Joss Whedon: The Biography (40 page)

His strongest inclination was to draft
Angel
’s Tim Minear, who had distinguished himself by becoming the first writer to break stories without him. But he had promised Greenwalt that he would never pilfer him from
Angel
. He searched for a
Firefly
showrunner outside of Mutant Enemy, to no avail; he felt that he “could not find anybody even remotely of the caliber of Tim.” Determined to keep his promise, he kept looking, until someone convinced him that if he didn’t move Minear to
Firefly
, Joss would have no time or energy for
Buffy
or
Angel
.

Minear had already read the
Firefly
pilot script, and Joss had told him about some of the stories he wanted to do over the course of the series. He was very excited about the show. When Joss showed him an early cut of the pilot, Minear gave him notes in the editing room—he loved the episode but kept himself from becoming emotionally invested in it, because he was working on
Angel
.

Finally, Joss showed up on the
Angel
set at Paramount, where Minear was directing the episodes “A New World” and “Benediction” back to back. He sat down with Tim and said, “I want to give you a spaceship.” As a longtime
Star Trek
fan—who had filmed and starred in his own
Trek
films in high school and screened them at comic cons—Minear was thrilled. “Oh, for God’s sake, that’s the whole reason I’m doing this!” he said.

The offer led to some turmoil at
Angel
. David Greenwalt “did not take it lightly, nor should he have,” Joss said. Greenwalt chose to leave
Angel
at the end of season three; he had a chance to develop a new show outside of the Buffyverse as the showrunner for the new ABC series
Miracles
. That wasn’t the only upheaval in the Whedonverse; Marti Noxon left
Buffy
to have a baby and would be gone through most of the seventh season.

Joss suddenly had three shows and had lost two showrunners. But he knew that this kind of pressure could actually be a good thing for him—it had helped him refocus his life for the better before. In the early years
of
Buffy
, he’d pull all-nighters all the time, because they were always behind. “When
Angel
came around, I was so tapped out,” he explains, “because every second I wasn’t working on
Buffy
, I would turn around and there would be work to do on
Angel
. I was much healthier, because I just was so worn out that I couldn’t wear myself out.” He got eight glorious hours of sleep every night, because his brain was so full.

In the same way, he says, “when three shows came on, I was very fierce and ridiculously focused.”
Buffy
’s upcoming seventh season was likely to be its last, so “I can let it slide,” Joss reasoned. “It’s the first year of
Firefly
, there’s nowhere to slide from”—and there was a risk that it wouldn’t succeed—“so I’ve got to bust it out.” He decided that “
Angel
’s where everyone’s going to expect me to drop the ball, so I have to make that super awesome. You get into a mode where you can just keep going, and just, you know, clicking over and clicking over. It was taxing, but in a way, it was almost simple.”

Joss did realize, however, that he could no longer oversee the day-to-day dealings of his production company. It was at this point that he reached out to his friend Chris Buchanan, who had quite the varied résumé as, among other things, a film producer, literary agent, and senior VP of production (one of his projects was 2001’s
Ocean’s Eleven
). On March 31, 2002, he announced Buchanan as the new president of Mutant Enemy.

Buchanan saw himself as the person to guide Joss’s creative ideas into concrete projects. “He’s done his thing,” Buchanan told
Variety
. “Somebody was needed to pick up the ball and run with it, figure out how we make things happen, how do we move it to the next stage.” He hinted that in the future, Mutant Enemy might not limit itself to only Joss-penned TV and features. “Joss has surrounded himself with people who are very creative,” Buchanan said. “He’d like to be the platform on which they build their own empires. It all goes back to world domination.”

Two weeks later, Joss reemphasized his commitment to
Firefly
and its Mutant Enemy siblings. The longtime comic book geek dropped out of talks with New Line Cinema to direct their upcoming film
Iron Man
.

Joss’s new approach to all things Mutant Enemy had another impetus behind it: Kai was pregnant with their first child, due in December 2002.
She had waited through five years of him pulling long hours in order to get his shows in production, and now, with a baby on the way, she was determined that he be a part of the new world they were creating together.

“OK, you did your time,” Joss remembers her declaring. “We said you were going to do your time and then we were going to start a family. So we’re starting! You have to be in it!”

In the meantime, Joss attended to the birth of his new series, a process replete with its own pressures and anxieties. His star Nathan Fillion, however, never lost his initial giddiness, even with all the pressure of being the lead on a one-hour television program. Fillion had been part of a sitcom ensemble, but this was something that he’d never done before. He tried not to think about the responsibilities it entailed. “I didn’t feel a daily pressure of, ‘Hey, you’re carrying the show,’” he says, “because it was very much an ensemble piece. And when you’re on a television set and you see the kind of work that goes on, the lead actor is not doing the majority of the work.

“Certainly your face is up there, but the majority of the work has been done before you even get to work. There’s a lot of hard work going on in a television program, and the majority has been done long before I ever step foot on a set. The writing, the organizing, building a set, the decoration, the costumes, casting; it’s a lot of work. What I do is icing on the cake.” But if anyone around him tried to remind him that the success of the series was riding on him, “I’d start to feel it. Start to look around and think, ‘I can’t blow this. I can’t blow it. Don’t blow this.’ That was my mantra.”

Joss most likely didn’t want Fillion to take on all the pressure for the series’ success. But perhaps the prospect of starting his own family with Kai, coupled with knowledge of how intricately involved he was in the intense episodic schedule, led him to initially keep his latest onscreen family at a greater distance than usual. In fact, he warned the cast early on that there was a reason why he named the show
Firefly
, after the spaceship, and not after any central character. Adam Baldwin recalls Joss declaring, “Because I’ve had experience with that before and I don’t want that. You’re all expendable. If I choose, you can go at any time.”

Joss’s mother, Lee Jeffries, receives her diploma from Radcliffe in 1957.
Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Joss with his family. Back row, from left to right: brother Matthew, stepmother Pam, brother Sam, father Tom. Front row, from left to right: cousins Deke and Tucker, Joss, brother Jed.
Courtesy of Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen Whedon
.

Photos from H. Bramston’s boarding house at Winchester College. In both the 1981 photo (left) and the 1982 photo (right), Joss is at the center of the front standing row.
Courtesy of Winchester College
.

With the Eclectic Society at Wesleyan in 1985. Joss is seated at center, on the couch arms.
Courtesy of Wesleyan University Library, Special Collections & Archives
.