite holiday, because it’s about family, but it’s about the family that you choose—he’s always kept Thanksgiving for friends.” (Sometimes those friends were quite random; one year, Joss told Kai that she couldn’t invite any more random people, but that night she came home and asked if a guy from Russia that she’d met at karaoke counted as a random person, as she’d already invited him over. “It was a really nice guy, and he had nowhere to go.”)

But his responsibilities to his new show meant Joss could no longer spend much time in the kitchen. “I felt it was false advertising when I found out that he was going to stop cooking for me when he started to work for
Buffy
’” Kai laughs. “I thought that that’s what I signed up for.”

The entire first season was written and filmed before
Buffy
premiered on the WB on Monday, March 10, 1997. By then, Joss had fought and won several battles in the journey to bring the series to air—not the least of which was the title. To broaden the show’s appeal, the network wanted to call it
Slayer;
Joss insisted on the full
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. As he explained, each word was crucial to understanding the show: “One of them is funny, one is scary, one of them is action.”

The first two episodes, “Welcome to the Hellmouth” and “The Harvest,” were packaged together to serve as the series premiere. Originally, Joss had wanted to preface the story with a dream sequence that bridged the gap between the
Buffy
movie and Buffy’s first day in Sunnydale. It would also serve as a primer for anyone who’d skipped the film, recapping Slayer lore, the Watcher/Slayer relationship, and the death of Buffy’s first Watcher. But the sequence was scrapped due to budgetary constraints.
Instead, the WB’s marketing team created a ninety-second trailer combining scenes from series with generic gothic imagery and explaining how, throughout history, a young woman would arrive in a town plagued by mysterious deaths. “For each generation, there is only one slayer,” it announced to viewers. “You are about to meet the Slayer.” It was not quite the informative prologue Joss had in mind, but despite the cheesiness of the stock gothic footage, it effectively informed the audience that this was no ordinary teen drama—this was a high school series in which the stakes really were life and death.

That fact was reinforced by the on-screen disclaimer that preceded the premiere:

The following two-hour world premiere is rated TV-PG and contains action scenes which may be too intense for younger viewers.

The warning may seem strange in retrospect, in an era full of
Vampire Diaries
and
Supernatural
occurrences (let alone bed-hopping
Mad Men
and meth-dealing schoolteachers
Breaking Bad
on basic cable). Yet
Buffy
was just the second hour-long drama on the WB, and it was premiering in the 8:00
PM
eastern time slot usually occupied by the family-friendly
7th Heaven
. (The following week it would settle in at 9:00
PM
.) A similar disclaimer would appear at the beginning of subsequent
Buffy
episodes, but the practice would retire with the series, not carrying over to any of the WB’s other science fiction, fantasy, or horror series.

Each
Buffy
episode would end far less ominously, with a crudely drawn white cutout of a monster jetting across the screen in front of the words “Mutant Enemy.” It was the “production slate” for Joss’s production company, which he had named after a line from the rock band Yes’s song “And You and I.” (Mutant Enemy was also the name of the typewriter he had in college.) All television series have such slates, which air during the closing credits, indicating such key entities as the executive producer and the distribution company (in
Buffy
’s case, 20th Century Fox). Joss got word shortly before he needed to deliver the slate and quickly both drew and voiced the monster, which grumbled, “Grr. Argh.” The Mutant Enemy cutout and his trademark yelp would become almost as synonymous with Joss as his teenage hero.

The premiere episode introduced the season’s recurring central villain, or “Big Bad”: the Master, a centuries-old vampire who wants to open the portal to hell beneath Sunnydale. But many subsequent first-season
episodes were more stand-alone than part of an intricate ongoing narrative, each hitting on a key trial that teenagers experience. “The Pack” explores the pressure to be cool, as Xander falls in with a group of bullies after being possessed by a hyena spirit. In “I Robot, You Jane,” Willow is so excited to have an online boyfriend, unaware that he’s an ancient demon who has been unleashed on the Internet.

Buffy
often took on the difficulties in maneuvering around new emotions and relationships. In the first episode of the series, Buffy encourages Willow to approach a boy, with the advice to “seize the moment, because tomorrow you might be dead”—advice that is pretty much an underlying theme throughout the show. But even though the characters are constantly reminded of their own mortality, they are often swept up in the seemingly mundane, especially when it comes to matters of the heart: Willow has her big unrequited crush on Xander, Xander is infatuated with Buffy, and Buffy falls for the enigmatic Angel, only to discover that their love is star-crossed as well: Angel is a vampire, reformed after a gypsy curse restored his human soul, allowing him to feel remorse for his murderous past.

“You know, we had our television tropes,” Joss admits. “In what world is Sarah Michelle Gellar not very popular in high school? I want to know about that magical land! But I think we did genuinely evoke something of an outsider sort of feeling: ‘No matter who they are, no matter how popular they are, no matter how pretty they are, no matter what they are. They have that feeling of, you know, I’m on the outs. I’m barely scrambling. I’m trying to figure this out. I’m alone here.’”

(In fact, Gellar did have a difficult time in school. Like Joss, her mother was a teacher and she attended a private prep school with classmates far wealthier than she was, and she felt misunderstood by the classmates who ostracized and harassed her for being “famous.” She, like Buffy, had to balance important personal commitments with her school-work, only it was auditions and acting gigs instead of slaying and saving the world.)

Monday nights on the WB began with the wholesomeness of
7th Heaven
, followed by the demon-filled adventures of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. It seemed like the network was sponsoring weekly excursions into heaven
and hell. And perhaps it was odd that Joss, the professed atheist, had kept the standard Christian imagery of crosses and holy water in the new vampire universe he had created.

“He’s atheist, but never seemed to be anti-faith,” Dean Batali, himself a Christian, says. Batali was intrigued that, as an atheist, Joss had created a world in which the vampires are afraid of Christian icons and artifacts. In the premiere, Angel gives Buffy a simple silver cross in a jewelry box with the admonition “Don’t turn your back on this.” Later that season, in “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date,” penned by Batali and Des Hotel, Giles holds a cross up to a newly risen vampire. The vampire recoils and asks, “Why does He hurt me?”

“We didn’t write that. Joss wrote it,” Batali explains. But further exploration of religious themes, particularly Christian ones, was nixed. Early on, Batali pitched a story in which Buffy teamed up with the religious kids at school to fight a demon, because he felt they all would be on the same side. He and Joss had never debated religion and had no desire to do so, but Joss let him know that he didn’t want the show to deal with it.

Even without the religious implications, the series was never lacking in allegorical weight. It was the show’s careful development of each story’s metaphor, the “Buffy of it” that Joss and Greenwalt insisted upon, that helped the show gain a foothold with its earliest viewers. That lesson was powerfully demonstrated with the airing of “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” the eleventh episode of the season. This was the episode in which a girl named Marcie is so widely ignored by her classmates and feels so insignificant in the world that she literally becomes invisible. (The premise, with its roots in Joss’s own high school experiences, had been part of his original pitch for the show.) Once Marcie realizes and embraces her invisibility, she indulges her darker side and lashes out against her perceived enemies, including Cordelia. After the episode aired in May 1997, the producers received a letter from an agoraphobic lawyer in her forties. “I’ll never forget: she said, ‘Last night’s show gave me the courage to walk out the door of my house,’” Greenwalt recalls. “I realized we’ve got lightning in a bottle here.”

In the season finale, “Prophecy Girl,” Buffy learns of a prophecy that says she is fated to die at the hands of the Master. Nonetheless, she ventures into his lair to confront him. The episode, written and directed by Joss, echoes the original movie in interesting ways. Buffy goes to battle in a prom dress and a leather jacket, just as she’d done in the film; the
Master, like Lothos, hypnotizes her. But in this case, the vampiric trance makes her so vulnerable that the Master feeds on her blood, then drops her into a shallow pool of water to drown. The Master escapes, but Angel has led Xander to his lair, and the latter revives Buffy via CPR—reminding the audience that this Buffy is even stronger because of her friends. When Buffy meets the Master again, he is incredulous that she defied the prophecy: “You were destined to die! It was written.”

“What can I say?” she says before killing him. “I flunked the written.”

Joss has said that
Buffy
is about showing what it’s like to come to terms with power, and he ended the season—and possibly the series, if it never made it past the first season—with the message that despite the demands of others’ expectations, despite how easy it is to believe that we’re at the mercy of forces beyond our control, we all control our own destiny by the choices we make. By all conventional wisdom, Buffy’s story should have ended with a failed motion picture, but now, with the help of his creative team, Joss had breathed the life back into her.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
didn’t immediately become a household name. In the United States, although the ratings were certainly high enough for the WB to be happy, they were never so impressive that they challenged the show’s time-slot rivals on the major networks. Joss’s new series garnered a lot of praise from reviewers for the emotional and metaphorical depth of its writing—somewhat surprisingly, given that critics initially had been split on
The X-Files
and mostly looked down on more campy sci-fi/fantasy shows such as
Xena
and
Star Trek: Voyager
—but it struggled to find mainstream success.

In fact,
Buffy
owed a debt to those earlier series, for showing a netlet searching for its identity that it could find success with a show that garnered so-so ratings but inspired fervent fan devotion. “We were not a wealthy or respected show for a while,” David Solomon explains. “We were kind of like
The Vampire Diaries
[was in 2011]—a show that feels like it deserves the buzz whether it’s getting it or not. They kind of just create their own.”
Buffy
got a lot of notice really fast, not from mass audiences but from a small, passionate group of hardcore fans—exactly what the WB needed to get the attention of advertisers. “They hit a show that they thought had a perfect demographic, a perfect, good-looking cast, the perfect ‘not like any other show’ [aspect], something completely unique,” Solomon says. It seemed to hit all the buttons all at once, especially with teenage viewers. The ratings in the highly coveted eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old demographic kept rising, which meant the WB could charge more for commercial time.