Joss Whedon: The Biography (24 page)

However, it was not a fit for Greenwalt, and he left almost as soon as he arrived. “It is a show that I liked and admired but didn’t really quite realize until I got there that I couldn’t write
The X-Files
to save my life,” he recalls. “It was about its fourth year—it was a really good time on the show, and I don’t get this show, you know?
The X-Files
was so cerebral and too … too mysterious for me, in a way. I get
Buffy
. I get something with emotion and heart and a search, so the deal completely slipped and I came back to
Buffy
right away.”

Greenwalt wasn’t the only one who wanted to be in business with Joss for the long term. In August 1997,
Variety
announced that 20th
Century Fox had signed a four-year overall deal with Joss. An overall deal is a development contract under which a studio secures a producer’s services not just for a particular series but for whatever projects he or she pursues, usually in exchange for a lot of money. Joss’s was worth $16 million. He was given $1 million to fund his production company, Mutant Enemy, and he would executive produce its TV projects and write, direct, and produce any Mutant Enemy films. Not only would he get to develop and write his own films, but Joss had finally won the right to direct them.

Going into the second season of
Buffy
, Joss had a lot more confidence in his ability to run a series. He’d had the experience of putting together his first writing staff, and he had a good sense of what sort of writers would be a good fit: people with “distinctive voices who can blend into the orchestra” of the show, who could write
Buffy
the way he wrote it, with a distinct patois and pop culture sensibility, and who were just good people. For Joss, the best writers were the best people, and “the person behind the words is ultimately how the show is shaped.”

Joss had to create the second-season writing staff almost from scratch, as Dean Batali and Rob Des Hotel were the only first-season writers who remained on staff. Fortunately, Greenwalt’s return also netted
X-Files
writer and executive producer Howard Gordon, who would join the staff briefly before leaving to create his own sci-fi series for Fox,
Strange World
. In addition, Joss set his sights on a newbie writer who was just breaking into television—and who had the audacity to turn him down.

“I got offered a job on another network show that already had its order,” Marti Noxon says. Joss called her and asked if it was true, that she was turning down
Buffy
. When she explained that she preferred
Buffy
tonally but needed the financial security of the other gig, Joss told her that if she wanted to be a better writer, she should wait for their offer. “He said, ‘Come on, that show sucks,’ and we talked for a while. He was so winning and so sure of himself, by the end of the conversation I had totally changed my mind.” Noxon called her agent when they hung up and turned down the other series. She started on
Buffy
soon after.

The remaining scripts were assigned to freelancers, bringing
Parenthood
’s Ty King and the sitcom writing team of David Fury and Elin Hampton into the fold.

On the set, Joss realized that he would have to take stronger control, to avoid the distracting behind-the-scenes drama of the first season. He realized that by trying to be everyone’s friend, he had failed to create a position of authority for himself. He also needed to regain a balance of work and personal time—fewer all-nighters away from Kai. He considered a comment Jeanine Basinger had made about film directors, that “a director doesn’t have to create anything, but he is responsible for everything,” and reinterpreted it as a mission statement for his role as an executive producer on TV. “I don’t have to write a line of the script … I don’t sew the damn costumes, I don’t say the words—but I’m responsible for everything in every frame of every show. That’s my job, whether or not I’m directing the episode,” he said. “So that’s why you have to have that complete faith, that kind of blind faith in a leader who has the ability to lead…. I just also think leadership is something that is earned. I respected those above me, and demand the same from those below me. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

To Joss, part of the reason he needed to assert control was to oversee the fantasy elements of the series. “The thing about fantasy is it creates its own seemingly arbitrary rules: ‘And then her face turns into the moon.’ ‘I love it!’ ‘And then her sister has long fingernails.’ ‘That’s idiotic! That could never happen!’ There’s always a reason for it. There’s a genuine instinct,” he explains. “When we did the Halloween episode in season two, I remember actually shouting, ‘No, the dwarves are demons! The midgets are vampires!’ I was so mad because people were not listening to me and they had done it wrong—because if you turn into a demon, you might change shape. If you turned into a vampire, you wouldn’t.”

Joss remembers how he yelled, “Take him away, it doesn’t work!” then realized, “Wow, I actually just shouted that with genuine anger in my heart. My job is so awesome.”

The second season brought on-screen changes as well. The series’ focus shifted from largely stand-alone stories to a narrative more entwined in mythology. Buffy had slain the Master in the first season finale, and much younger, more impetuous adversaries arrived in the form of aggressive punk-rock vampire Spike (James Marsters) and his somewhat psychotic, somewhat psychic girlfriend, Drusilla (Juliet Landau). Spike and
Dru are overjoyed to discover that their old friend Angelus has taken up residence in Sunnydale, but horrified when they learn that their murderous, manipulative ally, once dubbed the Scourge of Europe, has been cursed with a soul and become the do-gooder Angel. On a lighter note, Seth Green joined the cast as the laconic and dry Oz, a werewolf who is terribly smitten with Willow.

Buffy
began to hit a creative stride that drew more praise for the series and, more important for the network, more viewers. In January 1998, the WB moved the show to Tuesdays at 8:00
PM
eastern time to help launch the new series
Dawson’s Creek
at 9:00. That week, it aired a two-part story, with “Surprise” on Monday and “Innocence” on Tuesday. With those two episodes, the “high school as a horror movie” concept opened up to show that the scariest monsters in our lives are often the people we love.

In “Surprise,” the gang plans a surprise seventeenth birthday party for Buffy, which gets diverted when they get word that Spike and Drusilla are gathering the pieces to reanimate the Judge, a nearly undefeatable demon with the power to rid the Earth of the “plague of humanity.” The Judge awakens, Buffy and Angel narrowly escape him, and they make their way to his apartment, where they make love for the first time. At the end of the episode, after Buffy has fallen asleep, Angel rushes to the street and crumples in pain.

On Tuesday night, “Innocence” opens with Angel recovering—then killing a streetwalker who has come over to check on him. The gypsy curse that gave him back his soul, and thus his humanity, was broken when he experienced a moment of true happiness with Buffy. He has reverted to the evil Angelus, who revels in taunting Buffy when she finds him again in his apartment:

A
NGELUS:
You got a lot to learn about men, kiddo. Although I guess you proved that last night.

B
UFFY:
What are you saying?

A
NGELUS:
Let’s not make an issue out of it, OK? In fact, let’s not talk about it at all. It happened.

B
UFFY:
I don’t understand. Was it me? Was I not good?

A
NGELUS:
You were great. Really. I thought you were a pro.

Later in the library with the Scooby Gang, Buffy realizes that it was their lovemaking that broke the curse and is devastated that she brought
about Angelus’s return. (He will go on to become the Big Bad of the season.) But a Slayer cannot take time off for heartbreak, and she again saves the world, this time by blowing up the Judge with a rocket launcher. When she returns home, her mother is waiting with a birthday cupcake. Joyce, who knows nothing of slaying and vampires, asks Buffy what she did for her birthday. Buffy responds, “I got older.” Urged to make a wish, Buffy just watches the candle flame burn.

In the DVD commentary for the episode, Joss showered praise on Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanaz for their work. He declared that the exchange in Angel’s apartment was “possibly the best” scene they had done, and that Gellar broke his heart in her crying scenes. He has often cited “Innocence” as among his favorite episodes, and said it was “harder edged” and “uglier” than the stories that had come before.

The episode is certainly a major turning point in the series, in which Joss’s storytelling reaches new levels of rawness and honesty about a very common experience for many girls—a guy turning on them after they have sex. Even Buffy, the fairly unbreakable girl, is shattered by the experience. In prior episodes, she had disappointments related to other people’s expectations—trying to be a “good girl” for her mother, trying not to get kicked out of school—but in this moment, when she gives everything to Angel and he takes it, then cruelly scorns her, it is all about
her
. It isn’t about slaying getting in the way or teachers being unreasonable; it is about giving the guy she loves the most intimate part of her and then being rejected. It is the universal truth of that first heartbreak, which makes one wearier and forces one to see the world as a crueler place, that every viewer could relate to. That and the fact that they must get up and make it through the battle of another day, with or without a rocket launcher.

“You have to make sure the stakes are something more than life and death,” Joss explains. After all, the series had shown Sunnydale teens dying at the hands of demons for more than a season, and defined its heroine by her ability to fight monsters rather than get killed by them. With “Innocence,” he found a way to evoke real fear. “You have to make sure that the stakes have to do with an experience that will break this person, will twist this person,” he says. “Luckily, with Sarah we could go there. Breaking her heart was going to be way, way more terrifying than piercing it.”

So often, you’ll hear someone who’s worked on a TV show describe the experience as “making a little movie every week.” Joss, who had come out of film school and didn’t have that much experience with hour-long television, really did think he was doing just that. “Not only were we making a movie, we were making a completely different movie every week. It was really fun,” he explains. Like at Pixar years earlier, he felt a certain kind of freedom due to his naïveté about what the “proper” way to do things was. “This one’s a French farce! This one’s a Greek tragedy! This one’s just dumb! But we tried. Not knowing those rules and just reaching for something else, something more textural and ambitious, it was actually a help.”

Joss found that his time as a script doctor, even with its frustrations, was one of the better training grounds for being a television showrunner. Like dealing with film scripts that had already gone through several rewrites before they came to him, Joss was now working with an ongoing story that had the elements in place and couldn’t be changed. It forced him to think quickly and succinctly.