Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy [Paperback]

This is a book like none other I've ever read.

Candace Haven has given us a glimpse of the man who created Buffy, of where inside him this concept came from -- but even more she's given us a glimpse of what it takes to be the sort of person who can succeed in breaking all the taboos in the television industry.

What taboos did he break? Well, Buffy is a strong story-arc show like Babylon 5 and Dallas -- but without the (perceived) broad audience appeal of those shows. Buffy is about a young girl who kicks [butt]-- like Nikkita -- but going for a major network. Buffy is a series about vampires -- but it has a teen protagonist. Parents don't want their kids watching "that kind of thing." (or so they believed) The list of taboos is almost endless.

The genius that Havens refers to is, I think, Whedon's deliberate, pre-meditated integration of 4 distinct genres, horror, action, comedy and drama, into a single cohesive and coherent story and then finding a way to sell this package to Hollywood despite violating all those taboos.

Candace Haven writes in Joss Whedon The Genius Behind Buffy: "This integration lies at the core of Buffy's appeal, but it made the show almost impossible to desribe in a way that movie and network executives understood. How do you sell a show that doesn't fall into a clear genre? For this reason, the movie version of Buffy was turned into a comedy, much to Joss's dismay. As a television show, Buffy was rejected by the major networks. Ultimately, the fledgling WB accepted Buffy as a cross-genre show. This acceptance was either a result of WB's vision or of its executives' inexperience. But the reality is that it's unlikely Buffy would have been allowed to proceed with its cross-genre approach on one of the more established networks."

But WB did let the show become established as a genre-mix, and that is quite literally changing the whole fiction industry from movies, to television -- even to books. Now mixed genre novels such as my own Sime~Gen novels which are based on the vampire archetype, or my vampire romances Those of My Blood and Dreamspy, or Jean Lorrah's hot selling Blood Will Tell, abound and are beginning to find an audience among the Buffy fans. Because of the effect this show has had on the entire fiction industry, this book has become a very "important" book for those who want to enter that industry.

You have to read this book if you want to know "who" Joss Whedon is that he could get this show on the air and keep it there until its audience found it. Much of that information about who he is lies within the subtext of Candace Haven's fannish point of view cast against her journalistic professionalism. Read between the lines. You have to read this book to learn where inside Whedon the Buffy material came from and why the scripts for this show are so very, VERY well written. For just how well written I think they are, see my article in Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show edited by Glenn Yeffeth.

You won't find exactly this kind of information about a producer in any other kind of book. A biography could not include this exact point of view, a fan's point of view. A making-of could not include 3-D glimpses of other people who knew Whedon when he was young and in other contexts.

This book about Whedon&Buffy is a hybrid -- a kind of cross-genre biography/making-of/tribute-to book as Buffy itself is a cross-genre horror/action/comedy/drama. The very form of this book is awesomely appropriate to the subject matter. For that reason alone, reading this not-biography is a profound pleasure!