Joss Whedon: The Biography (23 page)

Buffy
became a flagship show for the network. Not only did it renew the series for a second season with an order of twenty-two episodes (ten more than in season one), but it also began to refocus the rest of its
programming in order to court even more of the teen market. Over the next year, it would roll out such teen-focused series as
Dawson’s Creek
(from another film writer newly transitioning to series television: Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter of 1996’s hit slasher flick
Scream
),
Felicity
(from future sci-fi mogul J. J. Abrams), and
Charmed
.

Joss liked being on the teen network, and the fact that the WB’s new series seemed to be on a similar track as his own. But the network’s branding efforts meant that
Buffy
tended to be pigeonholed as a show strictly for a younger demographic. Many fans in their forties and fifties have come up to Tony Head over the years and said that they were hugely embarrassed to admit that they loved
Buffy
, because the show was not aimed at them. Head refutes that thought: “Part of Joss’s genius is that he encapsulates such a wide demographic—that’s the whole point about his writing. It was a disservice to him to try and polarize that and make it only to a young audience, to [the WB’s] detriment.”

David Greenwalt agrees. “People who never watched
Buffy
or never understood it [would say] ‘Oh,
Buffy
, was that a kids’ show?’ They didn’t get it. The way Joss can guide a character through their paces—you won’t see it anywhere else. The way he wrings them out and gives them humanity, you want to cry with them and you want to laugh. You root for them—it’s like an old-fashioned movie experience watching his characters on screen.”

The show’s burgeoning online community was something that Joss could point to as evidence that
Buffy
wasn’t merely a faddish teen phenomenon. At the end of each episode, the WB would advertise the show’s official website,
www.buffyslayer.com
(the URL would later change to
www.buffy.com
). The site had information about the series and characters, and included an “interactive” section with a chat room and two separate message boards where people could come to discuss episodes. One of those message boards was the Bronze, named for the Sunnydale nightclub where the show’s characters hung out. It would eventually become one of the largest single-show-oriented forums on the web.

Today, many television producers and writers have their own Twitter and Facebook accounts where they both post their thoughts and communicate with fans. But in 1997, the main pop culture outlets were magazines
such as
Entertainment Weekly
, and fans would need to wait each week to see if there would be news about their favorite shows. Instead of spoilers leaking out as scripts were filmed, the most information that fans could get were episode descriptions in the latest issue of
TV Guide
. None of those options were enough to forge a real connection between viewers and the people creating their favorite shows.

The Bronze did just that—but first it created a bond among the community of “Bronzers” who frequented the site. In 1997, the majority of Americans still didn’t have a home computer, much less a permanent Internet connection, so many of the Bronzers either were fairly early adopters or worked at desk jobs with little supervision. Considering the qualifications—had a computer and access to the Internet, watched a high school show about vampires and demons on a small netlet (that wasn’t available in many areas of the country), and actually were willing to talk to strangers online—the board posters were a fairly small segment of the television-viewing public.

Bronzers discussed
Buffy
episodes in great detail and took care to find out about the show’s writers and their specialties. “These are really, really smart people. I always say that Joss’s fans are going to be running the country at some point. They are,” Kai says proudly. “They’re organized. They’re smart.” They’re not just talking about how cute an actor is, she says. “These are people who are really paying attention to what all of Joss’s people are writing. It’s a completely different universe than what people think it is.”

Chris Buchanan, who would later be president of Mutant Enemy, agrees. “So many of the people that I met over the years at conferences were super literate, super well educated and thoughtful. As much as the mainstream media would say that ‘it’s a bunch of nerds in their mom’s basement who don’t have a social life,’ I said, ‘Actually, it’s some really amazing people. One of the early people in fandom worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.’” There were also people who
did
live in their parent’s basement, but this was never seen as a bad thing by their fellow posters. People were judged solely by how they expressed themselves and participated in the community.

The Bronze was a “linear message board,” where everyone posted to a single, chronological series of posts rather than an organized collection of topics. In the same conversation stream, a poster might discuss the most recent episode, the significance of a demon killed two weeks back, or the
stress that she was having at work. “It’s a place where, in order to really fit in and survive, you
must
be a good written communicator,” said Mary Beth Nielsen, a frequent poster. “I think part of that stems from the fact that Joss himself is so witty and the show is so well-written.” It became such a highly developed community that almost a decade after it was shut down, several academic papers and sociological studies would be written about it, as well as a 2007 feature-length documentary,
IRL
(
In Real Life
).

Once
Buffy
’s production team became aware of the board, they often read the commentary there to see how people were reacting to each episode. Joss followed the conversation regularly. “I remember him frequently talking about the board,” Dean Batali says. “He took what they said to account. He didn’t let them make the decisions, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that they didn’t have any influence.” Joss’s fascination with the Bronze made sense to Batali. “All of life is high school, isn’t it? You want to be popular; you want to know people are talking about you and liking what you do.” And it was the kind of popularity, self-selecting but devoted, for which Joss was especially eager; “I’d rather make a show a hundred people need to see than a show that a thousand people want to see,” he once said.

The actors, too, were amazed by the passionate online fan base that the show was developing. While waiting on official word on the show’s second-season pickup, Tony Head had called Alyson Hannigan to check in. She quickly asked him if he had a computer; he did, but he rarely used it. “Well, you have to go on and look up your character name, because there are shrines to you,” she told him. “We’ve all got shrines!” Head asked her to clarify, not fully understanding what she was saying. “There are people who post and talk about you,” Hannigan explained. “Go check it out!”

“And so I did,” Head says. “I was absolutely blown away. I had never encountered anything like it. Now it’s probably two a penny, but at the time it was huge. Never, ever, ever encountered anything like it.”

On the Bronze, reading turned into posting and soon Joss, a few of his actors, composer Christophe Beck, makeup supervisor Todd McIntosh, and stunt coordinator Jeff Pruitt were contributing to the conversation. Not surprisingly, the writers, too, checked in regularly to see what the fans were saying. Marti Noxon, who would join the series in its second season, was one of the first writers to post on the board. (She, like many on the board, chose a pseudonym: “Scout.”) For the writers, it felt
like a gift to watch their fans discuss the show with one another—even when their reactions and responses were negative. “Some Bronzers hated everything every week. We knew them by name; we would go ‘Oh here he comes, he’s going to take thing apart,’” she recalls. “It was really in the early days of this feedback loop, and with the Bronze it was like being in the audience finally and seeing them appreciate that we’d been working hard, so it always felt great.”

Joss often jumped into the conversation with personal reflections and insider information on episodes:

Am interested in showing dreams of past slayers—bottom line, the past is expensive to produce on TV…. The past is more expensive cuz clothes, cars, landscapes all change—everything has to be bought or made. I never taught Nickie to dance like that. Xander is based on me but I am a swell dancer (actually, I never danced in high school.) (ever.) (I’m not bitter.) (This series has nothing to do with my bitterness.) (It’s not about revenge.) (The names of the girls who would not dance with me are as follows: #1, Wen—) We interrupt this bitterness to answer the folowing question: Yes there will be more dreams. They’re fun to shoot.

And when Joss posted, the Bronze would come to a cross between a total standstill and frenzied chaos. “It was always such a BIG DEAL when he was posting,” Melanie Morris, another poster, says. “It sometimes brought out the worst in people—those trying to vie for his attention and to get him to respond to their posts and questions.”

To the Bronzers, Joss and other
Buffy
insiders elevated the board’s importance. These fans weren’t just talking to a bunch of strangers about a Vampire Slayer; they had an actual connection to the show. “It was special that [Joss] took the time to post. It made us more loyal fans,” says early Bronzer Amanda Salomon. “You could argue there were Machiavellian overtones to their coming there. They get us to spread the word about their show. Still, we got private words from him that the other people watching didn’t get to hear.”

In the fall of 1997, two posters had the idea to throw a party so that Bronzers could take their conversations offline and actually meet in person. This event was the first Posting Board Party (PBP). It was held at the Planet Hollywood in Santa Monica—a quick ride on the freeway from Los Angeles if any official
Buffy
folk wanted to come by, although
expectations were very low on the part of the organizers that anyone from the show would actually show up. On Valentine’s Day 1998, the restaurant was filled with roughly one hundred Bronzers and their friends when Joss and cast members Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Seth Green, Tony Head, and David Boreanaz arrived. They were also joined by several
Buffy
writers; stunt coordinator Jeff Pruitt and his wife, Sophia Crawford, who was Sarah Michelle Gellar’s stunt double; and the makeup artist responsible for so many vampire faces, Todd McIntosh. For the Bronzers in attendance, it was a little mind-blowing that so many people from a show they loved would come out to a small fan gathering.

The inaugural PBP was first and foremost a party for the Bronzers—people who talked to each other every day but saw each other rarely if at all. The fact that actors, writers, and crew showed up was just a bonus. Unlike at a convention, where people line up in order to get an autograph or take a photo with an actor, at a PBP, people would mingle, dance, and occasionally run into David Boreanaz or Nick Brendon and chat, possibly snap a picture, and go.

After that first successful event, the PBP would be held every Presidents’ Day weekend through 2003, and continue to get bigger and bigger each year. Bronzers would travel in from all over the world, creating their own Bronze of sorts in the official hotel.

“It was always lovely to meet fans,” writer Marti Noxon says, “because you get into this vacuum where you’re [working episode to episode] and you kind of are dimly aware that it’s actually being watched. You sometimes forget that that thing you’ve been editing for days actually has some emotional impact, because it becomes routine to you.” Often the interactions between the fans and the crew and the cast went beyond mere appreciation. Noxon remembers being told “really touching, emotional stories about how
Buffy
is helping certain people at stages in their life feel good and feel more hopeful.”

To Joss, the connection was perhaps even more valuable. “I don’t think people realize, even the Bronzers, how wonderful it was for Joss to have that community,” Kai says. “Joss is not a guy who’s going to walk around and make friends at the market. He’s isolated, and he had a community. That was a community for him too. It was really nice for him to have that feedback and to have that comfort of the Bronze.”

Joss had found a true creative partner in David Greenwalt, a guide to the ins and outs of television production who showed him the respect that he had craved on his earlier projects. Greenwalt, in turn, was inspired and excited by Joss’s ideas, how he crafted stories that connected with fans on such a deep, personal level, something he knew from experience wasn’t often found on television. So it was a bittersweet moment when
Buffy
was picked up for a second season—because Greenwalt had left the series for
The X-Files
.

Four years into its run on Fox,
The X-Files
had grown beyond the typical constraints of sci-fi television to become a critical and popular hit. Mainstream critics now held it up as great, “classic” television, praising the writing of series creator Chris Carter and the standout performances of its stars: David Duchovny as an FBI agent obsessed with aliens and conspiracy theories, and Gillian Anderson as his partner, a skeptic medical doctor.
The X-Files
was the cult genre show that mass audiences actually knew about; while
Buffy
was drawing an average of 3.7 million viewers each week,
The X-Files
topped 19 million. In short,
The X-Files
was everything that Buffy aspired to be.