Joss Whedon Is Creating a Sci-Fi Drama For Fox

grafikhugh writes "An article on Yahoo! News states that Joss Whedon, the creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel", is close to closing a deal with Fox. He will create thirteen episodes of a "Anti-Trek" Sci-Fi Drama to be a big player in Fox's fall 2002 line up. Its seems Whedon wants to avoid aliens as the big bad, and concentrate on making "scary-ass" humans Living in a "Dark Place"." It's also worth noting the IMDB entries for a possible buffy spin-off Ripper and an animated Buffy.

Comments

Science Action

[svara]

I only hope that this will become a real _science_ fiction thing with some action... not a pseudo-science space-soap like Star Trek.

Alien Resurrection

[rnb]

Admittedly, I've never seen Buffy or Angel, or whatever those shows are, but I'm not sure I can ever forgive this guy for Alien Resurrection. Alien 3 pretty much destroyed an otherwise excellent series and then it was followed by something that could have set the series back on track but instead was just ... well, most of us saw what it was.

Yech.

Battlestar Galactica

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder if this has anything to do with the difficulties that the new Battlestar Galactica production is having with Fox.

title of the show

[Transient0]

> Tentatively titled ``Firefly,'' the new
> ensemble series takes place 500 years in the
> future and revolves around the crew of a
> "small, incredibly mobile spaceship whose aft
> end lights up", Whedon said -- hence the name.

For god's sake! you would think that a TV network would be able to afford to employ someone just to stop people from doing things like this!

i mean, come on:

"Well we don't have a name yet, but the little model we built had an LED in it's ass, let's see if we can work that into it somewhere..."

Re:Buffy and Angel?

[jaymz666]

People also tune into this for the season long story arcs, the interrelationships between the characters and the fact that most people can relate to the characters.

The Anti-Cliche Man

[fm6]

In a way, this development was sort of inevitable. There's a big market for SF on TV. But the genre's in a real rut. Most shows are invented by some semi-literate hack with one Big Idea that runs dry after a few episodes. On the rare instances where somebody has done something really creative and interesting, the project is soon taken over by media suits who judge story quality by the number of explosions, shootouts, and chase scenes.

Joss Whedon is the antithesis of all this. Not that he's any great literary genius. He just makes up ordinary, low-brow stories. But he hates hackwork, and he hates repeating himself. Most of all, he hates cliches.

You can see this in his biggest success, Buffy. The premise makes no sense at all, except as a kind of anti-cliche. It takes the biggest horror cliche of all, the helpless, clueless, personality-deficient teenage bimbo, and turns it on its head. Critics love to talk about how Buffy keeps "raising the bar", with ever stranger and more suprising stories and chracters. But really all that's happening is Whedon telling his writers, over and over, "No, we did that already."

So is good news, not just for TV SF, but for the whole genre. As bad as the idea-deficient Hollywood SF writers are, they're easier to take than all those bloated-epic writers who think that a clever idea is all you need. Somebody needs to teach all these people the basics of good storytelling, and Whedon is just the person to do it.

Re:Buffy and Angel?

[Syberghost]

Come on... not to troll or flame, but these shows only have popularity cause of one thing:
Great looking chicks.

Then why aren't other shows with MORE hot chicks more popular with the same audience?

Buffy draws an audience that includes a lot of straight girls. Dawson's Creek isn't very popular with straight guys 24-45.

In short, "not to troll or flame" was bullshit, you're trolling.