Joss Whedon: The Biography (29 page)

One way the producers shook up the series’ initial status quo was when they decided that the major character Doyle, played by Glenn Quinn, would be killed off in the ninth episode, “Hero.” Joss had always wanted to kill off a main character early in a series, the way he’d introduced Xander and Willow’s friend Jesse in the first episode of
Buffy
only to turn him into a vampire and stake him in the second. But here he had another motive: Quinn had a substance abuse problem, which was starting to disrupt production. The producers spoke with him about it, informing him that if he didn’t get it under control, he would be fired. Quinn was “terrific but troubled, and we had to let him go,” Greenwalt says. “It was a really sad turn of events.” They hoped that the firing would force the actor to find help for his addiction, but sadly, he would die from an accidental heroin overdose in December 2002.

Quinn’s final episode also became a turning point in the writers’ room. Joss was in the room a lot more, breaking stories with the
Angel
staff, but people still weren’t getting along. There was a “weird uncomfortableness,” Minear says. “It’s a little intimidating—he can be intimidating, because you want to impress him but you only have a certain amount of time to do it in because he’s not there all day. Even though they had been using this other staff, even though they weren’t letting us do that much work at that point, we get to episode six and suddenly we’re behind.”

There was no script for episode nine, no story up on the board. Tim Minear and Howard Gordon were assigned the episode, and they went into Joss’s office to break the story in the most rudimentary way. They ended up with a general outline of what happens in each act and how Doyle will sacrifice his life at the end, and were given the weekend to write the script. Like they had done on
Strange World
, the two split up the story and went their separate ways to write. While they checked in to be sure that all the character names were the same, they really didn’t have much time to properly integrate the two halves before they turned in the script. They knew that some of it would not quite line up, but it had all the right scenes in the right order with the right elements. In just over a weekend, they had delivered a script that was ready to go into preproduction.

“We turned this in on Monday,” Minear remembers. “Neither one of us has slept for like forty hours, we’re plainly fried, but we’ve done it. We’ve accomplished this thing. We’re big heroes, we think.” David Greenwalt called Minear in and gave his frank assessment of the script:
half was pretty good and he wanted to wipe his ass with the other half. Minear responded, “Well, when you wipe your ass with it, be sure to keep the brads in,” and went back to his office to pack up his things.

For Minear,
Angel
had started to feel like
The X-Files
all over again; he couldn’t write anything and he couldn’t really talk directly to Joss, just like he hadn’t been able to talk directly to Chris Carter. Adding insult to injury, as they left to write the script, Minear had learned that the following Tuesday, October 5, 1999, Joss was having a big party at his home for the premieres of
Buffy
and
Angel
. However, none of the
Angel
writers had been invited. Again, he felt like they were being treated like an afterthought. “There was sort of a high school atmosphere,” Minear says. “There were cliques, the popular kids, and then the ones who weren’t. It was just like, ‘We’re not eating lunch with you.’”

Minear then told Greenwalt that he was going to have a free parking space in the back. “I quit,” he said. “I’m not doing this for another year. I just had an experience like this, I’m not doing it again.” When Greenwalt asked Minear to talk, he decided that he had nothing to lose and completely went off about everything that had been bothering him. “I don’t like Joss, he won’t look at me, he won’t talk to me, and there’s just going to be some big premiere at his house tomorrow night and none of us are invited,” Minear said. Greenwalt was shocked and asked how he found out about the party. Minear said that it didn’t matter who told him, that Joss should have known it would get out.

Greenwalt tried to explain that Joss was very shy, and that the party was in his home and he didn’t really know the
Angel
writers. Minear reminded him that this lack of a relationship wasn’t the writers’ fault. “We’ve been here for months! Look, I understand that this man has created a brilliant television show about high school because he felt like he wasn’t popular in high school,” Minear said. “Now this office is like a high school and he is popular, but let me just explain something to you: I didn’t like high school either and I have no desire to repeat it.”

Minear went home, but he didn’t quit. After catching up on sleep, he came back in to work on the edit of an earlier episode he had written, “Sense and Sensitivity.” In the episode, Kate Lockley’s precinct is forced to go through sensitivity training, set up by Angel’s nemeses at Wolfram & Hart. The officers are put under a spell that compels them to be uncontrollably empathetic and unable to stop sharing their feelings. As this new touchy-feely, emotionally wrung-out police force ignores their duties and
tries to connect with their prisoners, criminals run rampant. This thrills the mobster who put it all in motion in order to assassinate Kate.

Before the drama of breaking “Hero,” the staff had watched the cut of that episode together. Joss declared it unairable. “Great,” Minear says. “The first episode that has my name on it, Joss Whedon feels like it’s the first episode in the history of Mutant Enemy that is so bad that America must never see it.”

Minear had asked to sit in with the editor and work on a new cut of the episode. At the time, it was rare for writers to regularly go into the editing room. They did a tremendous recut, and everyone felt that the results were actually pretty good. Minear himself felt that it never got great, but it definitely got better. Later Greenwalt would tell him that Joss said that he had done a great job and saved the episode.

Over the next weekend, however, Minear started to replay all the things he had said to Greenwalt and thought that when he repeated them to Joss, it would solidify Joss’s theory that Minear was the angriest guy he’d ever met. And most likely, he’d be fired on Monday. Monday came, and lo and behold, Minear still had a job.

Instead, Greenwalt invited him to lunch on the set at Paramount and asked him about his time on
The X-Files
, and how Minear had quit that series. “That’s a really big show, a lot of money and prestige. It’s a top-ten show, it gets nominated for Emmys. But you said no,” said Greenwalt, who had also walked away from a turn on
The X-Files
to return to
Buffy
season two.

“Because I wasn’t happy,” Minear replied. “The two things that don’t matter to me, David? Prestige and money.” At that moment, Greenwalt knew that none of the things that people are so afraid of losing really meant enough to Minear to be miserable—quite like Joss. And in the same way that Greenwalt had chosen to come back to work with Joss, Minear decided to stay.

After Glenn Quinn was written off the series, Doyle’s plot-motivating visions were transferred to Cordelia, but Joss and Greenwalt still wanted to add another character to replace him. One idea was to bring in Alexis Denisof as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, a straitlaced, jittery Watcher who had been introduced in
Buffy
’s third season. “I don’t even think it was my
idea,” Joss says. “One of the writers said, ‘What if Wesley came?’ and I was like, ‘Done! Solid. Sold. Beautiful.’” Joss had been impressed by his work on
Buffy;
he says that Denisof’s awkward kissing scene with Charisma Carpenter in the season three finale “may be one of my favorite scenes I’ve ever filmed. We just thought, ‘He’ll bring lightness, he has gravitas.’ And as is always the case in these shows, my goofiest character becomes my strongest.”

Joss met Denisof for breakfast and told him how things were going on
Angel
, how they’d like to make Wesley a part of it. The character, after being fired by the Watchers Council, becomes a self-described “rogue demon hunter” and finds his way to Los Angeles. Denisof was very excited. “I had already fallen in love with the character, and I had certainly fallen in love with Joss, so it was a great marriage, as far as I was concerned,” he says. “I didn’t know the journey that was ahead. I knew we’d have a trajectory for the character, but I had no idea the range that we would discover with that character over the five seasons.”

This was just the beginning of Joss reaching across series to bring the people he loved working with together again. He had been building his own family of friends for years, and going forward, he would often staff his projects big and small from that ever-expanding community. One recent addition to Joss’s on-screen family actually had his first experience with the Whedonverse years earlier, when he guest-starred in the first-season
Angel
episode “Somnambulist.” Jeremy Renner was one of over fifty actors who came in to read for the part of Penn, a vampire whom Angel sired in 1786 and must confront when he comes to L.A. on a killing spree. It was extremely unusual for that many actors to read for a guest role, says casting director Amy Britt. “We just couldn’t figure it out, as finding a worthy toe-to-toe adversary for Angel is tough. When Jeremy Renner came in we knew we’d finally found the guy. Even though Renner is smaller than Boreanaz physically, he has formidable in spades. About a decade later the rest of the industry figured that out as well.”

The notion of chosen family became an important part of the
Angel
story, too, just as it had with
Buffy
. In the season-one finale, “To Shanshu in L.A.,” Cordelia is cursed with horrible, incessant visions that drive her so mad that she has to be tethered to a hospital bed. When Angel finds her, he pushes past the doctor asking if he is family with a fierce and insistent “
Yes.
”

Later that same episode, another established character makes a shocking return. “I ran into David Boreanaz on the Paramount lot, where I was
working at the time. He grabbed me in a big hug and said, ‘Benz, we’re bringing you back,’” laughs Julie Benz. Her character, Darla, the vampire who sired Angel, had appeared in the very first scene of
Buffy
and was killed off several episodes later. “I got a phone call asking if I could come in and do a couple of flashback episodes.” She had been working on
Roswell
, and being on two separate WB shows became an issue for the network. “Both shows catered to the same audience, so they ended up kicking me off of
Roswell
to put me on
Angel
.” She had also done a pilot for Tom Fontana (
Homicide: Life on the Street, Oz
) that year, so they didn’t know her future availability when they sent her the script for the season finale. “They didn’t tell me what was happening, so I was halfway through the script and Darla hadn’t shown up yet, and I called my manager: ‘I think they sent me the wrong script.’ I got to the last page and it was like ‘Oh my god.’”

Darla is resurrected, in Wolfram & Hart’s latest attempt to get to Angel and take him down. Joss had kept it very hush-hush, as they didn’t know if Benz would be available to stay on. “If you’re available, we’re going to do a great arc with you,” Benz remembers being told. “If you’re not available, we’ll kill you in the first episode [of season two].” She, and Darla, would make it through the next two season premieres.

The first season finale also introduced an important new element in the mythology of a series that was quickly developing its own identity separate from
Buffy
. A new prophecy is revealed that a vampire with a soul will play an important role in the apocalypse and then be rewarded by becoming human once more. That prize for redemption grounded Angel’s journey and the series, allowing the writers to push the limits of their storytelling in a way that hadn’t worked for them in their first few episodes. “
Angel
got very dark, but when it got dark, it was usually in a horror movie way, or even in an emotionally complicated way,” Tim Minear explains. “The first script couldn’t do it well, because we couldn’t do it realistically.”