“From now on we’re gonna have a little less ritual and a little more fun around here!”
If season one had proved there was quite a bit of life in the undead, season two is when the series truly came into its own. The show introduced the dynamic vampire duo of Spike (James Marsters) and Drusilla (Juliet Landau), Xander began dating Cordelia; Willow started a relationship with Oz (Seth Green), who is revealed to be a werewolf; and, in the most exciting, compelling, and shocking twist, Angel, after Buffy and he consummate their relationship, loses his soul and becomes evil. Truly evil, betraying Buffy repeatedly; torturing Giles and murdering his girlfriend, Jenny Calendar; and threatening to suck Earth into hell, forcing Buffy to turn Mr. Pointy on the former object of her affections.
HOWARD GORDON
(consulting producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I came on after the first season for season two. Buffy was just starting to get some notice; people had begun to sit up and notice that there was something special there. It certainly hadn’t reached its cult status. I think the newness connected with people. The emotion. Joss always minded the store in terms of emotion. These characters were real. It’s the same thing that draws anyone to a hit show is that these characters become incredibly real, incredibly vivid and have emotional lives—and it’s wildly entertaining and moving all at the same time. And funny.
DAVID FURY
(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
When my wife and writing partner, Elin [Hampton], came in to pitch to Joss and to David Greenwalt at the beginning of season two, they both let us in on little things that were coming in the show. The whole idea of the Cordelia-Xander relationship was like, “Oh my God, that’s great.” But we never really got a sense of the staff, because it was really just Joss and David we were talking to. I noticed Howard Gordon’s name on the door and I knew Howard’s work from The X-Files and I was a big fan. But I never saw him there. I never actually saw a lot of the writers. We only just saw David and Joss and they were still very clearly figuring out the show. As much as they had and were able to accomplish in that brief first season, they were still trying to find something that was going to stick.
HOWARD GORDON
I was incredibly welcomed by Joss and David Greenwalt. I had a deal at Fox and I went on to Buffy as a consultant. I was actually blown away by Joss. I don’t know if Joss’s reputation as a genius had gotten around, but I was just blown away by the show. Just how clever it all was. I was a young writer then, and Joss was younger still. He mostly had a background of working in sitcoms and script doctoring on features. Just the way he was able to mash up a rich crazy filmography and bibliography and summon them at will … What I admired and saw him do again and again is that some writers just write the first thing in their heads and sort of paint themselves into a corner, and Joss I noticed right away just had this architecture in his head where you could really see the wheels turning. It was always a total pleasure to see.
JOSS WHEDON
(creator/executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Season one we found out that we had a show. That people liked it. I thought people were going to laugh at the Buffy-Angel thing and say, “Well clearly he’s a vampire. This is so hokey.” But they couldn’t get enough of it. It definitely made me realize—and by “Prophecy Girl” we had incorporated it—the soap opera aspect of it; a continuing story of the romance and the people and their emotions was really what was fascinating. The monsters were all very well and good, but in the first season we were like, “Let’s take our favorite horror movies and turn them into high school stories.” By the second season, the horror movies were gone and the horror came from the story, the high school, the emotion.
DAVID FURY
A lot of the first season was silly fun, it was Kolchak: The Night Stalker. But season two is where the show really found itself.
SARAH LEMELMAN
(author, “It’s About Power”: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)
The relationship of Angel and Buffy is frequently thought of as the greatest romance for Buffy, as it is her first foray into love, and clearly her most passionate. Despite the fact that Angel provides tender love for Buffy, and the two are madly and deeply under the other’s spell, the series still uses this relationship to present to viewers the anxieties of teenage girls, especially in losing one’s virginity and what it means when the partner may disappear or ignore the girl, as in the case of Buffy and Angel.
DAVID FURY
It was still early in the writing stage of the second season and we sold the story which was later “Go Fish,” which was about the swim team turning into monsters. I had just read an H. P. Lovecraft short story, “Shadow over Innsmouth,” which is a story about these townspeople who were gradually turning into these fish monsters, and it really affected me. I was also a big fan of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. They had already done a Frankenstein story and the Mummy [“Incan Mummy Girl”] and clearly they’d done Dracula, although not literally yet, but vampires, so I was trying to think of what other classic monsters they hadn’t done. That’s how that story got pitched.
They weren’t quite sure where the episode would fit in, because it was very much a stand-alone episode, and after Angel’s turn when he sleeps with Buffy is when the show became so rich and emotional. The metaphor of the first guy you sleep with becoming an asshole. As soon as you let him into your pants, he becomes a complete dick. That was a fantastic metaphor. They reached the depth they hadn’t reached before in terms of the characters. Suddenly our little fish story felt frivolous and so out of place.
DAVID GREENWALT
(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I used to have soccer moms come up to me and say, “What’s going on with Buffy and Angel? Are they going to get back together?” People really got addicted to Buffy. The age of the people that watched Buffy was like seven to seventy. Grown forty-five- to fifty-year-old women were really concerned about the romance, and I knew we were onto something really good.
JOSS WHEDON
In the second season we had “Innocence” and the Angelus arc that really let the audience know that we were interested in change; we were interested in shaking things up as much as possible and interested in just making things as grown-up and complex as we could get away with. The triangle with Spike, Dru, and Angelus. Originally, we thought Spike and Dru would be fun, more hip, and they won’t be trapped in a cave like the Master, so they can actually interact. As it grew and the more we thought about it, the bigger it got until it became a really complex, adult kind of show.
JAMES MARSTERS
(actor, Spike)
It was really satisfying, because it was so obvious that Spike did not fit into the pegs of this story at all. But in a way, that’s what made it great. He was able to take the theme and put it on its head, because the theme is, How does one grow up? How does one become one’s best self? It was frustrating a lot, because I really would get just two to three pages of dialogue a script. I often felt that I was at this enormous banquet with the best food I’d ever seen in my life, but my portion wasn’t always that big and I was salivating after everyone else’s plate. But that is a glorious place to be as an actor, because what it is not is having to mumble a bunch of crap—which is death. So, both frustrating and rewarding. Actors are so greedy—we want everything.
I had been doing regional theater for ten or fifteen years. I was very happy and very poor. And then I had a son. I remember looking at his beautiful, bloody face on the bathing table and he’s being wiped off, just seconds old, and I had an epiphany. Whereas I chose to be poor—a poor artist—my son didn’t make that choice, and I was going to have to do my best to try to make some money. So I called a childhood friend, who was a casting director in town named Robert Ulrich, and asked him if he could help me get an agent. He was very gracious; he said he would. He’s been a supporter of mine since high school and we’d known each other when we were both in New York when I was at Juilliard. I told my agent that I was not coming to Hollywood for awards or to prove myself as an actor; I had done that on stage. I was here for money. I was here for diaper money. I needed health care. I needed diapers. I need formula. I needed clothes for my son. And my agent was very happy with that and started booking guest spots on cop shows, and before long I got a call that I had an audition for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I said, “Well, no, not that. Not Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I saw the movie, man. No thank you.” My agent said, “It’s Tuesday night. Why don’t you watch it and call us back to see if you might change your mind. It’s a different animal than the movie. The writer’s actually producing it and it’s got a lot of buzz around it.” I watched about fifteen minutes of it and fell in love and called my agent back in desperation saying, “Jesus Christ, yes. Holy God, it’s amazing.”
I went in and auditioned for the casting director’s assistant. They were three days away from filming at this point. They had their backs up against the wall. They’d been looking for a Spike for a while but hadn’t found someone they liked. I guess Joss had put the word out to scrape the bottom of the barrel in Hollywood … calling all the people that normally wouldn’t be seen. That’s how I got the audition. I remember wanting the role very badly. I didn’t realize the size of the role. I was only given sides to one scene, but it was a very good scene, the introduction of the character and Drusilla. I had no concept that it was going to be any bigger than one scene. It was a great scene, and I remember trying to psych out the other actors in the audition room by reciting Shakespeare, because I’d just come off of a successful production of Macbeth in Seattle. I thought that if I did some of those soliloquies, I could prove that I was the best actor in the room. I was new to Hollywood and I didn’t realize that Shakespeare’s meaningless down here. All I was proving was probably psychosis.
I’m someone that respects film acting deeply. But Shakespeare’s not in the toolbox. I’m sure all the stares that I was getting were just wondering who let the psychotic in the room. I was lording it over the other actors, so I went into the audition very full of myself, which worked for Spike. I think the reason I got cast was I got along with Juliet Landau. I was her boy toy for that story arc, and she was the character that was going to continue in the story arc and I was going to be killed off after about five episodes. But both Juliet and I were from theater, so we kind of connected on that level very quickly. That’s how I got the role.
DAVID GREENWALT
James Marsters was one of my favorite people, too, and a really interesting actor. Something about his acting let you know everything he’s thinking all the time. It’s very simple and direct in a way and in other ways it just bamboozles me, and, of course, Drusilla was great, too. Juliet Landau and James were so interesting.
JULIET LANDAU
(actress, Drusilla)
Joss has described Spike and Drusilla as the Sid and Nancy of the vampire set. I really like that analogy. Even their look was a cross between period, Victorian-looking, and Kate Moss cheap. But there was also a sweet, sentimental side to their relationship. That’s one of the things that made them interesting villains. It sort of balances out the evil, horrible deeds they do.
JAMES MARSTERS
Part of what I like about acting is being able to safely explore places in myself that normal life would not allow me to explore. I had just come off of a successful production of Macbeth in Seattle. To play Macbeth I had to get comfortable with the idea that I was a man who slashed people in half as a day job and had no problem with that. That a normal day for me was to take my sword out and just disembowel large groups of people. I had always grown up thinking of myself as a nice guy. That was a challenge for me, because a lot of actors when they approach Macbeth, they always play him like, “I know this guy’s evil, too” and I think that’s a mistake. I really did not want to go down that road.
So I did some research into being a soldier and I found someone saying that one of the things that soldiers can’t talk with civilians about is the fact that murder is fun. There’s a rush that happens when you take a life. There’s a sense of power to that. And one of the things that soldiers have to deal with for the rest of their lives is the guilt that they feel having felt this animal reaction. Civilians really don’t understand when you talk about it. Luckily, I had already played a role where I became comfortable and didn’t feel guilty about this rush of excitement, imagining doing that act.
DAVID FURY
The most helpful thing is you can articulate your thoughts to the actors to get the cast excited. “Here’s what I’m thinking, here’s what I’d like to see you do, what do you think about this?” It was wonderful to be able to have that relationship, I loved working with James Marsters. It was great, because he relished it. Some actors don’t really want to talk about it, but James loved talking about it. I would tell him something for Spike and he would just get so excited.
JAMES MARSTERS
When I took Spike, there’s a saying in theater: it’s called a play for a reason; no one pays to watch you work. They’ll pay to watch you play really well. And so, it’s always about fun. You have to have fun in what you’re doing. It seemed … the way to make the [Spike] character work was just have this guy having the best time doing the most vile act and that’s just sick … just horrible. But if you can give yourself over to it, it can be a wild, weird ride for the audience. I was able to give myself over to that. And then once you do that, you’re just through the looking glass. You’re just in new territory. Macbeth was bloody but not sadistic, and Spike asked me to enjoy the sadism. And, you know, it’s all safe. No one got hurt. I got bruised as much as anyone else, but it was a weird ride. That was probably the most enjoyable part of it initially. The character grew way beyond that. But the first rush was that.
DAVID GREENWALT
Then Spike, who was this ballsy, dangerous, scary guy, you find out was this very fey poet to begin with and then to have the idea that Spike and Buffy would someday get together. You would never think you could pull that off.
JOSS WHEDON
I do think that the balance is necessary, that you need to go from something like Xander becomes uberpopular to Ms. Calendar gets killed. I don’t think you can have one without the other. That, to me, was our most manic-depressive moment with doing those shows back to back. I love them equally for totally different reasons. It was kind of a relief to get back to the high school from the unbelievable, world-shattering angst that is the real sort of mythology episodes.
DAN VEBBER
(staff writer, season 3, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Joss would come in and say, “Here’s the arc for the next season.” Now, for all I know, he might have worked with Marti Noxon or Dave Greenwalt before I even came into the room, so I don’t know to what degree other writers might have had a say in it. But in terms of the point when I was brought into the room to break the stories or to see the arcs of the season, it was already figured out by Joss. He knew what was going on. There was some leeway in coming up with episode ideas, but then it became about, “How does this fit into the overarching arc”?
DAVID FURY
That was the brilliance of Joss. He had these things that you just wouldn’t have expected. Especially coming off of sitcom writing. A lot of it is always the status quo remains the same. People don’t change. They’ll go through funny situations and they’ll have little moments together, but ultimately every episode you’re starting from scratch. So when he would have these dramatic turns like this Angelus thing, it was incredibly daring. He and David would run through this stuff with us. He would try to keep us abreast of what they were doing as the season went on, because of the whole process of us writing this freelance script. It went over several months so we just kept seeing a prize of new developments. I would just kind of be flabbergasted by, “Oh my God, that’s great.”
DAVID GREENWALT
This was the most brilliant twist ever in the show and this is what got all the soccer moms so involved, because the curse of Angel was that if he ever knew a moment of pure happiness, he’d turn evil, right? Of course Buffy is a virgin. He finally sleeps with her … they’d been waiting. We really built up to it beautifully and then he turns into an asshole. If that is not a metaphor, I don’t know what is. Every woman at some time in their lives loves a guy, they give it up for him, and he turns into an asshole.
DAVID BOREANAZ
(actor, Angel)
The transformation of Angel from good guy to bad guy was hard for me, both personally and professionally. I was in tune with Good Angel, but I wasn’t coming home for Evil Guy. I think if you’ve played a character long enough, you subconsciously carry that character with you into your private life. You can shut it off to an extent, but there’s a part of you that still consciously lives with it. On the set, it was particularly hard doing scenes with Sarah, because she didn’t see Angel as an evil type and all of a sudden there he was.
DAVID GREENWALT
Sarah was so good at this stuff. The scenes where she’s saying, she can’t believe how he’s behaving. And he’s saying, “Yeah it was all right. You were OK, you know a little inexperienced.” My favorite thing was where Buffy’s father comes and needs to talk to her and really the whole reason the marriage broke up was because of her. That and Angel turning into an asshole were really two of my favorite things in the series, because it was so emotional and your worst fear coming true in the case of Buffy and her father, and then with Angel that great sexual metaphor. It drove season two. I remember when I first watched it and how shocked I was at how much power it brought, because he was so good at being the evil Angelus. Your heart just broke for Buffy. It was unbelievable.
JOSS WHEDON
“Innocence” was the show where everything really fell into place with Buffy going through a hero’s mythic journey, being couched in the terms of losing your virginity and your boyfriend doesn’t call. It really felt like we hit both levels at once; it speaks to people about their experience and elevates it to something bigger.
DAVID BOREANAZ
For the most part, the relationship between Buffy and Angel had been almost a Beauty-and-the-Beast type of thing. Buffy knew what Angel was, but she still loved him. Then the transition came, and it was hard for her, and also for me, to adjust. To help Sarah with the transition, after each scene I made it a point to confirm to her that, “I’m here for you. I’m not here against you. This is not who I am.” I believe there has to be a coming-down period where you hug the other actor or help the other person, and even help yourself get out of the turmoil that’s been created, instead of being submerged in it. As harrowing as that can be sometimes, it’s part of the acting process, and one that I would never even think of giving up.
DAVID GREENWALT
David [Boreanaz] was cool with it. When I did Profit, in which the leading man [Adrian Pasdar] kills his own father in the pilot with a syringe, he said, “You’re sure you want to do this on screen, because a lot of people are going to freak out.” No, it absolutely had to be done. I never heard anything from David about it. I think he loved it. It was fun and most actors love it if they can play some opposite version of their character if they can justify it. You knew it had to swing back. You couldn’t do it forever, though. Once you got all the emotion out of it, it was time for him to suffer like a son of a bitch.
JOSS WHEDON
The first time when I wrote Angel turns evil because he and Buffy made the beast, I wrote the scene where he basically pretends that he just doesn’t care about her and just acts like a dick. I didn’t drop my pen, but I actually looked at it and was like, “Oh my God, I had no idea I was such a dick.” Like, I accessed this terrible person and I was just so happy that I had this darkness in me that was just appalling, and this has been happening with this script just over and over and over. Probably too much.
DAVID GREENWALT
The great thing I like about Joss is that he would really go there. He wouldn’t protect the audience. He used to say, “You have to give an audience not so much what it wants, but what it needs.” He would really go to these places where you can’t believe what you’re seeing. It really would change up the game. Doing that takes enormous balls and it’s what made the show really good. People responded. People loved it. His stuff feels like real life, a little bit heightened, but it feels so real to people.
MARTI NOXON
(executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
For me, personally, the emotional substance of Buffy is very real. I don’t think I’m alone in that assessment, either. The killing off of [Giles’s girlfriend and Sunnydale High teacher] Jenny Calendar was one of those surprises that we keep coming up with to keep our viewers on their toes. In one of the episodes I wrote, coincidentally titled “Surprise,” Jenny turns out to be a gypsy with a vendetta against Angel.
That was an idea that just grew on its own; it wasn’t something that Joss, David, and I were purposely planning on. I don’t think we even thought, at the outset, that Jenny was going to be connected to Angel in any way, but it soon became obvious that she was. That’s the wonderful thing about learning from Joss. His mind is completely open to do things that are unexpected. When Joss told us Angel was going to murder Jenny, I stood up and said, “No! You can’t do that to us!”
Joss was so pleased, because that was just the reaction he was looking for—you know, something strong and emotional. So our characters are always turning out to be involved in stuff that I didn’t think they were going to be involved in. But it’s not always by design. A lot of times, as with “Gypsy Jenny,” we went, “Oooh, wouldn’t that be cool? Let’s do it.”
JAMES MARSTERS
Initially, it was that Angel and Buffy were going to at some point have sex, at which point Angel goes evil as many boyfriends do in real life. And Angel would kill Spike, thus becoming the Big Bad and take up with Drusilla so that Buffy would get her heart broken. That was the original plan. And they kept most of that but then didn’t kill me off.
It let Joss kind of explore Spike as the sidekick—as the jealous little brother, rather than the Big Bad that originally came to Sunnydale. Once you decide not to kill Spike off, the problem is how do you get him up off that ladder of cool and back down to earth so he can actually be explored as a three-dimensional, interesting character? That was one of the big ways to do it. I think ultimately what Joss came to with Spike was that Spike was the most successful poser in the history of the world. Like most people who want to seem tougher than they are, they just buy some leather pants and the right car or whatever. But Spike actually was made into a vampire so that he could get away with posing. Because he was super strong now and he could heal quickly and all of that stuff, he actually could pose and get away with it. That’s really interesting. The beginning of that was just to show him as the jealous little sidekick of the much cooler Angel. And luckily art imitated life enough that I was thoroughly jealous of David Boreanaz. I hated David Boreanaz for a while … to my shame, because he was nice to me from day one.
My girlfriend at the time became jealous of Drusilla and me, who struck up a close friendship. We never became romantic in real life, but we became quite close as collaborators and as friends. My then girlfriend just couldn’t stand that. So she told me that she had a crush on David. And so that’s all she wrote. I was like, “F— you, David.”
And so, as jealous as Spike was of Angel on the show, I was jealous of David in real life. I kept it to myself. And, truly, David was supportive of me from day one and kept telling me to keep doing what I’m doing, because he started out on the show exactly where I was. He kept telling me how positive people’s reactions to the character were and that I should not lose hope and that I would probably become a large part of the show. He was just my biggest supporter from day one, and I was just blinded by jealousy for a long time.
DAVID FURY
When they finally said we’re going to put “Go Fish” at the end of the second season when the whole season was coming to a climax with Spike and Drusilla and Angel killed Jenny, it was tough to have emotional grounding to an episode that was meant to be a funny lark, and it felt out of place. The fact was that Joss and David were thrilled with it and that’s all we cared about at that time.
When they called, they called gleefully from the trailer. They were jumping up and down with happiness. That was the greatest feeling to know we nailed the first hour of television we had ever written, having only done sitcoms and animated series prior to that. It was a big deal for us and it was really exciting, and so we had that to hang on to. Even as a lot of fans trashed it.
On its own merits, it’s a fun episode. But I’m with the fans when I say that’s the last thing you want to see when all this great stuff is happening on the show and you really want to bring it to the climax and you get this little side trip where Angel has one tiny scene in the episode and it’s inconsequential. People are just going, “What is this episode we’re watching? We want to see Angel and Buffy.” And we weren’t seeing it.
Another surprise for viewers as well as the staff was Whedon’s decision to have Xander and Cordelia become a couple only to have Xander cheat on her with Willow, who had long endured an unrequited crush on him, breaking Cordelia’s heart.
DAVID FURY
It was the couple that you would never have thought would happen and it happens so quickly. And it’s smart, because it brought Cordelia into the mix as opposed to always standing outside the gang making snarky comments at Buffy. It was a way of bringing her in. Every move they made was so smart. I kind of held my breath.
Joss lives in the pain. He taught all of us that that’s where the best stories live. He really did. Coming from genres that don’t convey that kind of depth of human emotion and pain and anguish and suddenly you’re writing it, I thought, Why haven’t I been writing this all along? Why haven’t I been trying to strive for this in everything I do?
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
As the show got more popular, they had to rely on servicing the ancillary characters more, and that served the show in a great way. I wasn’t in the writers’ room, but that might have been the cause of exploring those characters, bringing in Oz, being forced to build story lines for Willow. And I think that created a lot. I felt like there was a big difference between season one and two.
We learned that Cordelia’s heart is broken when she sees Xander cheat on her, and that was the first time we see Cordy vulnerable and heartbroken. That changed a lot about the way audiences saw Cordelia; seeing her in a new light they could identify with her, because it’s a universal theme. You see this woman who is so acerbic and vain get sad, and that made it even more powerful.
MARTI NOXON
I can venture to say that I used my experience to punch up the relationship between Xander and Cordelia. It’s kind of pathetic in a way because their constant feuding, then making up, is very close to how my own romantic life was. Joss often said to me, “Marti, if you had had a happier teenager-hood, you wouldn’t be here.”
The justly lauded teenage metaphors of the series were never more ubiquitous and potent than in the second season of the show, all thanks to the wisdom of Whedon, who was learning to become a show runner while producing some of the most meaningful television the medium had ever seen for a generation of adolescents.
JOSS WHEDON
I didn’t read Robert McKee. I didn’t do any of the things you were supposed to do. I was raised by an angry pack of comedy writers. Structure is always hard and it’s the most important thing. Structure is work, it’s math, it’s graphs.
JOSE MOLINA
(former assistant to Howard Gordon)
Joss is pretty easily the best writer I’ve ever encountered. He is so fast and he thinks so differently. It’s something that I learned from him as a writer that there’s a way of telling a story that is the traditional way. You go from point A to point B. Well, you know, once you’ve been writing for more than a minute, you learn, well, what if I do that backward? What if I just flip it? And what if I do B to A? And what I learned from Joss is, don’t turn it around, turn it sideways. Flip it in some unexpected way. Can you go from A to Q or from R to C? What is the thing that you didn’t see coming? And do that not just in episodes, but in scenes and in line to line to line; where you might expect a person to ask a question and get an answer, what if a person asks a question and gets another question? OK, that’s simple: What if a person asks a question and gets a recipe for french fries? OK, I didn’t see that coming, now what does that mean? That’s what he has an incredible facility with. He can see that strange, off-kilter, unexpected way of approaching a moment or a scene or a story. I still aspire to that level of it. When I have to work on it. When I have time to think about it, I need to twist this scene and then I can put myself in that kind of head. But to him, it’s just natural.
JOSS WHEDON
I will do color charts for everything that looks like I’m doing a PowerPoint presentation. This is where it’s scary, this is where it’s funny, and everything has got to find its flow and intersect. That can be appallingly hard, but the act of writing, the macro and the micro, which is having ideas and then actually writing scenes once you figure out what they need to be, is perfect bliss. It is the greatest thing anybody got paid to do. I’ll never capture that feeling in any other way and I don’t need to. Characters are the reason I’m there and they’re the most fun to think up. It’s very easy to go, “You know what would be really cool…” Even a premise is not a movie—although that’s something in American cinema that people have forgotten sometimes. So, structure is an absolute.
DAVID GREENWALT
He’s a really good fucking writer. Joss’s scripts generally start a little slow and you just think you’re in real life. Sometimes even just the first ten or eleven pages of one of the TV scripts we wrote or he wrote or we wrote together would almost start to get a little boring, and then some incredible twist happens and you’re off and running. It’s emotional, it’s funny, it has a point.
JOSS WHEDON
Two times in my life I have had an idea that had a third act in the idea. And one of them was the biggest spec sale I ever made, and I knew it would be the moment I thought of it. The other one was Cabin in the Woods, which we wrote in a weekend. You have to know where you’re going. Now, some people can write a different way and I wrote a couple of episodes where I didn’t, but there was enough structure around them like the dream episode of Buffy [“Restless”], where I was like, I know enough that I can just sort of let this flow like poetry. But almost without exception, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re never getting anywhere. And it doesn’t matter how cool the idea is and how cool the characters are. You’ve got to figure out that reason why there’s a whole movie about it. So structure, structure, structure.
DAVID GREENWALT
The trick with Joss Whedon is not just that he is a genius, the trick is he works harder than anybody else. Maybe he’s a genius with that Jeff Katzenberg work ethic. At least in those days, but as you get older and the family becomes more important it’s harder. Writing a story with him was like watching Mozart play, because you would work and work and work and then wait and wait and wait. Then eventually he’d just go to the board and start writing these beats and you’d go, “Oh, they’re perfect.” They’re inevitable, but they’re surprising, they’re emotionally connected. He always says, “I’d rather have a moment than a move. I’ll sacrifice a move if I can have a moment.” Our stuff was very emotional. We were crappy detectives and, you know, our detective work probably left a little to be desired, but that wasn’t what we were interested in. We were interested in the emotional journeys of the people.
JAMES MARSTERS
The writing, especially as far as dialogue is concerned, is something that you’d have to go back to the films of Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges to match. Really, something kind of interesting or pleasing happens every five seconds. It’ll be a turn of phrase or an event that happens, some joke that happens with such frequency that it starts to froth. Usually a movie will give you something interesting happening every three minutes or so. I feel a little weird comparing him to Billy Wilder, because that’s like comparing him to Shakespeare, but Wilder never had to crank this stuff out every week.
JOSS WHEDON
What ends up connecting with people is that if you’re not writing about yourself, why are you writing? For me if you’re not telling a story, spinning a yarn is fine and there are some people who are great at it. And they are great at things that I’m not great at. You know, like intricate heist plots and things that I admire and envy, but if you’re sitting down to write something or make something that’s going to take three years out of your life, why would you not want to tell people something that is important to you to say? I don’t mean a moral, I mean an examination of the human condition.
You want to be able to talk about the politics of personality. That’s something it took me a while to find. I started to find it on Alien: Resurrection, which is the last thing I wrote before Buffy, before the show. That was the first time I went, “Oooohh, this is a metaphor” and the only way this works is if I feel the way she feels, and that was sort of like the beginning of becoming a storyteller instead of a yarn spinner. To me, if I can’t do that, if I can’t make that connection, then I’m wasting people’s time. As much as I may look back at anything I’ve made and go, “flawed, flawed, flawed, flawed, flawed, embarrassing, embarrassing,” I never feel like I wasted somebody’s time.
HOWARD GORDON
I learned the importance, and it may be self-evident, of the architecture of each season. Joss sort of knew the story he wanted to tell, didn’t quite know how he wanted to tell it. As a show runner, it’s become increasingly important—you have to know how to ask the right questions. You may not always have the answers, but you have to know how to ask the right questions and that’s what Joss is particularly good at. Joss was truly a great show runner. It wasn’t always easy. I don’t think I learned it from Joss, but certainly along my path I saw how important it is, when you see something and your staff doesn’t always see it, so it’s about having the patience and wherewithal to communicate something that you’re not always entirely capable of understanding yet in its entirety, but keeping the conversation going. Keeping them invested in it. Giving them ownership of it. And everyone did feel ownership in that show. It’s not an accident that so many people stayed with that show through the whole run or moved over to Angel.
DAN VEBBER
(staff writer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Joss is a terrific guy. At the beginning of the year, he was a lot less harried than he was at the end of the year. So by the end of the year, the chummy guy who’d be your buddy and was willing to talk about pop culture or whatever got replaced by the guy stalking through the hallways and completely in his own world, because he just got so freakin’ busy. But he’s definitely very confident about his voice and his vision and deservedly so. I don’t have anything negative to say about him. When he didn’t renew my contract, your ego is hurt, but the next time I saw him in public, he was very gracious and said, “Look, you’re a great writer, you’re a great comedy writer, and you’re going to land on your feet.”
DAVID GREENWALT
There’s certain of us that really fit in that Joss mold, in that Joss world, and certain others did not, and never the twain shall meet. Edgar Allan Poe would’ve done really well there. Thomas Smart Hughes, who was actually a happy, well-adjusted guy—he would’ve done terrible there. You had to be really vulnerable and willing to dredge up all the horrible things that have happened to you.
DAN VEBBER
Leaving Buffy at that time, you know, like I said, my ego was bruised and I was stressed out about it, but that ended up being right when they needed people to work on Futurama, which ended up being a show that I had a far, far better fit with. And since then it’s been those animated comedies that I’ve been working on. It doesn’t wound my ego to say that I have deficiencies in writing drama scripts, because I’m so confident in my ability to write adult primetime animated-type comedies with just jokes to make people laugh. To a certain degree, that sensibility helped me on a show like Buffy, but I think it also kind of hindered me, because I wasn’t thinking in terms of what’s going to be best for the emotional drama of the story.
DAVID GREENWALT
Joss was always kind and generous and one of my favorite things about him is whatever his troubles or demons may be, he didn’t take them out on other people like so many people in our business. He would be in his own world, with his blinders on, and you’d have to remind him this shoots Tuesday and we better have some words. I used to plant myself outside the bathroom. He’d come out and I’d be face-to-face with him telling what we had to do next. He would always forget his jacket or his teacup in your office. He was just so focused on what he was doing. One day we were in a big art department meeting and, for some reason, he just laid down on this table in the middle of this big serious meeting.
JOSE MOLINA
He’s one of those people that you hear about that needs to create. That needs to write. That’s not me. I would be perfectly happy taking long vacations and traveling the world and fucking around and spending time with my friends and my family and playing board games and video games. If I was never able to write again, I would miss it but it wouldn’t kill me. I think it would kill Joss. It’s kind of like air to him. He needs it to be able to function properly.
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
(actor, Principal Snyder)
I had been working on Star Trek for a long time. I’d worked a lot of shows before, but I wasn’t educated to the ins and outs of set behavior and politics until I was involved in the Star Trek franchise. So when I went to work at Buffy, every day of every episode that I ever worked on, Joss Whedon was there. This was not the policy that Rick Berman had at Star Trek. Rick Berman was a very busy man, and we rarely saw him on the set of Star Trek, so I was not used to seeing the executive producer on the set. So a thought occurred to me, is he here checking on me? Is that why the executive producer is here? Because I’m not used to having an executive producer around.
After I had done five or six episodes, I actually posed the question to him. He said one of the places he liked to write was on set. And then with my asking, “When do you get time to write here?” he said, “Between takes.” He was an amazing man on Buffy. He was the executive producer, he was the head writer, he was the person that sold the show. And because the cast was relatively young, at least younger than the cast in Star Trek, I can say he was the chief babysitter as well. He was there, I came to understand, probably for lots of reasons, but one of the reasons was to make sure that if there were problems on set, he could take care of them before they grew into larger problems. That was a remarkable ability that probably nobody ever talks about. He is, of course, a phenomenal writer and a phenomenal producer and a great creative mind. But he’s an incredible babysitter, too.
HARRY GROENER
The very last two shows of the third season [“Graduation Day”] they sent an email, because we didn’t have a script yet and we had to go to work the next day and they said, “Well, there’s a synopsis, but there aren’t any words yet. Just come to the set.” So we go to set, we get ready, we get our costumes on while we’re waiting for some words. Finally, some words come. So we say, “OK.” We get the scene, we go in and rehearse it, they light it, and while that’s happening, Joss is back over in a corner writing the next scene.
JAMES MARSTERS
I remember being terrified of Joss Whedon. I knew that he was the creator and head writer, so I went in with a lot of respect for him based on what I had seen on the show. I remember he came in and selected my costumes, thank goodness. The costumer had pulled a lot of glam rock, kind of clear plastic shirts and stuff. And Joss knows punk rock and he just axed all of that stuff, thank God, and got me into something that worked.
JOSE MOLINA
I didn’t have a lot of exposure to Joss. I’d never been on a working set. I’d visited sets, but it was one of those things where I saw an opportunity to learn something. So I spent some time on set with Marti Noxon first season and she was amazing. I’d already read a couple of her scripts and it’s the worst kept secret in town that she did an uncredited polish on the episode “Halloween.” And her voice was quickly becoming the strongest voice on the show that was closest to Joss, which ultimately led to her running the show seasons six and seven.
MARTI NOXON
One of the reasons that Joss and I work so well together, and why this partnership was so fruitful, is that much of the time what he wants is naturally—and not in ass-kissy way—what I want.
DAVID GREENWALT
Marti’s great. She started as a staff writer, as low as you can be, and she went to executive producer in not that many years. Joss, Marti, and I used to talk about ourselves as the evil triumvirate.
MARTI NOXON
I was nervous, because Buffy was actually my first staff job. My father, Nicholas Noxon, is the head of National Geographic Documentary Division and I used to hang around him all the time when I was a kid, because I always knew that I wanted to do something in the film business. But I found out that I really didn’t want to be a documentary person—I found it very frustrating watching and waiting for animals to do things. I wanted to give them direction. I went to film school at UC Santa Cruz, and when I graduated I just worked in a bunch of different jobs in the industry, mostly as an assistant to a writer and then to a writer/producer, and I just wrote a lot. I did spec scripts, both feature and television. I actually did have one produced, and that was for the show Life Goes On. After that, I got signed by one of the biggest agencies for television and talent and they passed my material to Joss at Buffy. I met with Joss and David, and I thought it had gone miserably, and I was never going to get the job. I couldn’t tell if they liked me, but much to my delight, they did.
I think one of the reasons they liked me was because I had a real taste for the macabre. When I was writing spec scripts, most of them were ghost stories, or had some sort of supernatural element to them. One of the specs I wrote was for The X-Files. I loved that show. I have always been obsessed with ghost stories, and it seemed that David and Joss were able to pick that up. That is why Buffy was such a great fit for me.
JOSE MOLINA
Even as a staff writer she was a force to be reckoned with and very cool and down to earth and approachable and accessible. You know, enough that she hung out on set with another writer’s assistant who was just there loitering.
MARTI NOXON
My agent at the time, there were definitely people telling me not to take Buffy. When I first got the job, my mother was like, “Oh, that’s too bad. Something better will come next year.” She was excited for me, but thought there would be something better. The attitude, even two and a half years after the first season, is that I was slumming a little bit. It wasn’t like I was having offers coming out of the trees; it was my first season on a staff. I was just going on a gut instinct and the fact that, considering all of the stuff that I could have possibly worked on, this really resonated with me. And to see that kind of paid off—it’s so gratifying to see that people who love it really love it and really get it. I felt that way about the show. I feel that way about Joss and his work, and … knowing that you would be watching the show if you weren’t working on it was pretty gratifying.
When I came in to meet with them, they sent me a bunch of tapes. My agents scrounged up as many tapes as they could find. I went and watched pretty much one through twelve, trying to get ready for my meeting. By about episode four, I was hooked. I was watching one after the other, ordering take out. And then when the whole Angel thing started happening in the first twelve, I was completely addicted.
DAVID GREENWALT
I learned a lot from Joss. So many things like what we call “first thought theater.” Many television writers want to do it too quickly and they won’t wait until the idea is correct. One thing I learned from Joss is wait a long time before you go to the whiteboard and start writing down possible beats of a possible story. Like one time, [writer/producer] Jane Espenson came in with a story idea about a student who could read minds. We said, “Oh, that has to be Buffy,” and then the story broke in twenty minutes and we never had that experience again. Most of them were laborious. They took five to ten days to break. The breaking was the hardest part and the part where the most attention had to be paid. Joss hates to rewrite, so he will wait. Once we have the story, he will wait and pace and pace and pace—he loves to walk and drink tea. Then he’ll sit down and eventually write a script that needs, you know, three line changes.
DAN VEBBER
Buffy was not a very collaborative show. At least not for me. It was very much Joss’s show. So that was my first experience with the idea of a show runner who pretty much will do a page one rewrite of your draft. I’m always reticent to talk about my experience on the show, because people will compliment me about the episodes that I wrote. For the most part, the things that they were so impressed with are purely, one hundred percent Joss and not me. And I don’t want to take credit for it.
It was Joss’s show for better or for worse, and for the most part it was definitely for better. I still think it’s the best thing that Joss has done. That and more recently when The Avengers came out, which is my favorite superhero movie ever. The Joss Whedon voice works so well in certain things and Buffy was the absolute pinnacle of that. It just happened to be his first big breakthrough thing that he did.
NICHOLAS BRENDON
(actor, Xander Harris)
After a while we started thinking, “When are the great scripts going to stop coming?” But they didn’t. I felt so fortunate to be doing such good material.
KELLY A. MANNERS
(producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Joss is a genius. Some days Joss would walk around with a dark cloud over his head, and you can just tell he’s either really deeply thinking of something and you know to stay the hell away from him, but most of the time Joss was a fun-loving guy. He called me Meat Pie. Meat Pie was a nickname he gave a friend of his in school.
I’ll never forget Sarah wanted to take a week off and she announced this after we were already prepping a script, and after the weekend Joss wrote a script for her where she turned into a frog. I couldn’t believe it. It was just remarkable how that man could adapt.
DAN VEBBER
It was very much a case of him standing at the whiteboard saying, “Here’s what our story is, here’s what the outline is, go write it.” Then you would go write it and he would rewrite it. He would take snippets of my dialogue, which was always nice because, you know, in theory, that’s why he hired me, because I got these characters. I could talk in their voices. But when you look at an episode like [third season’s] “Lovers Walk,” everyone always points to that great speech that Spike gives about the nature of love and stuff and I can’t take credit for any of that. I wrote a version of that, but the version that’s in the show is one hundred percent Joss’s doing, which he did … in his rewrite.
KELLY A. MANNERS
You didn’t get scripts early with Mr. Whedon, so I got to a point on Buffy where I’d break down his outlines and guess the page counts to just get an idea if we should build a set, do this or that. I’ll never forget about the second time I did that. I put out a one-liner based on guessing page counts and everything else.
Joss went and pondered it and talked to his writers and said, “Does this scene bother you as much as it bothers me?” They all said, “No, but we weren’t going to say that.” Joss came back to me the next day and said, “You’re right. I was going to reshoot it for selfish reasons. I had something else in mind.” He was an approachable guy. If you had something to say, you better know what you were talking about instead of wasting his time. He’s a genius, and, like all geniuses, he has a quirky side as well.
JOSS WHEDON
In the sense of dialogue, it comes down very specifically to just the musicality of a phrase and because I’m a wannabe actor, obviously I say everything as I’m writing. Also because I type very slowly. You can hear when something feels really awkward or abrupt or wrong. And sometimes it’s nice to throw something off, but when I’m being specific about it, I’m very, very attuned to how that’s going to fit in the mouth, how is this going to roll off and into the next line. In terms of meaning, and in terms of rhythm. And for a long time when I started, I would be in constant conflict with people about saying things exactly as I wrote them, because I was doing something a little different than anybody was used to.
And then over the years two things happened. One: I chilled the fuck out. I started remembering it was a collaborative process. And two: I realized that people no longer had as much of an issue with the way I wrote; that it had sort of entered the mainstream enough that it was now something that people understood and they would come in and they’d go, “Oh, yeah, I don’t need to replace this with the generic version of it. I get it.” Which was gratifying.
DAN VEBBER
What surprised me is that, as a staff writer, there were days when I just had nothing to do. I would come in and sit there, but Joss was just so busy doing every aspect of the show that he wouldn’t be around. I did learn a lot about story structuring and just a lot of the basics that people who go to school for this type of thing learn in classes. Like how you construct a drama script. I had never done it before. It was like a master course from Joss Whedon, which was really cool.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
(executive producer, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena)
What I loved about what Joss did, and I saw other show runners on other shows kind of just fumble their way through a season, was he came in and knew the beginning, middle, and end, which are the important parts as long as you have that structure. At the beginning of each season, often at the end of one season, he’d start talking about the next one. He would have an idea of, “OK, this is how it starts. This is what happens in the middle. This is what we’re building towards.” With twenty-two episodes, there’s a lot to figure out. He would always have that big-picture idea. A lot of times, he would have the idea for what the episode was about or the main thing he wanted to have in the episode.
I remember episodes were usually assigned on a rotational basis. It’s like from the top of the pecking order to the bottom; the top would usually get the first episode and then it would just go in order. Then it would rotate back around. You were never quite sure which one was coming up for you. I remember I got an episode called “Seeing Red,” where Tara gets murdered. I thought, “Oh, this is a tough one.”
JOSS WHEDON
We’d spend a few days breaking a story, figuring out what to write. Then someone goes off and writes it and that took a couple of weeks—or a few hours, if that’s what we have. We shot in eight days; then we had two days to edit. We tried to figure out the story lines far in advance, but we also tried to be flexible. Like something’ll pop up and we’d go, “Jenny could be a gypsy.”
DAVID FURY
As Joss has the big ideas, he doesn’t always know exactly how they’re going to be executed and what they’re going to be. He gave us a lot of free rein, which was really wonderful and important in that he gave us the big ideas, but where we found some of the story was in things that we, being the staff, were able to create and make work. In other words, his ideas weren’t always entirely worked out. He knew where he wanted to end up, but he didn’t always know how we were going to get there. He knew some of the devices we were going to use. He knew the events he wanted to explore. But beyond that, it was up to all of us to work out and work through. He was not this guy who was dictating everything to us. He was somebody who just gave us the building blocks of what the season will be and then we got to be the ones to figure out how to get there with him. The really enjoyable part of working with him was that he was not so locked into an absolute. He was basically looking for help. “This is what I want to do, help me get there.”
JOSE MOLINA
Howard’s involvement on Buffy was cut short because he got a pilot picked up which was called Strange World, which is a show that nobody ever saw, which explains why it lasted all of eight days on the air. We produced thirteen episodes and my first ever writing credit was actually on Strange World. But, because we did the thirteen episodes, that took him out of the Whedonverse for a while. But the minute the show got canceled, it was a similar situation again, where he was still on a deal and they were launching Angel and they wanted Howard to come and join Angel.
HOWARD GORDON
I left the show because I had a pilot that was shooting that got picked up. In a way, I came on as a consultant. I had an overall deal and in some ways Fox was servicing my deal, but it wasn’t a perfect match.
JOSE MOLINA
Let me give you the roster of the fucking heavy hitters that were there. Upstairs on Buffy you had Joss, of course; Marti Noxon; David Fury; Jane Espenson; Doug Petrie; Drew Z. Greenberg; Drew Goddard; Rebecca Kirshner; and Tracy Forbes. On Angel, by the time Firefly was up and running, you had Sarah Fain and Liz Craft, you had David Greenwalt, you had Tim Minear, Steve DeKnight, Jeff Bell, Mere Smith, and then on Firefly it was Joss and Tim, Ben Edlund and me and Brett Mathews, and Cheryl Cain was a story editor. So, you had kind of three murderers’ rows of writing staffs. People who would go on to have huge careers.
HOWARD GORDON
The writing room really was a bunch of really smart people: David Greenwalt, Marti Noxon, Jane Espenson, David Fury—really good people. Joss would come in and gingerly look at the work that had been done. He was very good at not dismissing it outright, but kind of rearranging it or revising it. I have to tell you, it was a pleasure to watch him work. You would see it in his face when he sort of got it and everyone knew the process was moving the furniture around until Joss gets it, and when he did, it changed fast. It was the perennial marching back and forth, until the light went off and you could almost see the light go off. You’d wait for it. He created a great culture, and a great group of people who really respected him and got him and got it and were happy to be there.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Joss was so great to be around. Look, running a show is a pressure-filled job. Nobody can be nice all the time. He had his good days. He had his bad days. He always loved his writers. He always said that, with his writers, you could be the best writer in the world and if you don’t get along with the family, he doesn’t want you there. He really considered it a family. At that time, obviously, he had Buffy. He had Angel. When I was on Angel, he had Buffy, Angel, and Firefly. I don’t know how you run one show that goes twenty-two episodes a year, but he was taking a stab at three. He must have never slept.
JOSE MOLINA
We all parked in the same parking lot and a lot of the times we would walk in at the same time. You get into the lobby and then the different people went in their different directions. The Buffy guys went upstairs, the Angel guys went to the left, the Firefly guys went up the stairs to the right. Then we would all sort of meet at various hours of the day out in the smoking patio, where even the nonsmokers would come out, because that’s where people were hanging out. So the three staffs got to know each other. Jeff Bell was there on Angel. And he actually became the show runner that year. But Jeff was not a smoker and he would come out. The Drews would come out every once in a while. Fury would come out to bum cigarettes, because he never had a pack on him because he was trying not to smoke.
ELIZABETH CRAFT
(executive story editor, Angel)
The group of people we got to work with was extraordinary. We were just starting out and we were working with Joss, Tim [Minear], Steve DeKnight, and David Fury. Jane Espenson was upstairs and Marti Noxon. Drew Goddard was just starting on Buffy when we were starting on Angel, and Ben Edlund. It was just a great group.
JOSE MOLINA
It really became one big group of like-minded writers who were all desperately craving Daddy’s attention. Because by the time Joss was running three shows, he didn’t have enough time for any of us. Running one show is enough of an enterprise, running two is crazy, running three is certifiable.
ELIZABETH CRAFT
There was a façade over our office window, a Buffy [set] façade over it. We would constantly be having pigeons getting trapped there and beating against our window. Another thing that added to the atmosphere of working on Angel.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
In the Angel episode where Fred dies, there was that argument that Angel and Spike were having about who would win: astronauts or cavemen? And the story behind that is Doug Petrie, who was working on Tru Calling at the same time, which was in the same building, came down one day and wrote on the [dry-erase] board, “Who would win, astronauts or cavemen?” We knew it was Doug, because he tends to throw up stuff like that. Would you rather be invisible or able to fly? So we were all in the room and Joss was there and we kind of looked at it and laughed and it ended up turning into a two-hour argument about who would win.
It was a really heated argument, because that’s the kind of stuff we love. And, of course, when you’re in the room breaking the story, you’ll talk about anything except the story for as long as you can. It was such a fun time working with them. Sometimes I wanted to kill them, but most of the time, it’s just like family. It is just the best place ever to have grown up, just amazing.
JOSE MOLINA
We would always meet out in the smoking patio and the first question everybody asked was “Did you get him today?” “No, we got him yesterday; we’re supposed to get him later today.” “Oh no, he’s directing now, we won’t see him for a week.” So we would always be comparing notes. “How are you doing? Are you ahead or are you behind? What’s the story you’re breaking?” Because we all knew everybody else’s shows and we all got each other’s scripts so that we would be up to date on what the other shows were doing. We would kind of collaborate and give notes and pitch in ideas. I don’t know how many ideas ever made it across staffs, but I had a ton of conversations with Craft and Fain and with Mere Smith, who were on Angel at the time. And with David Fury and you know, whoever came knocking. Sometimes creative, sometimes personal.
The Mutant Enemy writers really became one team, which is interesting because when I was an assistant on Angel, I found out about this softball league called the Prime-Time Softball League. The Prime-Time Softball League is a league where all the TV shows play against each other. If you’re not on a TV show, you are not welcome to play in this league. So when I was an assistant on Angel, I had two shows to cull from in order to cobble together a team. And I brought it up to Joss and I was like, “Hey Joss, how would you feel if we put the Mutant Enemy shows together and play in this?” And he was like, “Great!” He was so into it for a non-sports guy. He paid for the jerseys and the hats out of his pocket. We were Team Mutant Enemy, and that was the beginning of the cross-pollination between Buffy and Angel.
Funny story, though: I was in charge of getting the shirts and the hats and Joss was so upset when he saw the shirts and the hats, because they were so fucking ugly that when I came back for Firefly, he wouldn’t let me have anything to do with it.
KELLY A. MANNERS
I remember Joss on all fours, giving pony rides in the production office to Alyson and Sarah. It was hysterical to see this genius millionaire giving pony rides in the production office.
DAVID FURY
It was extraordinarily unique. There was no social media at that time, but Joss was one of the very first. He told me about “The Bronze,” the fan-site posting-board group. They took the name from the club in the show. Joss loved to engage the fans on the posting board with every episode. He said you’ve got to go on and try this. He was excited about this feedback he could get immediately, and the fact that they treated the writers like rock stars.
When we would go onto the message boards, I can only describe it as being like throwing bread into a pond. Suddenly, all the ducks came in. You’d go on and I’m talking to dozens and dozens of people who were so excited to talk to me, to talk about the writing process, and the show. It was remarkable. It was great and an exhilarating time. I know Joss told the story of when they first went to Comic-Con after the first season and it wasn’t even what it is now. They went there and they were mobbed. It blew everyone’s mind at the time. They didn’t know anybody was watching. They didn’t know anybody cared.