It really hit me watching the season 1 DVDs of Veronica Mars recently. Veronica Mars has a lot of the season 2 Buffy vibe. Teen age angst done right, a good sense of pacing and character. But the dialogue in Veronica Mars is just a little hit or miss compared to the snappy dialog in the first three seasons of Buffy.
And a lot of geeks forget that Buffy (the TV show) really wasn’t about vampires and monsters. It was about high school.
Those first three seasons of Buffy were pretty magical, capturing the essence of high school in so many ways. The fourth and fifth seasons were very competent, but lost a lot of the charm and punch. The less said about the sixth and seventh season, the better.
Angel was very hit or miss. There were some really great episodes, but there were terrible ones, too. Much as I liked the Fred character, the episodes set in the alternate dimension where they find Fred were terrible. The whole Conner arc was also pretty bad.
Firefly was a “creative mess”. Really interesting characters, but the milieu didn’t hang together very consistently.
So I think Whedon will be remembered mostly for his early work on Buffy, which was pretty fresh at the time, and for Firefly/Serenity, which will probably be labeled noble efforts that couldn’t quite make it into the mainstream.
You’re babbling. If Buffy is the measuring stick, we’d’ve gotten 7 times the number of eps, a sweeping space saga, with far more highs than lows. Instead, a film where something drastic has to happen to make it compelling and reducing my desire to see a sequel in the process.
Yes, but he also wrote the script for Toy Story. I admit, I’m a Whedon fan. I really enjoyed Angel (the entire run, though a few episodes were groaners), Buffy 1-6 (7 blew), and Firefly/Serenity. Though Wonder Woman has never interested me at all as a character, I’ll see the film version because of his involvement.
Whoa whoa whoa. Calm down. That’s a lot like saying that Francis Ford Coppola directed Supernova or that Sylvestor Stallone edited Rambo.
Six people can claim writing credits for Toy Story.
By your logic The Criterion Collection is the greatest writer, director and editor to have ever lived because it has re-cut some of the greatest movies ever and made them better.
Just because you write a few pages of a script or direct a couple of scenes doesn’t make you legendary. Brian Singer may have written the Usual Suspects but he still thought the line “What happens to a Toad…” was good enough to leave in the script. Stanley Kubrick made Barry Lyndon (which was beautifully filmed but boring; I suppose I could use Eyes Wide Shut for a supreme example of how awful he could be when he really set his senile old mind to it).
Face it, regardless of how we personally view a director they can still fuck up. Trying to undo the fact that Whedon solely wrote Aliens 4 by saying that he was one of many co-writers on Toy Story is some sort of weirdo desperation on your part.
Here I’ll take it one step further! Whedon was one of three writers on Titan A.E., wrote a handful of episodes of Roseanne and Parenthood and was only a staff writer who wrote a handful of episodes of Angel (although I am sure he had extensive creative input on them all).
It’s a good thing for my suicidal ideation that it’s not Kitsune laying that on me.
If Buffy is the measuring stick, we’d’ve gotten 7 times the number of eps, a sweeping space saga, with far more highs than lows. Instead, a film where something drastic has to happen to make it compelling and reducing my desire to see a sequel in the process.
Right, thus the sentence about it not doing the show itself any favors. We also would’ve received a world where the man didn’t have the same amount of yearning “anything this other dude did, Joss can do better!” song and dance routine. The show getting cut down did his PR wonders.
Also…drastic things happened in the movie? Deaths, sure, but people would’ve died in our subjunctive sweeping space saga, too–they probably just would’ve been dubiously resurrected later, that’s all.
That’s what finally killed any appreciation that I had for the first three seasons of Buffy. The finale was so bad, especially Anya’s death scene and Xander’s reaction to it, that I can’t even go back and watch the early eps that I used to love. Pretty much the entirety of seasons 4-6 were shit. I really started to lose it with the Willow lesbian thing. Not that I have anything against hot redheaded lesbians, but this was a transparent plot device pulled off solely to add diversity to the show.
Plus, who wasn’t rooting for Willow and Xander from the very start of the show’s run? Pulling that away and suddenly turning Willow into a gay witch demolished her character’s development over the first three seasons.
I watched Buffy from the night it premiered, and I’m right there with the anti-Whedon angst. Desslock’s criticism is dead-on; although I do think Whedon had the teenage-speak or whatever you want to call it dialed down the first couple of seasons. It was limited, and seemed fresh. Problem is, this is what the show became known for. It seemed like whole episodes and then whole seasons were consumed with self-referential, pretentious bullshit just so new viewers who’d read the latest gush in Entertainment Weekly would get their fill of Whedon’s buzz-worthy dialogue.
By the time Firefly came out, I was so sick of this style of dialogue that I never gave the show a chance. Found it dull and noticed just enough of the ol’ Buffy pretentiousness that I figured “Hey, I’ve been down this road before” and stopped watching after a couple of episodes.
Well, off the top of my head, in the past decade or so I can think of:
David Chase on Sopranos. Alan Ball on Six Feet Under. Shawn Ryan on The Shield. Ryan Murphy on Nip/Tuck. David E. Kelley on Picket Fences. Chris Carter on The X-Files.
Eight, actually, but he still gets lead screenplay credit. His contribution was clearly more than “a few pages” or “a couple scenes.” That would better fit the guy at the bottom of the list.
Basically, anyone not named Robert Wuhl who’s worked on a show for HBO.
And let’s not forget some of the great comedy people on TV, from Larry David to Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Okay, so sitcoms aren’t the best for character development, but what about Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant?
There are tons of examples of stunning writing out there in TVland.
Remember, folks. People said the exact same things about Kevin Williamson at the height of Dawson’s Creek/Scream that they’re currently saying about this Joss Whedon dude.
Not necessarily. The way the Writer’s Guild works out credits is something of a mystery. He may have done the first draft, or he could have done the last one.
Regardless, I’m inclined to give John Lasseter as much of the credit for Toy Story as anyone.
I wouldn’t necessarily want Joss Whedon to direct every comic book movie, but having read the first two collections of Astonishing X-Men i certainly think he has a good enough grasp of the characters to improve upon the shit burger we just got served that is X:3.
Sure a lot of Buffy is cringe worthy, but i really enjoyed the majority of Angel and what there was of Firefly was great.
To be honest, I would have liked to see Whedon do Superman and Raimi do the X-Men. Raimi is amazing at character portrayal and Whedon has the right kind of snappy dialogue for Superman… Clark Kent is pretty hard to get right, I think, and Whedon would probably nail it. I honestly can’t think of better choices for either series.
I don’t have any feelings on Joss Whedon one way or the other, but here are a few television creative talents (sic) that have achieved sustained success:
J.J. Abrams - Felicity, Alias, Lost
Aaron Sorkin - Sports Night, The West Wing, & the upcoming Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
David E. Kelley - Ally McBeal, Boston Legal, Picket Fences, Chicago Hope, The Practice, L.A. Law, Doogie Howser, M.D.
Chuck Lorre - Two and a Half Men, Dharma & Greg (this one’s arguable, but in a few years both will have made it to syndication)
Angie’s right - Sarah Michelle Gellar was the Dachau where good lines went to be brutally murdered. She was the Ted Bundy of zippy zingers. She could move well, but act? Nah.
