Last month, actress Charisma Carpenter publicly confirmed a longstanding open secret in Hollywood: Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator and Avengers writer/director Joss Whedon is an irredeemable asshole.
For years, fans of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which aired on the WB and UPN from 1997 to 2003, have had to reconcile their adoration for a show about a teenage girl who slays monsters with the criticism that often swirled around her creator.
Mr. Whedon’s early reputation as a feminist storyteller was tarnished after his ex-wife, the producer Kai Cole, accused him of cheating on her and lying about it. The actress Charisma Carpenter, a star of the “Buffy” spinoff “Angel,” hinted at a fan convention in 2009 that Mr. Whedon was not happy when she became pregnant.
In July, Ray Fisher, an actor who starred in Mr. Whedon’s 2017 film “Justice League,” accused him of “gross” and “abusive” treatment of the cast and crew. . . .
On Wednesday, Ms. Carpenter released a statement in support of Mr. Fisher, in which she said Mr. Whedon harassed her while she was pregnant and fired her after she gave birth in 2003. . . .
Over the past week, many of the actors who starred on “Buffy,” including Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy Summers, have expressed solidarity with Ms. Carpenter and distanced themselves from Mr. Whedon. The actress Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Buffy’s younger sister, Dawn, alleged on Instagram on Thursday that Mr. Whedon was not allowed to be alone with her.
“I would like to validate what the women of ‘Buffy’ are saying and support them in telling their story,” Marti Noxon, one of the show’s producers and longtime writers, said on Twitter. Jose Molina, a writer who worked on Mr. Whedon’s show “Firefly,” called him “casually cruel.”
Maria Cramer, “For ‘Buffy’ Fans, Another Reckoning With the Show’s Creator,” New York Times, February 15, 2021
If the copious fan-issued blog posts and video essays on this damning series of insider testimonials is an accurate barometer, Millennials have been particularly crestfallen over Whedon’s fall from grace. It’s only over the last few years, really, I’ve come to truly appreciate just how proprietary they feel about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That surprises me still, because I tend to think of Buffy as a Gen X artifact; after all, the modestly successful if long-derided (by even screenwriter Whedon himself) feature film was released five years before its TV sequel. (If you don’t remember—and I’ll bet you don’t—the movie’s shockingly impressive cast includes no less than pre-stardom Xers Hilary Swank and Ben Affleck.) I recall seeing this one-sheet on a subway platform during the summer between sophomore and junior years of high school—
—and thinking somebody had finally made a spiritual sequel to my formative influence: Joel Schumacher’s Gen X cult classic The Lost Boys. (Turned out, however, I was gonna have to do that myself.) I was sold! I marvel still at how the advertisement’s economical imagery conveys the movie’s entire premise and tone. So, yes—I was the one who went to see Buffy the Vampire Slayer in theaters. Guilty as charged.
But it was the TV series, I’ll concede, that took Buffy from creative misfire to cultural phenomenon, so it stands to reason it made such an indelible impression on Millennials. I submit that more than any content creator of his cohort—more so than even celebrated pop-referential screenwriters Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Williamson—Whedon is preeminently responsible for the mainstreaming of geek culture at the dawn of the Digital Age.
Buffy not only coincided with the coming out of geeks from the dusty recesses of specialty shops, it helped facilitate that very cultural shift: As John Hughes had done for Gen X a decade earlier, Whedon spoke directly to the socially and emotionally precarious experience of adolescent misfits, and his comic-book-informed sensibilities (before such influences were cool) endowed the Buffy series with a rich, sprawling mythology—and star-crossed romance (beautiful though it is, Christophe Beck’s Buffy/Angel love theme, “Close Your Eyes,” could hardly be described as optimistic)—over which fans could scrupulously obsess.
What’s more, all three cult serials Whedon sired were alienated underdogs in their own right: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a reboot of a campy B-movie on a fledgling, tween-centric “netlet” that no one took seriously; Angel, a second-class spinoff that was perennially on the brink of cancelation (and ultimately ended on an unresolved cliffhanger); and Firefly, his ambitious Star Wars–esque space opera that lasted exactly three months—or less than the average lifespan of an actual firefly. That these shows struggled for mainstream respect/popular acceptance only burnished Whedon’s credentials as the bard of geek-outsider angst…
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