Television Producer and Writer Joss Whedon.

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Interview: Writer and producer Joss Whedon discusses his career
and his latest show, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, sitting in for Terry Gross.

(Soundbite from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer")

Mr. ANTHONY STEWART HEAD: You really have no idea what's going on, do you?
You think it's coincidence your being here? That boy was just the beginning.

Ms. SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR (Buffy): Oh, why can't you people just leave me
alone?

Mr. HEAD: Because you are the slayer, and to each generation, a slayer is
born, one girl in all the world, a chosen one, one born with the strength and
skills...

Ms. GELLAR: With the strength and skills to hunt the vampires, to stop the
spread of their evil, blah, blah, blah. I've heard it, OK?

Mr. HEAD: I really don't understand this attitude. You've accepted your
duty. You've slain vampires before.

Ms. GELLAR: Yeah, and I both been there and done that, and I'm moving on.

BIANCULLI: That's Sarah Michelle Geller and Anthony Stewart Head from the
very first episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," a 20th Century Fox
production that airs on The WB. The show and the character were created by my
guest, Joss Whedon. Viewers put off by the silly "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
title, or by monster dramas in general, are missing something really special
here.

Despite its paranormal situations and characters, and sometimes because of
them, Buffy is turning out some of the best stuff on TV right now. Genuinely
funny jokes and seriously dramatic situations are dolled out in equal measure.
The show is full of metaphors about how loved ones can turn into monsters, how
high school and college life is a particular type of hell and how everyone, to
some extent, is haunted by his or her own demons. Characters grow, change and
sometimes even die. And Buffy, through the course of the series so far, has
survived high school, left home and her first serious relationship behind, and
moved on to college while still fighting demons on the side. She's gotten
older and wiser, but life hasn't gotten any easier.

This season, "Buffy" generated its first spinoff series, "Angel," starring
David Boreanaz as a heroic vampire, and the two series currently run back to
back on WB's Tuesday schedule. Let's listen to the first "Buffy" episode of
this season, written by Joss Whedon. Buffy is having a difficult first year
in college. She goes back to her old high school hangout and runs into her
pal Xander, the only one of the old gang not going to college. Xander, played
by Nicholas Brendon, asks her how it's going.

(Soundbite from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer")

Ms. GELLAR: College is good.

Mr. NICHOLAS BRENDON (Xander): OK, once more, with even less feeling.

Ms. GELLAR: No, really. I mean, Willow's in heaven and Oz is in this really
cool house off campus with the band.

Mr. BRENDON: And you're sitting here alone at the Bram's(ph), looking like
you just got diagnosed with cancer of the puppy.

Ms. GELLAR: It's just there's this vampire and she took me down, and I
just--I don't know how to stop her.

Mr. BRENDON: Then where's the gang? Avengers assemble. Let's get it going.

Ms. GELLAR: No, I don't want to bug them. I mean, they're just starting
school, and they don't need this.

Mr. BRENDON: OK, Buff, what's the `what' here?

Ms. GELLAR: It's just what if I can't cut it?

Mr. BRENDON: Can't cut what, the slaying?

Ms. GELLAR: Slaying, everything.

BIANCULLI: Joss Whedon, welcome to FRESH AIR.

Mr. JOSS WHEDON (Executive Producer, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"): Thanks for
having me.

BIANCULLI: We started this off by just listening to a very small piece from
the first episode where Buffy is very reluctantly coming to terms with her
fate. And I'm wondering if you can think back to that first episode so long
ago and how you feel about where her character has grown and whether you
anticipated any of that back in season one.

Mr. WHEDON: The character of Buffy has grown a lot. I had always imagined I
would take her on a pretty long journey. I didn't realize exactly how far
we'd go. I didn't realize how far the actress could go when we first started.
I knew that I wanted somebody who had to deal with the responsibility of this
great weight, this burden of being a slayer, and that that would help her to
grow up as a person. But I didn't know, you know, until I worked with Sarah
for a while, you know, how far she could take it, how deep she could go in
terms of the grief she could experience and the growth and the intelligence
she would bring to it.

BIANCULLI: Did you know what you wanted to do in terms of this TV series,
having come from places like "Roseanne" and doing movies and stuff, what you
wanted out of the TV experience?

Mr. WHEDON: Well, what I wanted was to create a fantasy that was,
emotionally, completely realistic. That's what really interests me about
anything. I love genre, I love horror, I love, you know, action, I love
musicals, I love any kind of genre, and "Buffy" sort of embraces them all.
But, ultimately, the thing that interests me the most is people and what
they're going through, and that's why I loved "Roseanne," that's why I wanted
to work on it, because it was the only sitcom I felt was genuinely funny and
also very real and very kind of dark. And that's what I wanted to bring to
this.

BIANCULLI: There's one thing I'm really curious about in terms of your work,
and that's if you see it, what you're doing every week in "Buffy," as writing
different chapters of a novel. That by being in control--because you spend so
much time reflecting on past history of the characters and past things that
they've done, if you're careful about the sequence and if I'm correct in
presuming that you allow ramifications to spread on down the line with what
these characters do from week to week.

Mr. WHEDON: Well, I'm very, very much aware of it as being like a novel.
You know, the only equivalent to what you can do with a soap opera
(unintelligible) to me is, you know, what Dickens was doing, and he happens to
be my favorite novelist, the idea that you can get invested in a character for
so long and see it go through so many permutations. It's fascinating to me,
the shows that I've always loved the best, "Hill Street Blues," "Wiseguy,"
"Twin Peaks," have always been shows that did have accumulative knowledge.
One of the reasons why "The X-Files" started to leave me cold was that after
five years, I just started yelling at Scully, `You're an idiot. It's a
monster,' and I couldn't take it anymore. I need people to grow, I need them
to change, I need them to learn and explore, you know, and die and do all of
the things that people do in real life.

And so we're very, very strict about making sure that things track, that
they're presented in the right way. Because, ultimately--and this is one of
the things that I did find out after we had aired, the soap opera, the
characters, the interaction between them is really what people respond to more
than anything else. And although we came out of it as a sort of monster of
the week format, it was clear that the interaction was the thing that people
were latching onto. So we were happy to sort of go with that and really play
it up and really see where these characters were going to go. So now it is
very much a continuing show, and we're always aware of that.

BIANCULLI: Now what part of--what seasons of "Roseanne" did you work on, and
what basically where the story arcs at the time?

Mr. WHEDON: I came in in the second season; I was there for one year. It
was--I guess Jackie was becoming a cop and--well, they're all very young. It
was very early on. Roseanne had just quit her job and was unemployed for a
while. It was the beginning of her hunt for work. And I quit after a year,
just because it was kind of chaos there.

BIANCULLI: Would you like to comment on the type of chaos?

Mr. WHEDON: The type of chaos was merely that, you know, they had a bunch of
writers who really didn't know how to write the show, or a show. They were
sort of not the right people to be there, and then they had--you know,
Roseanne was difficult. I don't think I'm breaking a big news story by
explaining that.

BIANCULLI: Right.

Mr. WHEDON: And for a while, the chaos worked for me because I got to write a
lot of scripts and I really got to work; I got in there. And then I sort of
got shut out of the process by the producers. As it got more insane there,
they got more insular and they just sort of locked themselves in a room and I
found myself with nothing to do, so I'd come in, work on "Buffy," the movie
script, and go home. And I realized that was not what I wanted to do, so I
quit.

BIANCULLI: You were also pretty much a puppy then, weren't you? How old were
you?

Mr. WHEDON: I was 24 when I started.

BIANCULLI: Yeah.

Mr. WHEDON: That qualifies me for puppy status.

BIANCULLI: I guess. Well--but, you know, one interesting thing about your
doing television, even though you're working on film and stuff at the time, is
that you're one of the few people that I've interviewed in terms of
writer/producers where you don't imagine a scene where having to go home and
tell your parents, `Oh, I'm going to write for television.' Because, you
know, it's in your line with both your father and your grandfather writing for
TV.

Mr. WHEDON: Yes, it's true. Well, I do think there was a bit of `Oh, maybe
he'll do something better than we did.' But, no, my father was
extraordinarily supportive.

BIANCULLI: Now in terms of your grandfather's credits, the only one that I
know of is "Donna Reed."

Mr. WHEDON: "Donna Reed." There was "Mayberry, R.F.D.," "Dick Van Dyke." I
know there was a "Room 222" I saw in college that he wrote. But those were
the ones that I remember the best. He also did radio before that. I have a
bunch of great "Gildsleeves" that he wrote.

BIANCULLI: Oh, wow. And then your dad, besides "Golden Girls"?

Mr. WHEDON: Well, when I was little, he did "Captain Kangaroo" and "The Dick
Cavett Show," and then he won an Emmy, actually, for being head writer of "The
Electric Company" when he was still in New York. And then he came out here,
he worked on "Alice," "Benson," "Golden Girls," "It's a Living."

BIANCULLI: Now how did you get involved in film?

Mr. WHEDON: I always loved movies, always wanted to make movies. When I got
to college, I ended up studying movies--to no one's great surprise--majoring
in film and not really having a clue about how it was I was going to enter the
world of film, because I didn't really think about being a writer until
necessity forced me to, and once I started writing, I started writing spec TV
scripts and realized that, you know, writing was my favorite thing in the
world. But the idea was always to head towards the movie world and eventually
I wrote "Buffy," which was not originally picked up, but did create a little
heat and I wrote a couple of specs and I started to get movie work and--some
of which was great, but most of which was ultimately pretty depressing.

BIANCULLI: Well, let's work through a little bit of that chronologically. I
know in terms of your credited writing stuff. Of course, there's "Toy Story,"
everybody would know that, and probably "Speed" and "Twister," "Alien:
Resurrection."

Mr. WHEDON: "Speed" and "Twister" are not credited.

BIANCULLI: But they're the uncredited ones.

Mr. WHEDON: Yes.

BIANCULLI: I was going back and forth.

Mr. WHEDON: I can't believe you left out "Waterworld," but...

BIANCULLI: Well...

Mr. WHEDON: ...because I'm so proud. Apart from "Waterworld" and the
"X-Men," which is going to come out, and "Titan A.E.," which is about to come
out, there haven't been that many. I stopped doing it, pretty much, when
"Buffy" came along. I had "Alien" about to start production, and so I had
plenty, and so I haven't done a lot of rewrites lately.

BIANCULLI: Now isn't the process completely different for writing a script
for film when you can be one of, you know, 18 drones and a line gets in or
nothing gets in vs. being a writer/producer where it's your vision?

Mr. WHEDON: Yes, I mean, it's completely different. Everything about TV is
geared towards the writer, because, ultimately, it has to be a writer's
medium. Yes, you have stars and some of them have enormous power--sometimes
too much, sometimes the right amount, sometimes, you know, you get very smart
people who know what they're doing. But, ultimately, you know, you have to
tell the story every week, and the bad news is if the story's not interesting,
they're not coming back the week after. So you really have to maintain a
level of quality that is based in the story.

BIANCULLI: Let me ask you about how you get in a position with The WB to turn
a movie that, at the time, was four or five years old, into a weekly series.

Mr. WHEDON: Well, Gail Berman went to work at Sandollar, who had the rights
to "Buffy" and very much wanted to turn it into a TV series. And when she
approached me and I thought about, you know, the idea of telling horror
stories about high school, since high school was pretty much one long horror
story in my life, I thought that's actually a series that actually makes sense
that's interesting to me. So we developed it and then The WB just--right
away, we pitched it to a couple of places--Fox turned us down. NBC, I don't
even know why they asked us to come in. And then The WB got it right away,
and my biggest fear was that they were going to say, `Make it stupid or make
it lighter. Make it fluffier. Take away the edge.' And, in fact, they very
much encouraged the dark side of it.

BIANCULLI: My guest is Joss Whedon. We'll be back after a break. This is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Joss Whedon is my guest. He created the show "Buffy the Vampire
Slayer." Now is it unfair to ask someone who creates all of these characters
if there is one that you either relate to more or have more fun writing when
you drop into the various skins?

Mr. WHEDON: You know, I have fun writing all--I love to write all of them,
and part of that comes from the actors, because their voices are so unique
that the more I know them, the more--like I started to write Willow the way
Alyson spoke throughout the first season, because she has such a particular
cadence and she and Nicky are both so witty. It's--of the characters
that--you know, Spike is always going to be fun to write, because he's always
going to have the meanest opinion about anything, and therefore, you know,
he's always got a good attitude. He's never just going to be there and be
sincere and give exposition. He's always going to put a spin on something.

As far as who I relate to, Xander was obviously based on me, the sort of guy
that all the girls want to be best friends with in high school, and who's, you
know, kind of a loser, but is more or less articulate and someone you can
trust. That part wasn't like me, but the rest was. And I also sometimes
identify with Giles, particularly when I'm working and I just--I feel like I'm
supposed to be the grown-up in an insane group of children who are not paying
attention to me when we have this mission which, in my case, is to create this
show. But I also went to English boarding school, and so knew a lot of Gilesy
people, so he has a particular resonance for me.

BIANCULLI: When you build this show, even though it was set in high school,
when it came time for them to graduate, you allowed them to graduate and then
moved on to a different venue in terms of college. Number one, is that a
reaction against, you know, the AARP card-carrying members of "Beverly Hills
90210" and that sort of thing? And is it just the idea of the ongoing
Dickension story that you want to tell?

Mr. WHEDON: Yeah. You know, I wanted to do the next thing, and sometimes I
thought, `Oh, I wish I could've kept them in high school a little bit longer,'
but it would have started to look silly. I did make one compromise. I had Oz
repeat a grade because I wanted him to be there for Willow, and he had
ostensively already graduated. So that was my one cheesy maneuver. But I
really felt like, yes, I want to keep him in high school, and that's probably
the way they feel. Yes, I'm worried that college is going to be, you know,
different and not as cool and we won't be as popular as a show, and that's
what they'd feel.

The important thing is always to match whatever your characters are going
through to whatever you're going through as a creator to what the audience is
going through. When people worried about, `How are you ever going to give
Buffy a boyfriend after Angel, how are they ever going to get over each
other?' Well, that's exactly what Buffy was worried about, that's exactly what
Angel was worried about. You know, it's taking the challenges, it's taking
the fears that you have and letting everybody go through them, because,
ultimately, everybody always does.

BIANCULLI: And then you also get the metaphors as well when she goes to
college and has a roommate from hell that pretty much is a roommate from hell.

Mr. WHEDON: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, there wasn't anybody I know who didn't
say, `Oh, yeah, that was me.' You know, everybody thought that was based on
them.

BIANCULLI: Whenever a program is not set in regular, present-day, normal
stuff--I mean, everything from "Star Trek" to "Bonanza," those shows are able,
if they want to, to talk about certain issues at the time, or to get away with
some things that they can't otherwise. And I'm wondering if, well, the title
of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and the idea of monsters, in some respects, may
make it a little harder for you to get respect from the Emmy community or
something else. Does it also make it easier for you to tell certain stories
or explore certain ideas?

Mr. WHEDON: Absolutely it makes it easier. You know, "Star Trek" dealt with
a lot of issues, you know, that other people weren't dealing with. As I said
before, "Buffy's" not really an issues show, it's more emotional. But it
allows us to get into some very hairy emotional places week to week in a way
that you just couldn't with a normal show. You'd think your characters were
schizophrenic. When you have the fantasy, you know, element of `Oh, here's my
evil twin,' you can really examine another side of a character and you can go
to a very dark place if you want to. You can kill people off, you can bring
them back, you can do all these things. You can put everybody through intense
emotional paces, and that emotional realism is the core to the show. It's the
only thing I'm really interested in. But when you have just a normal show,
you can't really take them to that many different places without it just
seeming very fake. It's like--you know, soap operas, it's like, `Who's going
to get kidnapped today?' You can only do that so many times. But when your
show is structured around a genre show--horror or fantasy or science
fiction--then you have, you know, great license.

What we don't have, which is what some science fiction shows have, is we can't
just do a thing because it seems cool. Everything that we pitch, everything
that we put out there, whether or not it works, is based on the idea of: The
audience has been through this. A normal girl goes through this. A normal
guy deals with this. You know, it's issues of sexuality, popularity, jobs.
Whatever it is, it's got to be based in realism. We can't just say, you know,
`The warship's come and, you know, they transmogrify, the--blah, blah, blah.'
We can't do that. We can go to some pretty strange places, but at the start,
we always have to be about, `How does the audience relate to having done this
themselves?'

That's why when we aired Innocence, when Buffy slept with Angel and his curse
went into effect and he became evil again, I went on the Internet and a girl
typed in, `This is unbelievable. This exact thing happened to me,' and that's
when I knew that we were doing the show right.

BIANCULLI: All right. Let's listen to a clip from Innocence. This is the
episode where Angel becomes evil.

(Soundbite from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer")

Ms. GELLAR: Oh, my God, I was so worried.

Mr. DAVID BOREANAZ (Angel): I didn't mean to frighten you.

Ms. GELLAR: Where did you go?

Mr. BOREANAZ: Been around.

Ms. GELLAR: Oh, my God, I was freaking out. You just disappeared.

Mr. BOREANAZ: What? I took off.

Ms. GELLAR: But you didn't say anything. You just left.

Mr. BOREANAZ: Yeah, like I really wanted to stick around after that.

Ms. GELLAR: What?

Mr. BOREANAZ: You've got a lot to learn about men, kiddo, although I guess
you proved that last night.

Ms. GELLAR: What are you saying?

Mr. BOREANAZ: Let's not make an issue out of it, OK? In fact, let's not
talk about it at all. It happened.

Ms. GELLAR: But I don't understand. Was it me? Was I not good?

Mr. BOREANAZ: Oh, you were great, really. I thought you were a pro.

Ms. GELLAR: How can you say this to me?

Mr. BOREANAZ: Lighten up. It was a good time, all right? It doesn't mean
like we have to make a big deal.

Ms. GELLAR: It is a big deal.

Mr. BOREANAZ: It's what? Bells ringing, fireworks, the Dulcid Choir or
pretty little birdies? Come on, Buffy. It's not like I've never been there
before.

Ms. GELLAR: Don't touch me.

Mr. BOREANAZ: I should have known you wouldn't be able to handle it.

Ms. GELLAR: Angel! I love you.

Mr. BOREANAZ: Love you, too. I'll call you.

BIANCULLI: That's David Boreanaz and Sarah Michelle Gellar in a scene from
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer." My guest, Joss Whedon, will be back in the second
half of the show. This if FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Funding credits)

BIANCULLI: Coming up, Angel moves to Los Angeles and Willow finds a
girlfriend. We continue our conversation with "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.
And Geoff Nunberg tells us what's wrong with so-called censor-ware.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, sitting in for Terry
Gross.

My guest is Joss Whedon, creator of the show, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
Whedon has also written a number of the episodes, including the one we are
about to hear. In a recent two-part episode, the character, Faith, a slayer
who started using her power for evil instead of good, found a way to switch
bodies with Buffy. So Sarah Michelle Gellar had to play Faith pretending to
be Buffy. She's a bad Buffy, but her friends and enemies don't know that.
And in this clip, bad Buffy is at a club and runs into Spike, played by James
Marsters. Spike is a vampire adversary who no longer is able to bite people.

(Soundbite from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer")

Mr. JAMES MARSTERS (`Spike'): Oh, fine, throw it in my face. Spike's not a
threat anymore. I'll turn my back. You can't hurt me.

Ms. SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR (`Buffy Summers'): Spike, Spike, William Bloody
with a chip in his head. I kind of love this town.

Mr. MARSTERS: You know, why I really hate you, Summers.

Ms. GELLAR: 'Cause I'm a stuck-up tight ass with no sense of fun?

Mr. MARSTERS: Well, yeah, that covers a lot of it.

Ms. GELLAR: 'Cause I can do anything I want; instead, I choose to pout and
whine and feel the burden of Slayerness. I mean, I could be rich, I could be
famous. I could have anything, anyone, even you, Spike. I could ride you at
a gallup until your legs buckled and your eyes rolled up. I've got muscles
you've never even dreamed of. I could squeeze you until you popped like warm
champagne and you begged me to hurt you just a little bit more. And you know
why I don't? Because it's wrong.

(End of soundbite)

BIANCULLI: You wrote that, didn't you?

Mr. WHEDON: Yes, I did, actually.

BIANCULLI: OK. So what's that like to write? What's it like to hand out to
the different actors and what's it like to have it done on the floor?

Mr. WHEDON: Well, it's--the most fun is writing it--is figuring out what
these characters need to say to each other and pushing the envelope sometimes
in terms of the kind of content we get. Obviously, that could be taken to be
a little bit dirty, that speech. But, you know, and Faith is very much
somebody who uses her sexuality to, you know, wield power over people.
It's--you know, once I give it to the actors at this point, they're pretty
much--they just go with it, you know, I can't surprise them anymore.
They--they're used to having to do everything. The stranger things get, the
more they have to play somebody who's not them. You know, the more they take
it in stride.

And shooting it--shooting it is, you know--it just depends on the day. It's
always fun to shoot the scenes with James. Sarah loves working with him
because, you know, he has a great rapport with everyone and people don't get
that many scenes with him--Spike--so they always relish them because he always
brings a very different perspective. And for him to be completely controlled
by somebody else in the scene. Faith, who is basically just badder than he
is, you know, is a different experience for him. So that's always fun. But
then you have to shoot like 19 angles of it, you know, and then it becomes
less fun. And then it gets genuinely boring.

BIANCULLI: Right. I know it eventually it ends up as work. Plays well on
the screen. When you talk about the flexibility and the versatility, that's
also definitely true of the co-stars and just about everybody who appears in
the show. And I'm wondering, you came to "Angel" as the spin-off and to David
Boreanaz as his character, but you could have gone--it would seem--with a
half dozen of them and spun off. How did you decide upon "Angel"?

Mr. WHEDON: Well, I've always have been of the opinion that any one of these
guys could sustain their own show. I think they're that good. I think
they're that interesting. And I think they're pretty. But Angel became the
logical choice for a few reasons, and that was clear early on. One, he is
like Buffy bigger than life, you know. He, for the first couple of seasons
anyway, was the only superhero on the show, in a sense, that Buffy was. You
know, he had something more. Now, you know, Oz became a werewolf, Willow
became a witch. Everybody sort of had something to make them more than they'd
been. But at the time, everyone else was enormal mortal, whereas, Angel was
kind of a bigger-than-life character. And if people responded to him like
that then he was gonna have a kind of heat that would certainly make the
network interested in making a show about him.

I also knew that the romance between Buffy and Angel could go so far before it
became incredibly tired. And we found interesting ways to shake that up,
obviously. The moment she slept with him, he turned evil, which, you know, as
I was saying before, in that episode, innocence was a huge benchmark for the
show. But ultimately, you know, there were so many variations we could play.
And so, even though people are constantly yelling at me and screaming on the
Internet that I have to get them back together, we knew that there was gonna
come a time where there wouldn't be as much of a place for Angel on the
show, so it made sense to give him his own.

BIANCULLI: The idea of getting to the point where you have him trying to
redeem the bad character of Faith because he had been a bad character himself,
and then having Buffy come in and almost be the villain in this triangle--not
the villain, per se, but just that it changed the dynamics so much. These seem
to be pretty high stakes chess moves with these characters.

Mr. WHEDON: Well, you can't--I mean, you can't bring Buffy to Angel without
a good reason, without--you know, without it making an impact. You can't just
drop by and borrow a cup of sugar. For one thing, it's too difficult
production wise. For another thing, it sort of lessens their impact as mythic
characters. We brought her back once before and they'd had the grand love
that they'd always been denied in an episode called I Will Remember You(ph).
And then, of course, it was forced to take it all back and she remembered none
of it. So we had played, you know, great tragic romance in that respect and
it was a lot of fun and very much felt like a calumniation of where they'd
been going, but what do you do the next time?

And when we realized the kind of conflict they were gonna have over Faith and
how they would have two totally different perspectives about it, we realized
that that was what we needed to play, that in terms of creating the mythic
story with the big characters. Here are three characters, you know, coming at
an issue from three totally different angles, so they really conflict on a
higher level, but at the same time emotionally, it's that thing of, `You can't
stay away from your old boyfriend or girlfriend, but you can't get along even
remotely.'

BIANCULLI: Let's listen to a clip from "Angel." This is last week's show
where Buffy made a guest appearance.

(Soundbite from "Angel")

Mr. DAVID BOREANAZ (`Angel'): I needed more time with Faith. I'm not sure...

Ms. GELLAR: You needed--do you have any idea what it was like for me to see
you with her? That you would behind my back...

Mr. BOREANAZ: Buffy, this wasn't about you. This was about saving
somebody's soul. That's what I do here, and you're not apart of it. That was
your idea, remember? We stay away from each other.

Ms. GELLAR: I came here because you were in danger.

Mr. BOREANAZ: I'm in danger every day. You came because of Faith. You were
looking for vengeance.

Ms. GELLAR: I have a right to it.

Mr. BOREANAZ: Not in my city.

Ms. GELLAR: I have someone in my life now that I love. It's not what you
and I had. It's very new. You know what makes it new? I trust him. I know
him.

Mr. BOREANAZ: That's great. That's nice. You moved on. I can't. You found
someone new, I'm not allowed to, remember? I see you again, it cuts me up
inside. And the person I share that with is me. You don't know me anymore,
so don't come here with your great new life and expect me to do things your
way. Go home.

(End of soundbite)

BIANCULLI: That was a clip from "Angel," and we're talking with its
co-creator Joss Whedon.

One of the things that you do from time to time in "Buffy" and in "Angel" is
to establish a very important character and then ruthlessly and unexpectedly
kill them off. And you have said that you like surprises. But with Jenny,
for example, in "Buffy" and with Doyle who was a co-star in "Angel," you just
set up these people and then take them from us. "St. Elsewhere" did that.
"Twins Peaks" did that. Not a lot of TV shows do that. Why do you do that,
and what reaction do you get from fans when you do do it?

Mr. WHEDON: Well, I do it because I want to keep afraid. I want to keep
people in suspense. I want people to understand that everything is not
perfectly safe. The problem with doing a horror show on television is that
you know your main characters are coming back week to week, and you're
not--you don't really care about, you know, somebody who just showed up for
one episode. So, you know, every now and then you have to make the statement,
`You know, nothing is safe.' And that's a very effective way of doing that.
If somebody objects, if somebody says, `How could you kill that character?
You have to bring that character back. You have to bring that character
back.' I know I've done the right thing. If they go, `Oh, they're dead,'
then I killed the wrong person because nobody cares. One of the things that
people always shy away from is killing a sympathetic character.

When I worked on "Speed," there was a character who died--a lawyer that Alan
Ruck played and I took out the lawyer, he was a bad man, he was terrible, he
was--you know, he was causing trouble and he ended up dying. And I turned him
into a likeable, sort of a doofy tourist guy, and they're like, `Well, now we
can't kill him.' And I--my opinion was, `Well, now you should because now
people will actually care when he dies.' But nobody wants to kill a good guy,
it makes them twitchy, particularly on a series. And we were very careful
about it because if there's somebody we know we're gonna want for future
episodes--but then again, Jenny Calendar worked more episodes probably
after she died than she did before because on our show everybody's a ghost,
everybody's a whatnot. But it does inflame emotion sometimes, but that is, in
fact, what I'm trying to do.

BIANCULLI: My guest is Joss Whedon, creator and executive producer of the
show. We'll be back after this break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: My guest is Joss Whedon.

When you talk about the resonance of characters and keeping the history going,
back in the episode of Doppelganger, I guess a couple of seasons ago now,
there was a reference made to Willow, Alyson Hannigan's character, as, at
least in this other existence, having a bisexual sexuality, and that
supposedly based on the Doppelganger rules, that that might mean something on
this real Buffy world. And in the most recent episode of "Buffy the Vampire
Slayer," which I think was, by the way, a very dramatic and very well-done
hour of television...

Mr. WHEDON: Thank you.

BIANCULLI: ...it culminated with a readjustment of Willow's sexuality, and
yet, if you'd been watching the show for a couple of years, it wasn't like an
Ellen move or anything else that was--it seemed very organic and natural to
the story, and I was wondering how the decision was reached to go that way and
with as much restraint as the episode presented it?

Mr. WHEDON: Well, the arc between Willow and Tara has kind of a long and
sort of tortured history. We had thought about the idea of someone exploring
their sexuality, expanding it a little bit in college, because that's felt
like one of the things that might happen in college. Since we tend to work
inside metaphor for most of the show, you know, we talked about Willow and
her, you know, being a witch because it's a very strong female community, and
it gives her a very physical relationship with someone that isn't necessarily
sexual at first. And then when we decided to go that way, part of it was
because Seth Green wanted to step out and do movies, and we knew that he was
going to be out of the picture and, you know, we had to do something with
Willow, and it seemed like a good time for her to be exploring this.

Then the question just became how much do we play in metaphor and how much do
we play as, you know, her actually expanding her sexuality? And you're
walking a very fine line there. The network obviously has issues. They don't
want any kissing. That's one thing that they've stipulated. And they're a
little nervous about it. Ultimately, they haven't interfered at all with what
we've tried to do, but, you know, they've raised a caution about it. And, you
know, at the same time, you have people--the moment Tara appeared on the
scene, saying, `Well, they're obviously gay. Why aren't they gay enough?
They're not gay enough. You need to make them more gay.' You know, people
want you to make a statement. They want you to turn it into an issue right
away. So you sort of have forces buffeting you and you're trying to come up
with what is both emotionally sort of correct as a progression and also sort
of mythically significant in terms of your greater arc. You're trying to
wield all these things and, week to week, sort of make this thing progress.

BIANCULLI: Now when you do these major moves for your characters, the story
meetings that you have with the other writer-producers, how far ahead are you
working? What's your bible like or whatever it's called?

Mr. WHEDON: Generally speaking, I come into a season with the arc for the
season, the main fill-in, you know, the main sort of journeys for each of the
characters, where are they going to go and some benchmarks--certain episodes.
Somewhere around episode 10, this has to happen. Somewhere around episode 15,
this has to happen. We have to keep it flexible, because you come up with
better ideas or an actor falls out or something happens, you know. The
process of creating TV is entirely fluid. You always have to be ready to be
thrown a curve, and in our case, every time we have, I think it's helped us
out a great deal. I really think what we're doing with Willow and Tara is
interesting. And Amber Benson's a wonderful actress. That might not have
happened if we hadn't lost Seth.

You always have to be ready for those things, and they tend to work out really
well if you are. But at the same time, you must have a bigger plan, both
emotionally and structurally. Because I make each year on "Buffy" work as a
separate arc. I did that with the first season because I didn't know if we
were ever going to air again, and I absolutely hate a show that ends in the
middle before everything's over. It drives me insane if the story isn't
finished. So with Prop Seeker(ph), on the last episode of the first season, I
finished the story, and if we had never aired another show, it would have
still been a self-contained union of 12 episodes that told a story. So that's
how we designed every year. And right now, we're in the process of discussing
year five of "Buffy" and year two of "Angel," figuring out, you know, the
benchmarks for those seasons.

BIANCULLI: And I guess my last question then is: Is there anything in
general you can tell us about any of those story arcs in general, or if not,
what you can tell us about what you're doing next?

Mr. WHEDON: Well, I can't tell you much about what's going to happen next
year because I don't like to spoil things. I'm a great believer in the
surprise. And although it's incredibly difficult actually to have a surprise,
especially with the Internet, I do like to try every now and then to shock
people. It's going to be a very different year on "Buffy" than it was
certainly--this last year was about college. It was about the sudden freedom
and how you try on new personas and how your gang kind of falls apart, and you
sort of, you know, at the end of your first year of college, you're in a very
different place.

Next year is really about family, is about getting the group back together and
really working within the group. It's about, you know, sort of refocusing,
and so I think people who feel like the Scooby gang, Buffy's friends and
whatnot have become a little peripheral, they're going to be pleased. We're
going to see much more intense interaction between all our main characters,
who all sort of got scattered in this last year. And what I'm going to be
doing next is figuring out what all that literally means, because right now,
we're starting to break stories for both shows and I don't really have time
for a whole lot else.

BIANCULLI: Well, you made me feel guilty about taking up this much of your
time, but thank you very much for being here.

Mr. WHEDON: Damn you. No.

BIANCULLI: It's a pleasure to have you here.

Mr. WHEDON: I really appreciate it. Thank you. It's good to talk to you.

BIANCULLI: Joss Whedon is the creator and executive producer of "Buffy the
Vampire Slayer" and the co-creator of its spin-off series, "Angel." Both
shows air new episodes tonight on The WB. Here's a scene from tonight's new
episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." In this scene, the Scooby gang are all
fighting and seem to be ready to go their separate ways.

(Soundbite of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer")

Ms. GELLAR: You guys, stop this. What happened to you today?

Unidentified Actress: It's not today. Buffy, things have been wrong for a
while. Don't you see that?

Ms. GELLAR: Well, what do you mean wrong?

Unidentified Actress: Well, they certainly haven't been right since Tara. We
have to face it, you can't handle Tara being my girlfriend.

Unidentified Actor: No, it was bad before that. Since you two went off to
college and forgot about me, just left me in the basement to--Tara's your
girlfriend? Bloody hell.

Ms. GELLAR: Enough! All I know is you want to help, right, be part of the
team.

Unidentified Actress: I don't know.

Unidentified Actor: ...(Unintelligible) wanted.

Ms. GELLAR: No! No, you said you wanted to go, so let's go, all of us.
We'll walk into that cave with you two attacking me and the funny drunk
drooling on my shoe. Hey, hey, maybe that's the secret way of killing Adam.

Unidentified Actor: Buffy!

Ms. GELLAR: Is that it? Is that how you can help? You're not answering me.
How can you possibly help? So I guess I'm on my own. And you know what? I'm
starting to understand why there's no ancient prophecy about a chosen one and
her friends.

(End of soundbite)

BIANCULLI: A scene from tonight's episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
Coming up, trying to screen out porn on the Web, a commentary from our
linguist, Geoff Nunberg. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Commentary: Computer software programs that promise to screen
out pornography and other offensive material don't work as well
as they claim to work
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

Adult-oriented material on the Web has been a source of concern for many
parents. Over the past few years, software companies have been offering
programs that promise to screen out pornography and other kinds of offensive
material. But as our linguist, Geoff Nunberg, points out, it's not quite that
simple.

GEOFF NUNBERG:

Schools and libraries under pressure to block young people's access to
pornographic or racist sites, businesses concerned about employees surfing,
parents worried about what their children might run into on the Web--they've
all been installing the content filtering programs that go by names like
CyberSitter, CyberPatrol, NetNanny and Surf-Watch, what some people refer to
as censor-ware. It's already a $100 million industry, and it'll grow even
faster if Congress adopts any of the various bills that require the
installation of the software in all schools and libraries that are receiving
certain federal subsidies. The only problem is that the programs don't
deliver.

They all work in, more or less, the same way. They start by hand-compiling a
list of sites that contain pornography or other offensive content, then add
additional filters to block sites that contain certain keywords and phrases.
But most of the programs turn out to have been deliberately blocking a lot of
sites that have nothing to do with pornography or violence: feminist and gay
discussion groups, safe-sex information, the home page of the National
Organization for Women, probably because it has links to gay and lesbian
sites. In sort, they try to rule out anything that any customer might find
objectionable.

What's more, those filters that are supposed to automatically spot
objectionable content turn out to be wildly inaccurate. Not long ago, one
anti-censorship group published a list of the first 50 URLs in the edu domain
that were blocked by the censor-ware program I-Gear. It turned out that fully
76 percent of these pages were errors or misclassifications. The blocked
pages included a diagram of a milk pasteurization system, a couple of sections
of Gibbon's "Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire" and some Latin passages from
"Saint Augustine's Confessions." When I looked at those, they turned out to
come from the section where Augustine complains that he still has impure
thoughts, but I have the feeling that wasn't why the program blocked them.
Probably it had more to do with the fact that the passages contained the Latin
preposition `cum,' as in `cum laude.'

And other systems have blocked sites as innocuous as the home pages of the
British Conservative Party and Beaver College in Pennsylvania, not to mention
the text of that well-known pornographic classic "Jane Eyre."

Some people might say that this is just the price we have to pay for blocking
the truly offensive sites, but it turns out that the systems aren't foolproof
there either. The software-makers like to claim that they can block anywhere
from 90 to 97 percent of the objectionable content on the Web, whatever they
mean by that. But even if the systems could block 99 percent of the
explicitly pornographic sites, you might have qualms about leaving a child
alone with it. At a best estimate, there are more than 100,000 porn sites on
the Web, and even the most efficient filtering system would leave thousands of
them available.

And bear in mind that a single porn site isn't like a handgun or a gram of
cocaine. Just one can serve an indefinitely large number of users. In the
end, the effect would be like reducing the number of available TV channels
from 100 to three. You might limit the variety of the content, but you
wouldn't necessarily reduce the size of the audience. When it comes to the
crunch, putting a content filtering system at a library is like putting a
metal detector at the airport that lets through 5 percent of the guns and
beeps at half the wooden hangers that people have in their suitcases.

None of this should be surprising. Censor-ware programs are like every other
kind of software that tries to deal with human language in a natural way;
systems for automatic translation, for example, or search engines that promise
to understand ordinary English questions. These systems have their uses, but
they can never approach our own language capacities simply because human
language is too complicated to be reduced to the kind of rules that a computer
can deal with, at least at the present stage of the technology. And if
computers have trouble rendering a simple sentence from English to French or
understanding a simple question like `Where is Joey Buttafuoco from?' why
would anybody suppose that we can count on them to recognize the much more
subtle distinctions between pornography and useful information?

How have the makers of censor-ware programs been able to gull the public about
the capacity to the systems? In part, it's because the software houses don't
ever make public the lists of sites that the programs block so that their
customers are kept in the dark about just how badly they performed. But
mostly, it's just a kind of wishful thinking that's endemic with new
technologies. We want to believe that we can rely on the technology itself to
provide magic bullets for all the social problems it gives rise to.

And, of course, the software provides an easy out for administrators and
politicians who want to be able to say that they're doing something about the
problem. The makers of the software insist that they're not in the business
of censorship. After all, they're private firms, not government
organizations. But when schools and public libraries are required to install
the programs, it's hard to think what other term you would use. Still, there
is a difference between the new censorship and the old. We're no longer at
the mercy of repressive autocrats who decide what we can read. Now we leave
the decision to dim-witted software code. That's a change, but I don't know
if I'd call it progress.

BIANCULLI: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist with Stanford University and the Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center.

(Soundbite of music)

(Credits given)

BIANCULLI: For Terry Gross, I'm David Bianculli.
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