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12 <h1>A Religion in Narrative?</h1><BR><h2> Joss Whedon and Television Creativity</h2>
16 Middle Tennessee State University<BR>
18 Paper given at the Blood, Text, and Fears Conference, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, October 2002<BR>
20 I'm a very hard-line, angry atheist. . . . Yet I am fascinated by the concept of devotion.<BR>
26 At the end of the first episode of the new season of <I>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</I>, now
27 beginning its seventh, and possibly last, season, an episode written by series' creator Joss Whedon,
28 all the Big Bads from the first six seasons reappear. Warren morphs into Glory
29 into Adam into Mayor Wilkins into Drusilla and finally into The Master, each picking up in turn,
30 an oration delivered to the newly ensoulled, newly returned to Sunnydale, mentally disturbed Spike.
37 <P style="margin-left: .5in">
38 SPIKE: The thing is . . . I had a speech. I learned it all. Oh, God. She won't understand, she won't understand.
40 WARREN: Of course she won't understand, Sparky. I'm beyond her understanding. She's a girl. Sugar and spice and everything...useless unless you're baking. I'm more than that. More than flesh . . .
42 GLORY: . . . more than blood. I'm . . . you know, I honestly don't think there's a human word fabulous enough for me. Oh, my name will be on everyone's lips, assuming their lips haven't been torn off. But not just yet. That's alright, though . . .
44 ADAM: . . . I can be patient. Everything is well within parameters. She's exactly where I want her to be. And so are you, Number 17. You're right where you belong . . .
46 THE MAYOR: . . . So what'd you think? You'd get your soul back and everything'd be Jim Dandy? Soul's slipperier than a greased weasel. Why do you think I sold mine? (laughs) Well, you probably thought that you'd be your own man, and I respect that, but . . .
48 DRUSILLA: . . . you never will. You'll always be mine. You'll always be in the dark with me, singing our little songs. You like our little songs, don't you? You've always liked them, right from the beginning. And that's where we're going . . .
50 THE MASTER: . . . right back to the beginning. Not the Bang . . . not the Word . . . the true beginning. The next few months are going to be quite a ride. And I think we're all going to learn something about ourselves in the process. You'll learn you're a pathetic schmuck, if it hasn't sunk in already. Look at you. Trying to do what's right, just like her. You still don't get it. It's not about right, not about wrong . . .
52 BUFFY: . . . it's about power.
55 "Back to the beginning." "In our end is our beginning," as we know from Eliot, and
56 if "the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning," as "Little Gidding" tells us, then it
57 shouldn't surprise us that Whedon might seek there the narrative secret of his creation as it begins
58 its possible end. Nor should it surprise us that the morphing finally reveals not a Big Bad but
59 Buffy herself. For is it not Sarah Michelle Gellar's possible departure from Buffy that inspired
60 all this talk of beginnings? (That the show just might go on without either its star or creator is both
61 "the beauty and horror of it" [Longworth 218].) And was it not concerning Gellar's character
62 that we heard (spoken by Tara, ventriloquized by the First Slayer) the admonition, "You think you
63 know . . . what's to come . . . what you are. You haven't even begun,"
64 Janus-words which this critic has always taken to be a meta-commentary-about the series itself, about
65 its narrative potential as much as they are about its eponymous hero. "It's about power," she
66 announces to Spike. Though we will no doubt need to follow the trajectory of Season 7's
67 arc to its end before we know for certain what the "it" refers to, we have already met the "power."
68 "You could never hope to know the source of our power," Über-Buffy scolds Adam before ripping out
69 his uranium power core in Season Four's penultimate "Primeval." Adam might not know, but we
70 have glimpsed its essence: <I>Buffy's</I> power source is narrative.
74 Emily Nussbaum reports in a recent profile of Joss Whedon in the <I>The New York Times</I> that she
75 witnessed "a dewy young woman" who "leaned forward and gripped [Whedon's] hand between hers,
76 pulling him in for enforced eye contact: 'I just want you to know - we trust you. We know you know what you're
77 doing. We know it will be great'." Asked in an interview about such fan idolization of his series
78 and himself, Whedon modestly deflects the question, insisting that such adulation is not really personal.
80 <P style="margin-left: .5in">
82 It's about the show, and I feel the same way about it. I get the same way. It's not like being a rock star.
83 It doesn't feel like they're reacting to me. It's really sweet when people react like that,
84 and I love the praise, but to me, what they're getting emotional about is the show.
85 And that's the best feeling in the world. There's nothing creepy about it. I feel like there's a <I>religion
86 in narrative</I>, and I feel the same way they do. I feel like we're both paying homage to something else;
87 they're not paying homage to me. (<I>Onion AV Club</I> Interview; [author's] italics)
91 "They" may not be but I am - continuing a process I began in the Afterword to Fighting the Forces,
92 a brief essay I called "The Genius of Joss Whedon" and which I hope to continue in a
93 book comparing and contrasting the creative processes of thirty-something Whedon and fifty-something
94 David Chase, the television lifer who created <I>The Sopranos</I>. All I can offer here
95 today is a preliminary intelligence report on the avatar of this narrative religion.
96 As John Briggs and Jonathan Gray have just admirably demonstrated, it is wise, after all,
97 before reality and myth begin to blur, to establish whatever truth we can about the founder of a new faith.
101 <B>Of course such attention to the creator</B> of a television series was, until recently,
102 extremely rare. Since television arose in a time in which the "death of the author"
103 was proclaimed by such important intellectual figures as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, and even
104 the "death of the auteur," that supposed movie creator - first promulgated by French cineastes
105 like François Truffaut and American critics like Andrew Sarris - capable of giving individual,
106 even autobiographical, shape and substance to the highly collaborative process of cinematic creation,
107 was likewise proclaimed, serious consideration of authorship in the often anonymous medium of television
108 has been suspect from the beginning.
111 But literary authors, oblivious to their extinction, continue to publish, cash in royalty checks
112 (as William Gass once quipped), and appear on talk shows, movie directors continue to attract a
113 good deal of attention, and now even television auteurs have become prominent in the way
114 we think and write about the medium. The major figures at century's end - Steven Bochco
115 (<I>L.A. Law, Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue</I>), Joshua Brand and John Falsey (<I>St. Elsewhere, Northern Exposure</I>) -
116 began to yield prominence to emerging new talents. Indeed, at the beginning of a new millennium
117 we seem to be witnessing in the US the emergence of a number of significant,
118 and sometimes prolific, television auteurs: David E. Kelley (<I>Picket Fences, The Practice,
119 Ally McBeal, Boston Public</I>), J. J. Abrams (<I>Felicity, Alias</I>), Aaron Sorkin (<I>Sports Night, West Wing</I>),
120 David Chase (<I>The Sopranos</I>), and Joss Whedon, spoken of, in a recent Entertainment
121 Weekly piece, as the next new Bochco (Jensen).
126 <B>We know quite a lot about Whedon's influences.</B>
127 A graduate of Wesleyan University with a degree in film studies, Whedon, we know,
128 loves Dickens. We know that he is the "world's biggest Sondheim fan" (and
129 once dreamed, long before authoring the fabulous <I>"Once More with Feeling,"
130 </i>of creating a musical based on the Oliver North hearings). We know that
131 Edward Gorey, Marvel Comics, especially early <i>Spiderman</i> and John
132 Byrne-era <i>X-Men, </i>Frank Miller and Alan Moore are all major inspirations.
133 That he greatly admires Steven Soderberg and Ang Lee and the Wachowski brothers
134 (he speaks of wishing to eat their brains in order to acquire their genius).
135 That he has watched admiringly <i>The Simpsons,</i> <i>Twin Peaks, West Wing,
136 The Sopranos, Party of Five </i>("a brilliant show," according to Whedon,
137 which often "made me cry uncontrollably," but "suffered ultimately from a
138 lack of rocket launchers"), and <i>My So-Called Life </i>(he has called <i>Buffy
139 </i>a genetic splicing of it and <i>The X-Files,</i> and in a satellite seminar
140 on "Writing for Teens on Television" Whedon bows down, literally, before <i>My
141 So-Called's </i>creator Winnie Holzman). But we know, too, that he was a
142 "PBS kid," "into the highbrow British stuff that my mother [Lee Stearns]
143 watched," who wasn't really raised on American television (Longworth
146 <P style="text-indent: .5in">
147 We know he loves movies- that in his college days he'd "go out and see three classic films,
148 stagger home at 2 a.m. and then watch whatever was on HBO" (Nussbaum), and, thanks to his commentary on
149 the <I>Buffy</I> DVDs, where he mentions Hitchcock, DePalma, Lynch, Leone, Abel Ferrara, Luc Besson,
150 Sam Peckinpah, Tim Burton, Marcel Ophuls, Woody Allen, we know something about the directors whose
151 work he remembers (not always favorably) and sometimes emulates.
153 <P style="text-indent: .5in">
154 We know that he counts Wesleyan University scholar Richard Slotkin, author of books like
155 <I>Gunfighter Nation, Fatal Environment,</I> and <I>Regeneration Through Violence</I> which examine the
156 deep cultural roots of American "mythogenesis," "the creation, 'in both maker and audience,
157 [of tales that are] mystical and religious, drawing heavily on the unconscious and the
158 deepest levels of the psyche, defining relationships between human and divine things,
159 between temporalities and ultimates" [Slotkin, quoted by Tucker] and that he once greatly admired Sartre's
160 <I>Nausea</I>. We can be fairly certain that a man who is convinced that
162 <P style="margin-left: .5in">
163 ultimately, stories come from violence, they come from sex. They come from death.
164 They come from the dark places that everybody has to go to. . . . If you raise a kid to think
165 everything is sunshine and flowers, they're going to get into the real world and die. . . .
166 That's the reason fairy tales are so creepy, because we need to encapsulate these things,
167 to inoculate ourselves against them, so that when we're confronted by the genuine horror that
168 is day-to-day life we don't go insane [Longworth 213) . . .
171 has read Bettelheim's <I>The Uses of Enchantment</I>. We can assume that someone who refers
172 routinely to the "baroque" stage in the evolution of genre has absorbed Thomas Schatz' <I>Hollywood Genres:
173 Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System</I> and who speaks of understanding "the motivation
174 of the man with the murderous gaze, . . . of the terrible objectifying male" (Longworth 215) has mastered
175 the ideas of Laura Mulvey. The great directors of the 1970s and 80s often were film school
176 grads. Tarantino established the 1990's video store auteur tradition. Though himself
177 a former video store employee and cognizant of the new auteurhood trajectory - he has quipped that
178 "Actors wait tables, directors work at video stores" (Onion AV Club Interview) - Whedon may well
179 represent yet a new career path: the film studies auteur, just as likely to be familiar
180 with critical schools and narratological theory as with lenses and filters and a
181 spect ratios. Perhaps this is why those of us assembled here feel such an attraction to his work.
183 <P style="text-indent: .5in">
184 We know that <I>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</I> was a recombinant hybrid of his obsessions:
185 "We wanted to make that sort of short-attention-span, <I>The Simpsons</I>, cull-from-every
186 genre all the time thing. You know, if we take this moment from <I>Nosferatu</I>, and this moment
187 from <I>Pretty in Pink</I>, that'll make this possible. A little <I>Jane Eyre</I> in there, and then a
188 little <I>Lethal Weapon 4</I>. Not <I>3</I>, but <I>4</I>. And I think this'll work" (Onion AV Club Interview).
190 <P style="text-indent: .5in">
191 We know that, in addition to being executive producer extraordinaire, Whedon
192 has written/co-written twenty+ episodes of <I>Buffy</I> and directed nineteen, in addition to
193 several episodes of <I>Angel</I> and of his new series <I>Firefly</I> as well. Though by his own
194 admission he knew very little about directing and virtually nothing about creating a television
195 show prior to helming <I>BtVS</I>, Whedon, we know, has turned out some of the series' - and contemporary television's -
196 most memorable, and most innovative, episodes, including "Innocence", in which Angel loses
197 his soul and becomes the evil boyfriend from Hell Angelus after having sex with Buffy; "Becoming" (I and II),
198 which was the first time the series shot on a soundstage and used historical settings
199 and costumes; "Hush," a marvelous experiment, which broke him, he admits, out of a
200 devolution into a "sort of a hack TV director" (Longworth 220), in which almost half the episode
201 transpires in silence after fairy tale monsters The Gentleman steal the voices of Sunnydale; "Restless,"
202 an all-dream episode, "basically a forty-minute poem" (as Whedon describes it [Longworth 220]), which I have
203 described as a kind of television <I>8 1/2</I> and Rhonda Wilcox has compared to Eliot's "The Wasteland";
204 "The Body," an emotionally-wrenching depiction of the aftermath of Buffy's mother's death; and
205 "Once More with Feeling," an ingenious all-singing, all-dancing musical, the fulfillment
206 of a long-time Whedon ambition. Whedon written and/or directed episodes exhibit stylistic and
207 verbal signatures too complex to explore here.
209 <P style="text-indent: .5in">
210 And we know that it is not just his own episodes that show his influence. "I have control over all the shows,"
211 Whedon explained to ET Online two years ago.
213 <P style="margin-left: .5in">
214 I'm responsible for all the shows. That means that I break the stories. I often come up with the
215 ideas and I certainly break the stories with the writers so that we all know what's going to happen.
216 Then once the writers are done, I rewrite every script. . . . Then I oversee production and edit
217 every show, work with the composers and sound mixers. Inevitably every single show has my name on
218 it somewhere and it is my responsibility to make it good. . . . Every week that show is on, I'm standing
219 in the back row, biting my nails, hoping people like it, so I feel a great responsibility.
220 The good thing is that I'm surrounded by people who are much smarter than I am. So gradually
221 I have been able to let certain things take care of themselves, because my crew, my writers,
222 my post-production crew, everybody is so competent, that I don't have to run around quite as much as I used to.
225 Now again masterminding not only <I>Buffy</I> (due to Marti Noxon's maternity leave) and <I>Angel</I>
226 (due to David Greenwalt's departure for ABC), not to mention his own new series, the sci-fi/western <I>Firefly</I>,
227 the new spinoff <I>Ripper</I> (for British television), and a still-in-production <I>Buffy</I>
228 cartoon series - all as part of his plans for "total world domination" (Adalian) by his Mutant Enemy
229 production company, it would seem that Whedon's dream of peace and quiet will not be coming true any time soon.
231 <P style="text-indent: .5in">
232 We know, too, that, though now deeply entangled in television, Whedon, like <I>Sopranos</I> creator
233 Chase, really wants to make movies. He admits that his original dream after college had long been
234 to "head toward the movie world" (Interview with David Bianculli). Though it was in the movies
235 that he made his first breakthrough, when Fran Rubel Kuzui butchered his screenplay of <I>BtVS</I> in
236 1992, though he has contributed, often as a highly paid - and sometimes uncredited - "script doctor" to
237 a variety of films both before (<I>Speed</I> [1994], <I>Toy Story</I> [1995], <I>Waterworld</I> [1995],
238 <I>Twister</I> [1996]) and after (<I>Alien Resurrection</I> [1997], <I>X-Men</I> [2000], <I>Titan A.E.</I> [2000]),
239 <I>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</I> the television series came on the air in 1997; though Anthony Stewart
240 Head has remarked that "It's only a matter of time before we lose him to the cinema" (BBC Interview),
241 Whedon himself confesses that "I have always felt my movie career was an abysmal failure" (quoted in Tracy 44).
242 According to The Internet Movie Data Base, Whedon once directed an episode of the television
243 sitcom <I>Boy Meets World</I>. Though Whedon denies having done so, he does insist that he is far
244 prouder of the <I>Boy Meets World</I> episode he never directed than he is of his work on <I>Alien: Resurrection</I>.
246 <P style="text-indent: .5in">
247 In the medium in which he has experienced his greatest success, we know that Whedon can claim a
248 unique genealogy. A third generation contributor to television, perhaps the only one in existence - both Whedon's
249 grandfather and father wrote for TV[1] - he speaks warmly of an important parental admonition: "The best
250 advice [my father] every gave me . . . was, 'If you have a good story, you don't need jokes. If you don't
251 have a good story, no amount of jokes can save you.' I'm not really that interested in jokes. I like
252 the more dramatic stuff. But that tenet of 'the story is god' is the most important thing I could have
253 learned" (Onion AV Club interview). Whedon himself, we know, would contribute to both <I>Roseanne</I> and
254 <I>Parenthood</I> prior to the making of the original <I>BtVS</I> film.
256 <P style="text-indent: .5in">
257 But he dreamed of directing, as he confessed to <I>The Onion</I>:
259 <P style="margin-left: .5in">
260 I'm sure a lot writers want to direct because they're bitter, which is not a reason to direct.
261 I want to speak visually, and writing is just a way of communicating visually. That's what it's all about.
262 But nobody would even consider me to direct. So I said, "I'll create a television show, and I'll
263 use it as a film school, and I'll teach myself to direct on TV."
266 In a recent article in <I>Slayage</I>, I have summarized and commented upon Whedon's DVD revelations
267 about his education as a maker of television, and I will only summarize them briefly here.
269 <P style="text-indent: .5in">
270 The "dog and pony show" of series television production apparently provided a rapid education
271 for Joss Whedon, who had no prior hands-on experience with making TV. As he acknowledges at the outset
272 of his commentary on "Innocence," every aspiring television auteur thinks of his work, however,
273 minor it may be, as equal in weight and importance to <I>Citizen Kane</I> ("a black and white film,"
274 Whedon reminds us, should we not know, "about a bald guy"). In reality, the strict parameters
275 imposed on creative inclinations by small budget and time constraints force novice and
276 veteran alike to find less expensive and more expeditious paths to quality. "Freedom," Robert Frost once
277 observed, "is swinging easy in harness." Though he began as "Mister-I-don't-know-how-to-make-a-television-show,"
278 Joss Whedon has mastered the TV harness as well as any of his contemporaries, and he
279 concedes that what he really "love[s] about my show is the amount of cheese that we can sort of get away
280 with, the amount of how little money we have and how we make it look a little more epic than it is." "I've
281 been described as Ed Wood," Whedon admits, "and I've been assured that this is a compliment,
282 because of the amount of work we have to get done in so short a time. Especially with <I>Buffy</I>, which
283 is a very hard show to make, because we have the action and the special effects, and we
284 have to be very careful about the performances, making it all work. So you get that
285 overload thing" (<I>Onion AV Club</I> Interview).
287 <P style="text-indent: .5in">
288 The aspiring filmmaker continues to chafe at the bit, however. In an interview in <I>The Watchers's Guide</I>,
289 Vol. 2, for example, he confesses that "I'm getting to the point now where I'm like, 'Okay, I've told a
290 lot of stories. I've churned it out.' I just feel like I want to step back and do something where I can't
291 use the excuse of 'I only had a week'" (323). But Whedon nevertheless thinks of his experience in
292 television as highly educational and recommends it:
295 <P style="margin-left: .5in">
296 I think everybody who makes movies should be forced to do television. . . .
297 Because you have to finish. You have to get it done, and there are a lot of decisions made
298 just for the sake of making decisions. You do something because it's efficient and because it gets the
299 story told and it connects to the audience. (Interview in <I>The Watcher's Guide</I>, Vol. 2: 323)
302 <B>We possess at least a preliminary understanding of Whedon's basic television aesthetics.</B> We know that
303 he expects the medium to be smart. "I hate it when people talk about <I>Buffy</I> as being campy . . ,"
304 he tells Nussbaum. "I hate camp. I don't enjoy dumb TV. I believe Aaron Spelling
305 has single-handedly lowered SAT scores." We know that, in concurrence with the Gene Youngblood
306 axiom that entertainment gives the audience what it wants while art contributes what it never dreamed it
307 needed, he does not want his narrative religion to be merely entertainment. "Don't give people what they want,"
308 he tells <I>The Onion</I>,
310 <P style="margin-left: .5in">
311 give them what they need. What they want is for Sam and Diane to get together. Don't
312 give it to them. Trust me. . . . People want the easy path, a happy resolution, but in the end, they're
313 more interested in . . . No one's going to go see the story of Othello going to get a peaceful
314 divorce. People want the tragedy. They need things to go wrong, they need the tension. In my
315 characters there's a core of trust and love that I'm very committed to. These guys would die for
316 each other, and it's very beautiful. But at the same time, you can't keep that safety. Things have
317 to go wrong, bad things have to happen.
320 "One of the things TV is about," Whedon tells James Longworth (211), "is comfort, is knowing
321 exactly where you are. I know they're going to invite Jessica Fletcher over, one of
322 them is going to get killed, she very politely is going to solve it. I know what's going
323 to happen when I tune in to a particular show." But Whedon's narrative style takes a different approach:
325 <P style="margin-left: .5in">
326 With <I>Buffy</I> we'll do French farce one week and <I>Medea</I> the next week. We try very hard structurally
327 not to fall into a pattern either, so there's not a shoot-out in a warehouse every
328 episode. I'm very much committed to keeping the audience off their feet. It's sort of antithetical to
329 what TV is devised to do. (Longworth 211)
332 But we know too that Whedon's religion must entertain if it is to have adherents: "It's better to be a
333 spy in the house of love, you know? . . . If I made 'Buffy the Lesbian Separatist,' a series of lectures on
334 PBS on why there should be feminism, no one would be coming to the party, and it would be boring.
335 The idea of changing culture is important to me, and it can only be done in a popular medium" (Nussbaum).
338 <B>In <I>The Stuff Our Dreams Are Made Of:</B> How Science Fiction Conquered Reality</I>, the always
339 irreverant Thomas Disch, contemplating the follies of Scientology, wonders out loud why it is that the
340 only science fiction writer ever to found a religion had to be such an awful one.
341 Why, oh why, could it not have been, say, Philip K. Dick whose theologizing found disciples
342 and not the reprehensible L. Ron Hubbard? The "religion in narrative" now gestating - the magazine <I>The Door</I>,
343 we should take note, recently named Buffy the Vampire Slayer its "theologian of the year" and the
344 series has attracted a great deal of attention from CESNUR, as the presence of such scholars as
345 Gordon Melton and Massimo Introvigne at this conference testifies - should produce no such qualms. It's
346 difficult to imagine it in better hands than those of the "very hard-line, angry atheist" Joss Whedon.
349 <P><B><center>Notes</center></B></P>
351 [1] After a career in radio (writing for such shows as The Great Gildersleeve), Whedon's grandfather went on to contribute to Donna Reed, Mayberry RFD, Dick Van Dyke Show, Room 222. His father wrote for Captain Kangaroo, The Dick Cavett Show, The Electric Company, Alice, Benson, Golden Girls, and It?s a Living.
355 Adalian, Josef. ?Whedon Widens Mutant?s Reach.? Variety 1 April 2002.
357 Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season on DVD. Twentieth Century Fox 1997.
359 Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Second Season on DVD. Twentieth Century Fox 2002.
361 Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. NY: The Free Press, 1998.
363 Holder, Nancy with Jeff Mariotte and Maryelizabeth Hart. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher?s Guide. Vol. 2. New York: Pocket Books, 2000.
365 Jensen, Jeff. "Galaxy Quest: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Mastermind Joss Whedon Launches an Intergalatic Western That Comes Complete with a Tight-Pants-Wearing Captain, A Space Hooker, and a Behind-the-Scenes Showdown." Entertainment Weekly 13 Sept. 2002: 96-99.
367 Lavery, David. "Emotional Resonance and Rocket Launchers": Joss Whedon's Commentaries on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs.? Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. http://www.slayage.tv/essays/slayage6/Lavery.htm.
369 ___. "The Genius of Joss Whedon." Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002: 251-56.
371 Nussbaum, Emily. ?Must See Metaphysics.? New York Times 22 September 2002.
373 Slotkin, Richard. Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. New York: HarperPerennial, 1986.
375 ___. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Centiry America. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992.
377 ___. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
379 Tracy, Kathleen. The Girl?s Got Bite: The Unofficial Guide to Buffy?s World. LosAngeles: Renaissance Books, 1998.
381 Tucker, Ken ?High Stakes Poker.? Entertainment Weekly 1 October 1999: 20-23.
383 Whedon, Joss. ?The Creator Speaks: Joss Whedon on Sex, Death, Gaping Holes and Horrible Things Ahead.? http://www.eonline.com/Features/Features/Buffy/TheCreatorSpeaks/index.html.
385 ___. Interview with BBC Online http://www.bbc.co.uk/buffy/reallife/jossinterview.shtml
387 ___. Interview with darkhorse.com. http://www.darkhorse.com/news/interviews.sku_97796int/
389 ___. Interview with David Bianculli. Fresh Air 9 May 2000. Available online at http://whyy.org/cgi-bin/FAshowretrieve.cgi?2876
391 ___. Interview with ET Online http://www.theslayershow.com/chat8.html
393 ___. Interview with Fanforum http://www.fanforum.com/buffy/news/786.shtml
395 ___. Interview with Fraxis. http://websites.cable.ntl.com/~fraxis/the_ww/features/whedon.html
397 ___. Interview. The Watcher?s Guide, Vol. 2.
399 ___. Interview with The Watcher?s Web. http://websites.cable.ntl.com/~fraxis/the_ww/features/epk/joss.html
401 ___. Interview. "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest." Videocassette. Twentieth Century Fox, 1998.
403 ___. Interview. ?Angel + The Puppet Show.? Videocassette. Twentieth Century Fox, 1998.
405 ___. ?joss says" (Thu May 27 08:26:10 1999). Online posting. 27 May 1999. The Bronze VIP Posting Board Archives. 25 July 2000. http://www-pub.cise.ufl.edu/cgiwrap/hsiao/buffy/get-archive?date=1990527.
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