Amy Pascale Quotes

With three of its fourteen episodes still unaired and two of them still in production, Firefly was canceled.

According to Joss [Whedon], "TV is a question, movies are an answer.

As Joss showed up to start work on the new season, Barr gathered everyone on staff and made a speech about how the tabloids were obsessed with her and had sources among the crew feeding them details of her personal life. Joss, who had heard about tabloid drama and the staff conflicts, anticipated a speech that would bring everybody closer: "It's us against the world, and dammit, we've got good work to do here, let's all get it done." Instead, Roseanne told the writers they had better keep their mouths shut or they would all be fired. It was a plot twist that he wasn't expecting. "It made me realize … that every time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things - connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect," Joss said. "Connecting is the most important thing, and actually an easy thing to do. I try to make a connection with someone every time I talk to them, even if I'm firing them…. People can be treated with respect. That is one of the most important things a show runner can do, is make everybody understand that we're all involved, that we're all on the same level.

My generation, we were kind of raised on the super-cool, "I can handle anything" with a gun in his hand hero. Any situation you throw at him, he can handle it - with catchphrases. It was very cool. But Joss Whedon's version of a hero doesn't always win. He loses more than he wins, and when he wins, the victories are tiny, but he takes 'em. "That's a victory! I call that a victory!" It's a tiny victory - he takes it, and that's what he walks away with. And that's something I can actually relate to.

As soon as I was old enough to have a feeling about it, I felt like I was alone. No matter how much I loved my family -- and I actually got along better with my family than I think most people do -- I just always felt separate from everybody, and was terribly lonely all the time,' Joss said. 'I wasn't living a life that was particularly different from anybody else's ... It wasn't like I didn't have friends, but .. we, all of us, are alone in our own minds, and I was very much aware of that from the very beginning of my life. Loneliness and aloneness -- which are different things -- are very much, I would say, [among the] main things I focus on in my work.

But what clicked with Joss most of all was that Greenwalt was able to balance his edginess with an old-school approach to narrative. It was Greenwalt, Joss says, who was "constantly pulling us back to 'But do we care about Buffy? But is Buffy in trouble?'" "We learned early on when we started writing that we've got to have the metaphor," Greenwalt explains. After all, a storyline that's just about a cool monster every week would quickly get old and predictable. "You've got to have the Buffy of it - what does it mean?

Joss would come to understand that this position - respecting, admiring, and identifying with women while acknowledging the objectifying influence of the male gaze - helped him create female characters that worked and connected with an audience. "You can't write from a political agenda and make stories that are in any way emotional or iconic. You have to write it from a place that's a little dark, that has to do with passion and lust and things you don't want to talk about.