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Joss Whedon Is Creating a Sci-Fi Drama For Fox

Posted by chrisd on from the this-man-can-do-no-wrong dept.

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.

1 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. The Anti-Cliche Man by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.