Joss Whedon: The Biography (59 page)

With
The Cabin in the Woods
and his Fox series
Dollhouse
yet to go into production, Joss concentrated his energies on launching
Dr. Horrible
. He and the producers had meetings about how to roll out and promote the show with a few companies, including Creative Artists Agency, where his agent, Chris Harbert, had moved several years earlier. Since web series were such a new venture, no one knew quite how to proceed. So
Dr. Horrible
star Felicia Day took charge, drawing on her experience distributing
The Guild
online. She explained how streaming worked and warned that certain potential hosting sites would not have the bandwidth to support the demand for the show. “She was so on top of it,” Joss said. “The rest of us were like, ‘Yeah, what she said.’ It was like a
Buffy
moment—the cute little girl in the room blows everybody out of the water.” They decided to distribute the show themselves, with help from the online video service Hulu.

The next hurdle was possibly the most important: publicizing the show and attracting viewers. This is where most original Internet content failed, because unlike a television network with an established audience of millions of viewers, few online sites at the time had the ability to reach a wide audience. But with Joss’s very loyal and very web-savvy fan base, it ended up being one of the easiest things to deliver. Joss needed only to post a message on Whedonesque. He told fans that the episodes would initially be available to stream for free, and after that brief window passed the series could be purchased for download on iTunes. The grassroots publicity engine of Whedon fans that had faithfully forwarded his pro-WGA messages throughout the writers’ strike was now laser-focused on
Dr. Horrible
. Fans even managed to track down and watch the trailer before Joss and company were ready to release it. But that was a small price to pay for so much free publicity.

Midnight on July 15, episode one of
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
was released to the world. Until everything crashed shortly thereafter. The streaming servers were not prepared for the onslaught of viewers. “We like to say we broke the Internet,” Joss said, “because ‘we were too cheap to pay for more bandwidth’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.” Jed Whedon explained that they were hoping the audience would build over time; they didn’t expect everybody to try to see it all at once. But they did—to the tune of about a thousand viewers a second. “We broke other
things they had streaming nearby and all ancillary sites, like Whedonesque and Felicia’s site for
The Guild
, they all went down.” Joss added. “There was this domino effect, people either looking for it or some connection, and that made us feel pretty awesome. We didn’t feel bright, but we felt cool.” By the time the next day rolled around, the sites stayed up and the views kept coming.

“Releasing it for free was a brilliant idea,” Neil Patrick Harris says. The fact that it was available to stream for only a limited time gave the fans a sense of urgency and excitement. “It was very, very enjoyable for me and the rest of the cast and crew and writers to sit and watch the comments right after episode one was released—to see what people thought of it,” Harris says. They watched fans speculate on what was to come next as they waited for subsequent episodes to be released. Harris likens it to the way that Stephen King published his 1996 serial novel
The Green Mile:
“The paperback books came out once a month for [six] months, and I had that same feeling when the new paperback dropped. I would go out to the bookstore and buy it first thing [and] read it, devour it.”
Dr. Horrible
proved that people will come, and keep coming back, for online content that they’re interested in.

Fans also turned out in droves for the
Dr. Horrible
panel at San Diego Comic-Con on July 25, 2008. Joss was surprisingly nervous to face the four thousand attendees, Simon Helberg recalls. “Backstage, he was even redder than he normally is, then he goes up and destroys, and you feel like, ‘How could you be this nervous? You’re such an amazing writer, and every question that somebody asks you, you have the most hilarious, articulate answer.’ He was amazing.”

It was Helberg’s first year at Comic-Con, and it gave him a glimpse at the differences between Joss Whedon fandom and the fans of his hit CBS television series
The Big Bang Theory
. While the two groups had huge overlap,
Dr. Horrible
fans tended to be consistently younger. “[
Big Bang
] has an array of people, whereas
Dr. Horrible
, those Joss fans, are all the geeky hipsters or just pure geeky people,” he says. “I think it’s definitely that quality that Joss has that I don’t know how to even really describe, but that sort of self-reflective, kind of intellectual, self-deprecating geek pop culture kind of thing. It’s so tasteful and specific. I think that appeals
to a lot of younger [fans]—and by younger, I just mean not seventy. I don’t mean, like, twelve.”

Helberg was utterly unprepared for the event and surprised to discover that excited
Dr. Horrible
fans had even infiltrated his
Big Bang
panels. “I didn’t know that this kind of thing existed,” he says. “I thought you do a television show, and if you’re popular maybe some people will come up to you during the day or you hang out and there’s press there, and that’s as intense as it gets.” The fact that Comic-Con was a place where thousands of people sleep out and wait to listen to actors and producers share anecdotes was overwhelming. “That was a crazy day, and I just realized at that point, ‘OK, there’s something in the zeitgeist here that hasn’t been fully recognized by me.’”

That night, there was a scheduled
Dr. Horrible
screening. Fans were ready in homemade Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer costumes. Early on, the line of people waiting had already well exceeded the capacity of the space. One of the producers was running around trying to find another copy of the musical and an additional room in which to screen it. Ultimately, they were able to set up several theaters to play
Dr. Horrible
all at the same time. The cast snuck into the back of one of the rooms and watched along. It was the first time that they all got to watch it with an audience, who were already singing along and shouting back at the screen. “It was very surreal,” Harris says. “We had clearly succeeded in our core goal, which was to create something that would amuse. And it was amusing. There was great ferocity that night.

“It was just very out-of-body to watch,” he adds. “A lot of people laughing so actively, and deeply into the experience. I hadn’t really experienced that before. Joss has a hardcore adoration that follows him around, and when people laugh at Joss Whedon’s jokes, it’s a big-ass belly laugh, and that was kind of crazy to witness.”

Critically, the series was a hit as well, praised for its witty writing and musical numbers. Ironically, the weakest part of
Dr. Horrible
was the one thing that Joss had been lauded for through most of his career: his female characters. Penny is a disappointment, a one-note “nice girl” who serves as little more than a prize for which Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer compete. She comes across as naive and bland, especially when compared to her
vibrant and over-the-top suitors. At the very end of the series, Dr. Horrible accidentally kills her with a death ray meant for Captain Hammer. Her last words are “Captain Hammer will save us,” and her death gives Horrible the villainous cred he needs to be accepted by the Evil League of Evil. Thus, Penny plays an important role in the main character’s emotional arc, but she fails as a well-developed, independent character.

Where
Dr. Horrible
fares better is in a realm that Joss doesn’t often do well. For a person who has developed and nurtured such a large group of friends, Joss has a surprisingly soft track record when it comes to depicting male friendships. Most of the men in Joss’s stories have prickly or begrudgingly respectful relationships with one another, and they almost never unabashedly express their love—in opposition to the believable and inspiring female friendships (Buffy/Willow, Inara/Kaylee) and male/ female friendships (Malcolm/Zoe, Cordelia/Angel). Dr. Horrible and Moist are an example of one of the few easy and plausible male friendships in the Whedonverse.

Joss showed the finished series to one of the most important men in his own life: his father, Tom. As a musicals fanatic who’d written lyrics for off-Broadway shows, Tom was thrilled. “But what he loved more than anything,” Joss said, was “when the credits came up at the end and he just saw so many Whedons. I watched him just tearing up with joy that so many of us were involved in it. He just cares that he had so much fun and that it was such a family endeavor.”

Once
Dr. Horrible
moved to iTunes, it remained the number-one download for five weeks. Joss’s skeptical accountant changed his tune and asked if a
Dr. Horrible 2
was in the works. “It’s not like a huge moneymaker, but it’s something everyone believed in and everyone trusted and everyone put their egos aside,” Kai says. “That could be the future, you know. That could be how we make movies.”

There was no denying that the Whedons had found an innovative way to both engage viewers and make some money in an untested medium. Even the Hollywood trade papers took notice:
Variety
published a piece on how writers were creating series for the web, featuring Joss and the story of
Dr. Horrible’s
development—both financial and creative—and its ultimate success. Joss was gratified by the headline: S
CRIBES
S
TRIKE
B
ACK
. “There was a picture of Dr. Horrible, a picture of me with a picket sign, and nothing else on the front page. Just that article,” he recalled. “All of a sudden the politics came back into play, in a good way. People
started going, ‘Okay, we did accomplish something, we didn’t do it during the strike, but we did it and now it means something.’ Because it went from this is a political action to this is us making jokes about a horse, to this is a political action again. That was very gratifying.”

The next step was to release
Dr. Horrible
on DVD. Joss and his collaborators decided that it should be a special experience, like the Internet release had been. Joss suggested that in addition to the standard DVD commentary in which the cast and crew talk about what is happening on screen, they could record an extra commentary track in which scripted versions of the writers and actors
sing
their thoughts about the project. And so
Commentary! The Musical
was born. It serves as a bonus soundtrack to the series, if not an entirely new musical on its own. “I’ll probably regret [that idea] forever … or at least Jed will, because he had to produce everything,” Joss said. “It took us about twice as long to write and produce as the actual film. It has to contain about twice as much music, because you can’t just sort of have people talking in a musical commentary because then it just sounds like a commentary.”

Commentary!
has been called “ambitious and funny while still being cleverly lyrical.” It adds an entirely new level to Dr. Horrible and the idea of going “behind the scenes.” “Those songs are as equally entertaining to me as the songs from
Dr. Horrible
itself,” Harris says. “It never really felt like, ‘Great, we did it, now let’s sell out and make money back.’ If they’re going to whore themselves out, it’s going to be a fantastic—where do prostitutes live? Bordello. It’s going to be a fantastic bordello.”