Slashdot Mirror
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.
...with Joss's work on Angel, Fray, the animated show and the limited work he does on Buffy (since Marti Noxon does most of it now), how is he going to manage everything?
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
>He came up with a concept that's part Western,
>part space drama.
Hmm... maybe we will see a return to true space opera(like 1930s sci-fi literature). I would love to see a straight up western transposed into outer space. Space-ships and six-shooters. I've always been intrigued by the crossover of high and low tech.
lysergically yours
- Sarah Michelle Geller is likely to be cast as an alien, as
the obligatory 7-of-9 clone.
- Wil Wheaton, in an effort to rescue his foundering career, will
probably be one of the main characters. He will work for cheap and he's
easily recognizable, so why not?
- David Duchovney will probably also have many guest appearances,
although keeping him on full-time will probably put the show waaaay over
budget.
- Ryan Phillippe will probably be the token pretty-boy character,
because, well, that's just what he does best.
There were many other names mentioned, of course, but these seemed to be the most credible.Bill
will they stick with the gravity generator style of space ships, as in Space Trek,....or will they have lack of gravity.
I expect the ships will have gravity, as the production hassles of faking lack of gravity would be costly.
You know, I would have agreed with you maybe a year ago. Who would want to watch a show called Buffy: The Vampire Slayer anyway??
But then one of my friends started raving about how good this series is, and he's the kind of guy who doesn't watch a show just for the good looking women.
Slowly he managed to convince me to watch the show. While season 1 was pretty bad and gave the necessary backstory, season 2 and 3 gave me some of the best hours of TV I've watched.
Angel is one of the best villians I have ever seen in my life. Sure, Darth Vader killed a lot of people and Kevin Spacey in Se7en made you want to throw up, but Angel was cruel, vicious and stabbed you in the heart with every mean word he said. The buildup of Angel as a good guy beforehand is what creates the intense emotional weight of Angel as a bad guy.
Meanwhile Xander, Willow, Oz, and all the regulars have such a great ensemble together. Joss Whedon gives them some great, witty dialogue and you find these people would be people that you'd actually want to be friends with.
This is a show that never sells out for an easy plot. When the show has twists, turns and surprises, it earns it. Even in all the silliness of the episode Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered, where Amy's love spell screws up and makes all the girls go after Xander, this act has repercussions. Willow is upset afterwards for how she was forced to act with Xander, for example.
Hush, an episode where the characters can't speak, nominated for an Emmy.
The Body, an episode where Buffy's mother dies, and the BEST episode ever for portrayal of a death. Many long cuts, slow scenes, very realistic, and no music through the entire show.
Recently, the Buffy Musical was a great achievement, even UPN allowed the show to run 9 minutes longer than the usual 44 minutes for an episode.
The show sounds really cheesy, the ideas really campy, but it never takes itself too seriously and makes fun of itself a lot. Throws in some excellently written emotional plotlines and earns the audiences' feelings. Even actors who want to get on the show usually have to convince their Agents. "You want to be on Buffy the WHAT??"
And the spin-off is quality. Angel can be described as the best stuff on TV you're not watching.
If you're not convinced, check out Buffy creator/writer/producer/director/superhero Joss Whedon's interview on The Onion and you can see how intense and visonary this guy is.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer...might as well be called Fluffy the Vampire Slayer. It's hard to take a show with such a silly premise, and a hottie like SMG as the main character, seriously.
But seriously you should take it because Buffy has got some of the best damned writing on TV today, and it keeps getting better.
Joss isn't just churning out the class-A stories, he's delving into new and exciting territory. While other shows consider themself to be forward thinking by including five seconds of girl-girl kissing, Buffy features a deep well developed relationship between Tara and Willow. This season's musical epsiode features exceptional music, vocals, and choreography. It was a total diversion from the standard Buffy format, it was incredibly good, and it leaves the viewer wondering what kind of genious could create something so different, so wonderful, and for just one episode.
Joss.
The man is a genious.
Hopefully he won't have to throw in an angst-ridden geek character for Slashdot readers to appreciate the brilliance that is Joss.
---
I support spreading santorum
Joss Whedon hated Alien Resurrection as well. His scripts are written be to delivered in a very specific way, and many directors just don't 'get' it. Here's a clip from an interview, talking about his work on X-Men and leading into Alien Resurrection.
JW: X-Men was very interesting in that, by that time, I actually had a reputation in television. I was actually somebody. People stopped thinking I was John Sweden on the phone. And then, in X-Men, not only did they throw out my script and never tell me about it; they actually invited me to the read-through, having thrown out my entire draft without telling me. I was like, "Oh, that's right! This is the movies! The writer is shit in the movies!" I'll never understand that. I have one line left in that movie. Actually, there are a couple of lines left in that are out of context and make no sense, or are delivered so badly, so terribly... There's one line that's left the way I wrote it.
O: Which is?
JW: "'It's me.' 'Prove it.' 'You're a dick.'" Hey, it got a laugh.
O: It's funny that the only lines I really remember from that movie are that one and Storm's toad comment.
JW: Okay, which was also mine, and that's the interesting thing. Everybody remembers that as the worst line ever written, but the thing about that is, it was supposed to be delivered as completely offhand. [Adopts casual, bored tone.] "You know what happens when a toad gets hit by lightning?" Then, after he gets electrocuted, "Ahhh, pretty much the same thing that happens to anything else." But Halle Berry said it like she was Desdemona. [Strident, ringing voice.] "The same thing that happens to everything eeelse!" That's the thing that makes you go crazy. At least "You're a dick" got delivered right. The worst thing about these things is that, when the actors say it wrong, it makes the writer look stupid. People assume that the line... I listened to half the dialogue in Alien 4, and I'm like, "That's idiotic," because of the way it was said. And nobody knows that. Nobody ever gets that. They say, "That was a stupid script," which is the worst pain in the world. I have a great long boring story about that, but I can tell you the very short version. In Alien 4, the director changed something so that it didn't make any sense. He wanted someone to go and get a gun and get killed by the alien, so I wrote that in and tried to make it work, but he directed it in a way that it made no sense whatsoever. And I was sitting there in the editing room, trying to come up with looplines to explain what's going on, to make the scene make sense, and I asked the director, "Can you just explain to me why he's doing this? Why is he going for this gun?" And the editor, who was French, turned to me and said, with a little leer on his face, [adopts gravelly, smarmy, French-accented voice] "Because eet's een the screept." And I actually went and dented the bathroom stall with my puddly little fist. I have never been angrier. But it's the classic, "When something goes wrong, you assume the writer's a dork." And that's painful.
Joseph Michael Straczynski.
If there were more epic stories like Babylon 5 on TV, it would actually be worth watching.
Actually, Farscape and Stargate SG-1 aren't too bad, either. Sure, there are plenty of real bad sci-fi shows, but this are all on the Big 5 (NBC/ABC/CBS/FOX/UPN), where corporate marketting reigns. On the channels that don't have to rely on people with B&W TVs using an attenna to get their sitcoms, they have enough intelligence to find shows based on good stories, and not a short-term big-hit injection (ie: good pilots, bad episodes) to get their finacial high.
Series like Babylon 5 and Farscape survive because it's a good long-term story that lasts a long time (and gets people hooked for a good amount of Nelson cash flow), and the channels that host them are willing to let them go past their 13 episodes, even if they aren't suddenly the #1 show in the universe. (The main corporates just won't settle for anything less, anymore. If you don't believe me, just look at UPNs first season, where they canned EVERY SINGLE SHOW except for their Voyager cash cow.)
Zodiac Survey