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big interview with Whedon I just found online at the Bendis Message Board...
** SOME SPOILERS FOR ANGEL FINALE ***
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TheStar.com
Father of all vampires mourns show
Joss Whedon took the cancellation of Angel very hard
As always, he's willing to ease his pain by sharing it
MALENE ARPE
TORONTO STAR
Who is going to make us take our bitter, healing medicine now that the
Buffyverse is closed for business?
For eight years and a total of 12 television seasons, Joss Whedon, creator
of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and the spinoff series Angel, has given the
audience, as he once declared, not what we want but what we need.
He's given us pain, suffering, shocking deaths of major characters (there
are no better portrayals of grief than the death of Buffy's mother in "The
Body," and the death of Angel's Fred in this season's "Shells") passionate,
un-pretty love stories and a parade of selfless sacrifice. He has managed
that most difficult of all balancing acts: to take a staunch moral stand
without ever being preachy. And while they made us shudder in horror as
the characters we loved were chopped to pieces or shot or sucked into
faraway hell dimensions, the shows were written with sparkling wit and
more downright dirty innuendo than any other show on television.
Buffy quit her job a year ago; Angel was fired by the WB and fights his last
fight Wednesday with the series finale, "Not Fade Away." Whereas Buffy
was allowed to have a somewhat triumphant, happy-ish ending, it doesn't
look good for the characters on Angel. But that's in keeping with Angel's
much darker vein.
There will be death. There will be sorrow.
"Oh yeah, baby," Whedon says. "The pain that I felt when they cancelled the
show, I'm going to share."
Whedon -- who says had he thought the passionate fan campaign to save
the show had any hope, he would have been out there with his placard and
bullhorn -- would have liked one more season to tell his tale of the vampire
with a soul and his search for redemption.
"I always felt there was more to say about all these people, that the show
was kinda cut down in its prime. We did have a sort of final statement
prepared for the end of the season, because you go into every season not
knowing your fate, and I do feel like we finished the series saying what I
wanted to say in a grand fashion. But I don't have the feeling I had with
Buffy, which was: We are done, thank you, good night," he says during a
conference-call interview.
Angel (David Boreanaz) and his fellow evil-fighters Wesley, Fred, Gunn,
Lorne and the other souled vampire Spike (James Marsters) -- the latter
added this year from Buffy's cast -- have spent this season working inside
the nefarious law firm of Wolfram & Hart. They've tried to fight the good
fight, while being tempted by the lure of power.
"In past seasons, Angel had always been the loner hero in one form or
another and sometimes he'd been just a bad-ass and sometimes he'd
lost sight of his goal, but he was always just a champion, fighting. This
year was about, if you're inside of a structure, be it corporal or societal, that
is by its nature corrupt, do you affect it or does it affect you?"
Since the announcement of his show's cancellation, Whedon's heroes
have found themselves increasingly at odds with that power structure.
Coincidence?
"We knew as writers we were projecting a little too much. The fact of the
matter is if it only reads that way, then you're doing the wrong thing. I
actually don't have as contentious a relationship with the executives as I,
trying to seem like a cool rebel, would have it seem. The fact is, they let me
put on my weird show for a total of 12 years and I'm grateful for that.
"There's definitely some executives that I'd like to take a ball-peen hammer
to, (but) there's just as many who have been supportive and creative.
Definitely, we were feeling the hurt and it definitely informed what we were
doing."
Whedon says his show was "old and in the way," as the WB is trying to
divest itself of expensive properties to make room for more reality
television -- a genre for which Whedon obviously has no love.
"Ultimately the (vampire) shows were cult shows; we didn't make Friends,
so nobody is going to use us as a financial model. And the financial
models are what changed television. If I had created reality television I
would have had a much greater influence, but then I would have had to
KILL MYSELF."
With shows like his own, as well as the Star Trek franchise and other
science fiction and fantasy shows struggling to find backing while the
ratings soar for dating, surgery and survival programs, Whedon still
believes that well-written genre television is important and can survive.
"Genre TV is a great way to speak to people, very directly without being
either didactic or maudlin or, you know, boring. It's a way to really hit home
emotionally and societally without having to lecture people, and it can be
very beautiful, it can be very direct and get to a place no other show can,
because people love to imagine themselves in a fantastic universe,
especially if that universe is not just in the service of cute tricks," he says.
"In that sense it has a good chance of surviving, of going on. But it also
faces peril in that there are very few mainstream hits that use that mold;
people don't take genre seriously. They don't want to spend the money.
The fact of the matter is that's a very big issue when you're dealing with
fantasy."
Whedon, who says he doesn't believe we've heard the last of the
Buffyverse and will find ways to explore his own creation, be it via comic
books, miniseries, spinoffs or feature films, will be going to work in two
weeks on Serenity, the major motion picture take on his short-lived Fox
project, the sci-fi western Firefly, which is set for a 2005 theatrical release.
As for rumours the Angel finale has a cliffhanger ending, leaving the door
open for further explorations?
"I do not think of it as a cliffhanger at all. It is not the end of all things. It is
not a final grace note after a symphony, the way Buffy was. We are definitely
still in the thick of it, but it is, and was meant to be, a final statement about
Angel. ... The point of the show is, you're never done. Whoever survives the
show, to get that point, will embody it, but no matter who goes on, the fight
goes on.
"Did I make it so that it could lead into an exiting sixth season? Yes I did.
But it still is a final statement, if that is what it needs to be."
The finale of Angel airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. on the New VR and Victoria
Day at 10 p.m. on Space, after an all-day viewers-choice marathon of
favourite episodes. The Space broadcast begins at 11 a.m. with the series
premiere, followed by the top 10 episodes.
Additional articles by Malene Arpe
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Glad to hear it's really good - can't wait! Is it 2 hours or the regular 1? (I'm still fuming that the Buffy series finale was given a paltry one hour)
But that fact that Illyria had enough depth to even come up with that sentence is just amazing.