Angel

I ran into Joss Whedon while I was helping Rebecca cover the American Wedding premiere. She recorded this too and will be posting it on her romance/drama site, but I posted it first, so ha! Joss is so cool he offered to stop talking if I needed to grab someone else for an interview, but nobody was as important as Joss.

There was ground to cover about the new season of Angel and a perspective on the reaction to Buffy’s end.

How’s your summer going? It’s a lot like winter. It’s work. I just started shooting Angel today.

But not as much work as before though. No, no. Only one show.

What was today’s shoot like? Good day. There was a lot of talk about spanking. I’m not kidding. Lotta spanking.

So this will be more of an S&M influenced season? No, there was just the one scene with the spanking.

What do you think of the fan rumor about Spike coming back as the first male slayer? That would never happen. There will never be a male slayer. That would simply never happen.

How will you bring Spike into the mix? I’ve had every scenario thrown at me. All I can say about it is that it’s going to shake everything up because he’s Spike, that’s what he does.

Will more Buffy cast members to come on? Oh yeah. We think Sarah will be doing shows in sweeps if everything works out. And we sort of have our pick. We want them all. We just got to pay to fit ’em in.

What about Alyson? That would be nice. I’m a fan.

Do you have story plans for how they’d work in? Our plan is for them to say they’d work in and then to think of a story. We have certain things on hold, ideas for a few of them, but we really wait until they give us the nod and then we go to town. Because if you spend a lot of time thinking of a story and then they suddenly can’t, you’re occasionally boned.

What is the theme for this season of Angel? The theme of this season is corruption because they’ve taken over Wolfram and Hart. The theme is can we do good in an evil world or will we just become tainted by it?

Is Stephanie Romanov coming back? We’re not sure. We sort of wrapped up the character but we love the actress and we want to have her back if her schedule permits and we can afford it, but she’s not the main voice for Wolfram and Hart anymore. There’s going to be a new character.

Did you find Buffy fans and critics more harsh on season six or season seven? You know, people always hate the current season for one reason or another. But at the end of the day, season six took a lot of hits. I think season seven probably came out a little ahead. I think season four took a lot of hits which is one of my favorites. Inevitably, everybody has a favorite. People who are really depressing like season six as much as I did.

Was the [I[Buffy finale something you had planned for several years? No, no. About a year. At the beginning of the year, I thought okay, I know I’m leaving. But it wasn’t anything like at the beginning that I knew I was going to do that. It came out of Buffy’s separateness from the other characters that I decided that’s what we need to address.

How would you explain the message to fans who didn’t understand season seven? Watch it again when it comes out on DVD. I think not understanding it would be the worst because it’s almost didactic in its clarity.

Do you have any future DVD plans? After we do season seven, not so much.

Are you developing any non-genre shows? Non genres, you mean like them dramas? Them procedurals? Anything that doesn’t have some element of the bizarre in it, tends to put me to sleep, or I just don’t know how to do it. I’m not developing anything this second. I’m still sort of recovering and spending my time trying to get Firefly made into a movie knock on wood. I will be at some point this year, but whatever I do, I’ll be pretty shocked if it isn’t a genre show.