Joss Whedon Biography

A youthful pre-beard Whedon in an early-2000s promo shot

Writer-director Joseph Hill Whedon was born June 23, 1964 in New York City. He chose the name “Joss” for himself, taking it from a Chinese word meaning luck, fate or even god. As a child, he was enamored with the world of comic-books, particularly those of Marvel’s X-Men series. When Joss later went on to create his cult TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he would draw on his understanding of superhero team dynamics, admittedly basing protagonist Buffy Anne Summers on his favored X-Men character of Kitty Anne Pryde. Since then, he has created three other genre-oriented series: Angel (1999-2004), Firefly (2002-2003) and most recently, Dollhouse (2009-2010).  In 2004, he was able to fulfill his dream of writing for the comic-book series of his youth, in a fan and critically acclaimed 24-issue run on Astonishing X-Men. In 2008, he scored an online hit with the web series Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which won a 2009 Emmy, even though it never appeared on TV.

Joss has been called the first third-generation TV writer: his grandfather John Whedon worked on such 50s and 60s classics as The Donna Reed Show, The Andy Griffith Show and Leave It to Beaver; while his father, Tom wrote for sitcoms Alice, Benson, Golden Girls– and was a showrunner for PBS’s The Electric Company, while Joss was young.

After his parents divorced when he was 9, Whedon settled with his mother, Lee Stearns, a teacher and political activist. He describes his early TV viewing as “snobbish”— due in part to his mother’s viewing preferences, and as a reaction to the sitcoms which he thought were beneath his father. “I liked the shows he did, but I never thought they were as funny as he was… this is the wittiest man I’d ever met, and all of his friends were extraordinary, and the sitcoms were never quite the same as my father.”

For high school, he spent three years in an English boarding school, Winchester College in Hampshire, after which he returned to the States, to rediscover himself: “I had never really sort of gotten America. I went back and studied it, learned about it. I was excited. I was like, ‘I’m interested in being American now.’”

Whedon went onto Wesleyan University, the only school he applied to, because “we clicked.” He had already been developing an interest in film, and now had the opportunity at Wesleyan’s Film Studies program, “watching films over and over again and dissecting them, really understanding what they were trying to do, and all that good stuff. The best film theory study available.” And with the influence of his mother, who had raised Joss to be a “radical feminist,” he explored what was to become an ongoing thread in his work: “My biggest concentration was gender studies and feminism. That was sort of my unofficial minor.”

After getting his BA in 1987, Joss had aspirations to become an independent filmmaker, and crossed the country to Los Angeles— but definitely not to follow in his father’s footsteps: “I literally had left college going, “I’m not going to be a television writer.” And my friend would go, ‘Three-G TV!’ Third generation. He’d taunt me all the time. ‘It’s not going to happen!’”

In LA, he found himself staying with father, getting closer for the first time since he was a child. And like other nascent talents, he worked in a video store while writing spec scripts for shows like The Wonder Years, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, and Roseanne— the last of which led to his getting on staff for Roseanne’s series. He found the experience exasperating: he wrote six scripts the first year on staff, but his efforts kept getting rewritten by producers, and then tossed aside by the mercurial Roseanne Barr. “It’s so sad… I went on that show because it had a feminist agenda, because it was real, and decent, and incredibly funny. And she brought a lot of that to the table – and she sort of took it away, because her unhappiness made her incredibly divisive and destructive, and that’s that.”

Joss quit the staff and briefly moved to the series Parenthood, while in his spare time shopping around his first movie script, a low-budget horror spoof. Whedon’s idea was to subvert the “girl attacked in a dark alley” trope: instead of having a man come to her rescue, she would rescue herself. He started with “Martha, the Immortal Waitress” and settled on “Vampire Slayer.” For the heroine’s name, he chose something he took the least seriously, that sounded like it belonged to a B-movie: Buffy. He wanted a title that would make people take it off the video store shelves, “because it has to sound silly and not boring.”

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