Joss Whedon: The Biography (34 page)

Tonally, Eric Wight explains, his new series and his previous one “were very similar. We had to strike a very difficult balance of being a little bit dark but not too edgy. On
Batman Beyond
, we were taking an established mythology and evolving it into a completely unique direction. With
Buffy
, we were trying to honor the original series as closely as possible.”

With scripts in hand, the team set about creating character sketches and storyboarding. “One of my favorite stories Jeph told me was how they had the art hanging up at the offices and on one occasion he looked over and saw Michelle Trachtenberg staring at her character design, unknowingly standing in the exact pose I had drawn her in,” Wight says. “He knew I had a strong attention to detail, but that blew him away.” Wight hoped to bring aboard many friends from his
Batman Beyond
days. He also had preliminary conversations with Mike Mignola, the creator of
Hellboy
, about creating some monster designs. “Both Joss and I are tremendous fans of his work, and he was a huge influence on the style,” Wight says.

Joss and the writers were also excited about the stories they could tell without the limitations of live-action budgets; in animation, a dragon crashing into a library costs the same as people sitting in a room talking. One episode involved Buffy having to deal with a demonic driver’s ed instructor; another was about Buffy getting shrunk down to a super-tiny size. “It’s a very silly show,” Joss said. “We refer to it as
Simpsons Beyond
.”

But to Jeph Loeb, “the scripts were like fine pastries in a sea of cafeterias. It was the Murderers’ Row of writers—the
Buffy
and
Angel
staff writers at the height of their game writing for Saturday-morning cartoons. They all wanted to work on this!”

For all the enthusiasm, the development of
Buffy: The Animated Series
did not proceed smoothly. The plan was for 20th Century Fox to produce the series, to air in its Fox Kids block on affiliates across the country. But in July 2001, Fox Family Worldwide, which oversaw Fox Kids, was sold to Disney. Joss and Mutant Enemy didn’t feel that anything would change—at first. But then they finally got a call: Disney wasn’t interesting in proceeding with the series.

“We were met with a lot of—I don’t want to say resistance, because it was just more of no response,” explains Chris Buchanan, whom Joss hired to run the business end of his production company in early 2002. “[Disney] just didn’t really respond to us.” The irony, of course, is that years later Disney would very much be in the Joss Whedon business, when they bought Marvel Comics and produced
The Avengers
.

It was an enormous blow to the team. They’d worked hard and were ready to ship the first episodes overseas. The animation test had come back promising. “It was like getting ready for a birthday party and then the cake never arrived,” Jeph Loeb says. “Only worse.”

They hoped they could find another home for the series. But “because of the sale, there were larger issues between Disney and Fox,” Buchanan says, which made it difficult to obtain permission to shop the show around. “We finally got over the hump on it and made a little presentation, which is different from a pilot because it’s just much shorter. It was really cool—and it was a great style of animation that Joss was really into, and it started that round of conversations with different distribution partners like Cartoon Network. We talked to pretty much everybody.”

The challenge was that in the time between when work on the show began and when the team sorted out the issues with the Fox Family changeover to Disney, the animation market had changed dramatically. Joss had modeled
Buffy: The Animated Series
after shows such as
Batman Beyond
, which featured high-quality animation and demanded a fairly pricey per-episode cost. By the time
Buffy
was back in negotiations, most animated fare on TV was much less ambitious, demanding perhaps only half the budget of something like
Batman Beyond
.

“Essentially what that means is instead of having fifteen days of production in Asia and Korea on your show, you were down to ten days,” Buchanan says. “It was just not the same creative model, and the offers that we had coming in didn’t really make sense. It just ultimately kind of died the death where we didn’t have enough demand on the distribution
side to get enough money to execute it the way that Joss and Jeph wanted to creatively. It was just really unfortunate, because the scripts were great, and I thought it was a fantastic way to kind of bring a new generation of
Buffy
fans into the fold.”

In addition, the networks they approached in 2002 had trouble imagining how they would schedule such a series;
Buffy: The Animated Series
was deemed “too adult” to be placed in a more traditional children’s animated block of television, yet it didn’t have broad enough appeal to be worthy of a prime-time airing. Today the media landscape has shifted further, and there are far more adult animated series airing in prime time. It raises the question: could an animated
Buffy
series be a viable property once again?

“I’ve always said—sometimes to Joss’s teasing dismay—that the best Buffy stories had to do with resurrection,” Jeph Loeb laughs. “So why not bring this back again? Joss has never been more popular and Buffy is firmly implanted as a TV icon. Who knows, we might even get Sarah [Michelle Gellar] now.”

As the saga of
Buffy: The Animated Series
was making its way toward its premature conclusion, back in the live-action world, its parent series was headed toward an unexpected end point of its own. In 2001, the show found itself caught in a battle between two things far more fierce than anything to come out of a Hellmouth: a television network and a production studio.

Buffy
was nearing the end of its contracted run at the WB. If the network wanted to continue running the series past season five, it would have to agree on new terms with 20th Century Fox. It wouldn’t be easy; during their earlier negotiations, the studio had already offered up veiled threats to take the show elsewhere if the WB didn’t agree to its demands for higher licensing fees. When asked if he would consider moving
Buffy
to the studio’s own network, Fox’s Sandy Grushow had hedged his comments—“The first time we move a show like that is the day our business is in serious jeopardy”—but added that if the WB’s Jamie Kellner “attempts to lowball and refuses to step up to fair market value,” such a scenario would certainly be possible. “Fair market value is fair market value.”

These comments had not engendered goodwill between the two men. Kellner had long been concerned about the WB’s financial stability and
was frustrated that Grushow was muddying the waters of public opinion at a time when
Buffy
still had two seasons left on its contract. He felt that Fox had a potential franchise on its hands and could capitalize on syndication deals, spin-offs, and merchandising instead of pushing for more money from his network. In fact, the WB had already bought the spin-off
Angel
and solidified a two-hour block of Joss-produced television each Tuesday night. In Kellner’s opinion, the studio should have been grateful for all of the attention and promotion lavished on
Buffy
, instead of expecting more money.

Through
Buffy
’s third and fourth seasons, the financial disagreements had quieted, but in spring 2001, with the network’s contract nearing its end, the parties readied themselves for battle once again. And this time, Joss himself would be drawn into the fray.

The first shot in the battle over Joss’s flagship series came from the WB’s Jamie Kellner at the Television Critics Association press junket in January 2001. He told reporters that if his network went along with 20th Century Fox’s plans to raise
Buffy
’s licensing fee from roughly $1 million to $2 million per episode, it would actually lose money by airing the show. Kellner suggested that the WB’s final response would be to say, “We will take all the revenue we can generate with ‘Buffy’ and we’ll give it to you in a giant wheelbarrow…. And if that’s not enough, then take it to somebody else, and you’ve demonstrated that you’re not the kind of partner we should be doing business with.”

Sandy Grushow, now the Fox Television Entertainment Group chairman, snapped back in his own executive Q&A session at the TCAs, “They don’t have wheelbarrows at the WB, they have Mercedes.”

While the two men aired their grievances in the press, Joss tried to stay out of it as much as he could. He liked being on the WB, the small network that had taken a chance on him and his stories. His girl hero was not too keen to make a move, either, and she chose to go public with her feelings. “The WB has been so supportive, such a great network over the past four years,” Sarah Michelle Gellar told E! Online. “It feels like home. I don’t want the show to move, because I feel that we belong on the WB. It’s where our fans are.” She added, “I will stay on
Buffy
if, and only if,
Buffy
stays on the WB. And you know what? Print that. My bosses are going to kill me, but print that. I want them to know…. If
Buffy
leaves the WB, I’m out.”

The renewal drama was spreading, but with no clear sense of when a decision had to be made, Joss focused on the more urgent task of guiding two series with complex narrative arcs toward satisfying season finales.
By March, however, Joss could no longer leave the fight to other people. On March 23, 2001, Kellner landed a devastating blow in an interview with
Entertainment Weekly
. “Nobody wanted the show,” he argued. “It didn’t perform [at first] but we stuck with it…. It’s not our No. 1 show…. It’s not a show like
ER
that stands above the pack.” He also claimed that
Buffy
’s audiences were getting too old to warrant a heftier price tag. “Our audience is a younger audience,” he said. “Maybe what we should be doing is to not stay with the same show for many years, and refresh our lineup.”

Joss responded in the same article, countering Kellner’s slams about
Buffy
’s aging demographics by pointing out that he had been told that the show’s median age was “26 to 29 years old in year 2 of the show,” so it shouldn’t be a bargaining point in year five. He also pointed out that
Buffy
might not have been the network’s highest-rated show (that was the wholesome
7th Heaven
), but it “put the WB on the map critically” and remained their second-highest-rated series. The WB, he argued, should “step up and acknowledge that financially.”

In light of Kellner’s disrespectful and dismissive comments, Joss no longer felt such a strong pull to stay at the WB. He explained his views on leaving: “Other networks reach more people, but other networks also have more hit shows they need to promote. We could be exposed to a new audience, but we could also be buried. But if we decide to move, I’m fine with it.”

Many assumed that 20th Century Fox would move the series to the Fox network. That move, however, would create an even bigger drama in the television industry. While television series had jumped networks in the past, those moves were precipitated by the original network’s choice to cancel a fading series, not the studio’s desire to make more money from a successful show. Fox didn’t want to endanger its ongoing relationships with ABC, NBC, and CBS by suggesting that it might pull other hit series from those networks to air on its own.

Instead, Fox offered
Buffy
to the big three networks. But while the series was a hit by WB standards, its average audience of 4.4 million viewers per episode in the 2000–01 season was not comparable to the ratings of their hits, which regularly netted around 18 million viewers. A better fit was the other small netlet, UPN. At the time, UPN aired four nights of original programming a week, and its biggest hits were the male-skewing wrestling series
WWF Smackdown!
and
Star Trek: Voyager
.
Even though
Buffy
brought in fewer viewers than either, it had a strong core female audience that the UPN wanted to court. The netlet immediately became the front-runner to be the new home of the Slayer, even as Fox executives made it clear that they would give the WB the chance to match any UPN offer to acquire the series.