Skip to content

Top Navigation

EW.com EW.com
    • All TV
    • TV Reviews
    • TV Reunions
    • Recaps
    • What to Watch
    • Animated
    • Comedy
    • Crime
    • Drama
    • Family
    • Horror
    • Reality
    • Sci-fi
    • Thriller
    • All Movies
    • Movie Reviews
    • Trailers
    • Film Festivals
    • Movie Reunions
    • Movie Previews
    • All Music
    • Music Reviews
    • All What to Watch
    • What to Watch Podcast Episodes
    • TV Reviews
    • Movie Reviews
    • All BINGE
    • EW's Binge Podcast Episodes
    • Recaps
    • Survivor
    • This is Us
    • RuPaul's Drag Race
    • Stranger Things
    • The Boys
    • The Blacklist
    • The Walking Dead
    • Better Call Saul
    • All The Awardist
    • The Awardist Podcast Episodes
    • Oscars
    • Emmys
    • Golden Globes
    • SAG Awards
    • Grammys
    • Tony Awards
    • All Books
    • Book Reviews
    • Author Interviews
    • All Theater
    • Theater Reviews
  • Podcasts
  • Gaming
    • All Events
    • Comic-Con
  • Celebrity
  • Streaming

Profile Menu

Your Profile

Account

  • Join Now
  • Email Preferences
  • Newsletter
  • Manage Your Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Give a Gift Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Logout
Login
Subscribe

Explore EW.com

EW.com EW.com
  • Explore

    Explore

    • Hell-raisers: The Boys season 3 shakes up prestige TV with superhero debauchery

      Hell-raisers: The Boys season 3 shakes up prestige TV with superhero debauchery

      Just because they're Emmy nominated doesn't mean The Boys are pulling their punches. Here, the team dives into what might be "the most insane season of TV ever filmed." Read More
    • Your guide to 2022's biggest tours

      Your guide to 2022's biggest tours

      From Billie Eilish and Bad Bunny to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Weeknd, here are all the artists who can't wait to get on the road again. Read More
    • Ready for takeoff! We drank 3 rounds with the hotshot cast of Top Gun: Maverick

      Ready for takeoff! We drank 3 rounds with the hotshot cast of Top Gun: Maverick

      The actors playing the next generation of pilots in the action sequel felt the need for lots of cocktails. Read More
  • TV

    TV

    See All TV
    • TV Reviews
    • TV Reunions
    • Recaps
    • What to Watch
    • Animated
    • Comedy
    • Crime
    • Drama
    • Family
    • Horror
    • Reality
    • Sci-fi
    • Thriller
  • Movies

    Movies

    See All Movies
    • Movie Reviews
    • Trailers
    • Film Festivals
    • Movie Reunions
    • Movie Previews
  • Music

    Music

    See All Music
    • Music Reviews
  • What to Watch

    What to Watch

    See All What to Watch
    • What to Watch Podcast Episodes
    • TV Reviews
    • Movie Reviews
  • BINGE

    BINGE

    See All BINGE
    • EW's Binge Podcast Episodes
    • Recaps
    • Survivor
    • This is Us
    • RuPaul's Drag Race
    • Stranger Things
    • The Boys
    • The Blacklist
    • The Walking Dead
    • Better Call Saul
  • The Awardist

    The Awardist

    See All The Awardist
    • The Awardist Podcast Episodes
    • Oscars
    • Emmys
    • Golden Globes
    • SAG Awards
    • Grammys
    • Tony Awards
  • Books

    Books

    See All Books
    • Book Reviews
    • Author Interviews
  • Theater

    Theater

    See All Theater
    • Theater Reviews
  • Podcasts
  • Gaming
  • Events

    Events

    See All Events
    • Comic-Con
  • Celebrity
  • Streaming

Profile Menu

Subscribe this link opens in a new tab
Your Profile

Account

  • Join Now
  • Email Preferences
  • Newsletter
  • Manage Your Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Give a Gift Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Logout
Login
Sweepstakes

Follow Us

  1. Home
  2. Gallery
  3. 12 Signs It's a Joss Whedon Project

12 Signs It's a Joss Whedon Project

Strong women? Self-aware dialogue? We ID the geek auteur's signature moves to look for
Darren Franich
By Darren Franich Updated June 23, 2016 at 12:10 AM EDT
Skip gallery slides
FB

1 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Strong Women

Joss Whedon | Before Buffy the Vampire Slayer became a tiny culty movie and a genre-defining TV show, it was based on a simple conceptual flip. In most…
Credit: Diyah Pera; Richard Cartwright/WB

Before Buffy the Vampire Slayer became a tiny culty movie and a genre-defining TV show, it was based on a simple conceptual flip. In most horror movies, the cute blonde girl goes into a dark alley and dies; why not make her the hero? And, in turn, why not make her the hero of a female empowerment coming-of-age story? The TV show cast Sarah Michelle Gellar — who, ironically, played a couple cute blonde/dead girls in I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2 — as the titular Slayer, and created one of the most memorable heroines in TV history.

The Whedonography is filled with similar visions of female empowerment, like warrior woman Zoë on Firefly; to a certain extent, the fascinating-but-flawed Dollhouse can be read as an attempt to reconcile female empowerment in a world that relentlessly sexualizes women. And in The Avengers, Whedon retconned Iron Man 2 eye candy Black Widow into a genuine character, giving her more screen time than anyone besides Iron Man or Captain America. And the great what-might-have-been of superhero cinema was Whedon's Wonder Woman, which he developed during the mid-2000s.

1 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement

2 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Self-Aware Dialogue

Joss Whedon | It's easy to forget that Whedon originally rose to prominence in the salad days of The WB, when the network was filled with teenagers who…
Credit: Zade Rosenthal

It's easy to forget that Whedon originally rose to prominence in the salad days of The WB, when the network was filled with teenagers who all talked like hyper-articulate twentysomethings. Self-aware dialogue ran rampant throughout Buffy the Vampire Slayer — but unlike on, say, Dawson's Creek, the self-awareness helped to humanize the characters, who seemed to be reacting to the show's fantastical creatures with the same disbelieving skepticism as the audience.

Self-awareness has basically become the lingua franca of popular geek culture, and Whedon has led the charge: One of the hallmark lines of the Avengers trailer came when Tony Stark nonchalantly tells Loki ''We have a Hulk,'' as if the word ''hulk'' is just something two guys say. And when Whedon started a run on Astonishing X-Men, he had Cyclops deliver a mission statement for the writer's back-to-basics approach: ''Superheroes wear costumes. And quite frankly, all that black leather was making people nervous.'' And Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. begins with a lead character explaining the mouthful acronym Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division with a meta-gag: ''Somebody really wanted to spell S.H.I.E.L.D.''

2 of 12

3 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

The Simultaneous Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Clichés

Joss Whedon | Whedon often gets lumped together with J.J. Abrams, since both über-creators rose to prominence on television with geeky properties (and both have since gone on…
Credit: Diyah Pera

Whedon often gets lumped together with J.J. Abrams, since both über-creators rose to prominence on television with geeky properties (and both have since gone on to take the reins of neo-geek mega-franchises.) But whereas Abrams generally tries to ignore old genre tropes and replace them with faster-and-more-intense action storytelling, Whedon tends to explore and even radically expand those tropes, making their subtext explicit. People used to describe Star Trek as a space western?so Firefly literalized that conceit, imagining a spacefaring culture that resembled a John Ford movie.

But Firefly also explored notions of frontier civilization and the individual-versus-society in ways that the original Star Trek only glanced at. Likewise, Buffy played with a whole host of horror clichés, but also used the parade of monstrosities as an opportunity to construct a semiotics-class-worthy study of contemporary sexuality. Likewise Whedon co-wrote Drew Goddard's Cabin in the Woods, a film which pointedly assumes the structure of a vintage horror movie while asking pointed questions about the psychological roots of the horror genre.

3 of 12

Advertisement
Continued on next slide.
Advertisement

4 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Character Death

Joss Whedon | In some ways, Whedon's penchant for main-character-fatalities has been oversold. Unlike, say, George R. R. Martin, he doesn't generally kill off lead protagonists. But, if…

In some ways, Whedon's penchant for main-character-fatalities has been oversold. Unlike, say, George R. R. Martin, he doesn't generally kill off lead protagonists. But, if you're a beloved supporting player, watch out. Whedon offed a whole assortment of B-players from Buffy (farewell, Tara! So long, Buffy's mom!). Hardcore Firefly fans had to suffer through two big deaths in Serenity. And with Agent Coulson's heroic sacrifice in The Avengers, Whedon found a way to kill off pretty much the only killable main character. (As with Angel and Buffy before him, Coulson is staging a comeback on S.H.I.E.L.D.)

4 of 12

Advertisement

5 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Order is Evil, Chaos is Good

Joss Whedon | Big ideas run throughout the Whedonography, but if you had to pick one big one, it's Whedon's basic suspicion of any forces seeking to bring…
Credit: Zade Rosenthal

Big ideas run throughout the Whedonography, but if you had to pick one big one, it's Whedon's basic suspicion of any forces seeking to bring order to a fundamentally chaotic world. That was true of many of the Buffy Big Bads but especially of the Mayor, a vision of political gladhanding and moral decency. It was also true of the Alliance, the organization in Firefly that was basically a combination of a megacorporation and a national superpower — sort of like a conglomeration of America, China, Goldman Sachs, and Big Tobacco. Loki's motivations are rather tangled in The Avengers, but at one point, he gets in a good line that defines the Whedon villain: ''The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled.''

There's a great scene in an early episode of Buffy where the Slayer asks mentor Giles if life ever gets any easier. ''What do you want me to say?'' he asked. ''Lie to me.'' And he does:

The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.

It might sound like Whedon is cynically denying that simplistic worldview — he is — but he's also underlining a key point of his philosophy: The confusing complexity of the real world is better than the tantalizing moral simplicity of Giles' imaginary universe. Human life is a mess, but it's a mess worth fighting for.

5 of 12

6 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

The Simultaneous Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Moral Icons

Joss Whedon | Whedon is an avowed atheist, and, although his characters rarely address spirituality directly, there's a running undercurrent of spiritual skepticism in his work that often…

Whedon is an avowed atheist, and, although his characters rarely address spirituality directly, there's a running undercurrent of spiritual skepticism in his work that often presents a surprisingly complicated perspective on how humanity creates icons of societal morality. In the Firefly episode ''Jaynestown,'' Adam Baldwin's thuggish Jayne returns to a settlement where he caused some trouble?only to discover that the citizens have turned him into a folk hero, with a large statue and a whole legend. Jayne spends the episode living down to his legend, but his example — based, remember, on utter falsity — inadvertently inspires another character to self-sacrifice.

The complicated argument seems to be: Everyone who serves as a good moral example was probably a bad person, but we still need good moral examples. Or, in the words of Nathan Fillion's Mal: ''It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another. Ain't about you, Jayne. It's about what they need.'' The Avengers' Nick Fury would probably agree: After the sacrifice of Phil Coulson, Fury shows the heroes Coulson's Captain America cards covered in blood, claiming that those totems of his sacrifice were in his pocket. After the heroes leave, Fury's subordinate notes that those cards were actually in Coulson's locker. Fury: ''They needed a push in the right direction.''

6 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement
Continued on next slide.
Advertisement

7 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

A Sense of Humor

Joss Whedon | All this chatter about philosophical subtext and spiritual deconstruction would be hot air if the Whedonography didn't have another unifying factor: It's funny! Dialogue in…
Credit: Marvel

All this chatter about philosophical subtext and spiritual deconstruction would be hot air if the Whedonography didn't have another unifying factor: It's funny! Dialogue in Whedon projects crackles with screwball flair. Whenever one character asks a serious question, another character almost always responds with a joke. Whedon has often noted, with pride, one of the few lines he wrote for X-Men that got in: When Cyclops asks Wolverine to prove his identity, Wolverine offers: ''You're a dick.''

7 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement

8 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Structural Silliness

Joss Whedon | That sense of humor extends deeper than witty dialogue. Whedon is willing to take on conceits that, on a conceptual level, sound downright goofy —…

That sense of humor extends deeper than witty dialogue. Whedon is willing to take on conceits that, on a conceptual level, sound downright goofy — and more often than not, it results in the kind of utterly eccentric work that few creators would even consider. Buffy had a musical episode: Okay, lots of shows have had musical episodes. But how many shows have gone the Angel route and featured an episode where the handsome brooding protagonist gets transformed into a muppet?

Whedon's apparently silly flights of fancy might work because, bizarrely, he takes the silliness seriously. As he said at a panel at Comic-Con 2013, '' The appeal of The Avengers is that it doesn't work. Everybody knows that Iron Man and Thor shouldn't have a conversation, which means that when they do, we can have the fun of them knowing it too.'' Now pray for a muppet interlude in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

8 of 12

Advertisement

9 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

A Willingness to Experiment

Joss Whedon | It's possible to look at the Whedonography as a to-do list of challenges the writer has set for himself: -Make a movie with a goofy…
Credit: Kurt Iswarienko/FOX

It's possible to look at the Whedonography as a to-do list of challenges the writer has set for himself:

-Make a movie with a goofy title like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, somehow make that movie into a TV show, somehow make a spinoff of that TV show succeed where most spinoffs fail.
- Make a space western TV show, and if it fails, turn that TV show into a movie.
- Make a musical web series.
- Make a movie that brings together three different superhero franchises.
- Film a Shakespeare adaptation in a fortnight?and film it at your own house, too.

The best expression of Whedon's urge to experiment is probably Dollhouse, a TV series where many of the main characters literally became different characters each week. Dollhouse suffered from network interference and a general sense of mission drift; the fact that the show actually managed to organize itself from such disparate raw materials into a genuine serialized narrative show is nothing short of incredible.

9 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement
Continued on next slide.
Advertisement

10 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

The Little Guy

Joss Whedon | The science-fiction and fantasy genres generally favor epic heroes, but Whedon likes to drill down and tell stories about the people behind the heroes. One…

The science-fiction and fantasy genres generally favor epic heroes, but Whedon likes to drill down and tell stories about the people behind the heroes. One of Buffy's best episodes has a title synonymous with this concept: ''The Zeppo'' pushed Xander to the forefront, relegating Buffy's universe-saving antics to a B-storyline. Whedon has described the new S.H.I.E.L.D. series as a show-sized reimagination of ''The Zeppo,'' with Agent Phil Coulson as the everyman in a world filled with super-people. And Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog twists the idea by imagining a wannabe supervillain competing with the popular Captain Hammer.

10 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

11 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Scooby Gangs and Superteams

Joss Whedon | With his background in television, it's not surprising that Whedon prefers to tell stories about communities. With one notable exception, all of his stories are…
Credit: Marvel

With his background in television, it's not surprising that Whedon prefers to tell stories about communities. With one notable exception, all of his stories are about groups of people, often brought together by circumstances beyond the control, who discover that they become more powerful together. This is even true of Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, which focuses on how relationships make both parties greater than the sum of their parts. The exception is Dr. Horrible, which is in some ways about the titular character's loneliness — although, notably, the engine of the plot is his desire to join the Evil League of Evil.

11 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement

12 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

The Whedon Repertory

Joss Whedon | Just got cast in a Joss Whedon project? Good news: Now, you'll be cast in every Joss Whedon project. The Whedonography is filled with repeat…

Just got cast in a Joss Whedon project? Good news: Now, you'll be cast in every Joss Whedon project. The Whedonography is filled with repeat appearances by familiar faces. Eliza Dushku's role on Buffy led to the lead on Dollhouse. Felicia Day appeared towards the end of Buffy, sang in Dr. Horrible, and featured prominently in the gonzo flashforward episodes of Dollhouse. And Much Ado About Nothing was a veritable Whedonverse reunion, with regulars Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker playing lead romantics Benedick and Beatrice.

What makes Whedon's collaborations interesting is that he often casts his actors in radically different roles. Nathan Fillion played a woman-hating sociopath on Buffy, then a bruised-sardonic hero on Firefly, before playing a jocky parody of superheroism in Dr. Horrible and the comic relief in Much Ado.

12 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement
Replay gallery

Share the Gallery

Pinterest Facebook

Up Next

  • By Darren Franich @DarrenFranich

    Share the Gallery

    Pinterest Facebook
    Trending Videos
    Advertisement
    Skip slide summaries

    Everything in This Slideshow

    Advertisement

    View All

    1 of 12 Strong Women
    2 of 12 Self-Aware Dialogue
    3 of 12 The Simultaneous Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Clichés
    4 of 12 Character Death
    5 of 12 Order is Evil, Chaos is Good
    6 of 12 The Simultaneous Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Moral Icons
    7 of 12 A Sense of Humor
    8 of 12 Structural Silliness
    9 of 12 A Willingness to Experiment
    10 of 12 The Little Guy
    11 of 12 Scooby Gangs and Superteams
    12 of 12 The Whedon Repertory

    Share & More

    Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message
    EW.com

    Magazines & More

    Learn More

    • Subscribe this link opens in a new tab
    • Advertise this link opens in a new tab
    • Content Licensing this link opens in a new tab
    • Accolades this link opens in a new tab

    Connect

    Subscribe to Our Newsletter
    Meredith© Copyright 2022 Meredith Corporation. Entertainment Weekly is a registered trademark of Meredith Corporation All Rights Reserved. Entertainment Weekly may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Privacy Policythis link opens in a new tab Terms of Servicethis link opens in a new tab Ad Choicesthis link opens in a new tab California Do Not Sellthis link opens a modal window Web Accessibilitythis link opens in a new tab
    © Copyright EW.com. All rights reserved. Printed from https://ew.com

    View image

    12 Signs It's a Joss Whedon Project
    this link is to an external site that may or may not meet accessibility guidelines.