Joss Whedon

SEATTLE — I’m standing in a muddy backyard behind a row of neat town houses, in the world’s most efficient television studio. Actors practice their lines in a heated tent on the lawn stocked with gourmet food and a dressing table. Props and costuming work out of the basement. A few feet away is the sound stage, a converted three-car garage and sometimes-bar that currently serves as the main set for Cherub, a fan-made parody of Joss Whedon’s popular TV series Angel.

Basil Harris, who plays Cherub’s title character, stands on the lawn in a robe and bunny slippers waiting for his next scene. "The set of Cherub is structured like a low-budget film," he says, gesturing at the prop guys running around with a Christmas tree and scimitars. "In fact, a lot of the equipment is actually better."

Now filming its second season in a whirlwind 10-day, $10,000 shoot, Cherub caught fans’ attention last November. The first season consisted of 12 installments of three to five minutes, posted weekly, and within months the show’s audience had grown from a few theater geeks in Seattle to tens of thousands online. There have now been roughly 100,000 downloads of Cherub episodes.

Cherub’s popularity is exceptional, but its subject matter isn’t: The show is one of several fan-created online films and TV series set in the so-called Whedonverse, the special land where Joss Whedon’s three canceled shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, take place. With the official Whedonverse put out to pasture, fans have taken the reins on a stable of unofficial spinoffs.

But unlike typical fan-made work, these amateur productions feel almost professional. Some, like Cherub, even negotiate Screen Actors Guild contracts for their talent. Nearly all have access to high-quality film production technologies, as well as professional crew, actors and musicians. With built-in audiences and a reach that extends across the blogosphere, fan films may be the first generation of web TV shows that will give big-budget network series a run for their money.

Director and show creator Scott O. Moore exits the sound stage at a rapid clip. "All right, the first thing this afternoon is the pirate scene," he barks, cutting through an excited discussion of comic books and the Aquaman TV series in the actors’ tent. Transformed into pirates by haunted gold, Cherub and his crew would be pillaging and sword-fighting for a couple of hours — then quickly change into Christmas outfits to film a holiday special in the early evening. In a production like this, things move fast and everybody participates — even this journalist, who was persuaded to don an elf outfit to play the part of a foul-mouthed "little helper" to evil Santa.

Like Angel, Cherub is the story of a vampire with a conscience who fights crime with a ragtag team of outcasts and nerds. But that’s where the resemblance ends. Cherub is pure slapstick — the title character is doomed to wear cursed bunny slippers and spends most of Season 1 crossing swords with two monkey-obsessed villains called Johnny Mildly-Irritating (Paul Gude) and Princess Valium (Jennifer Pratt). The future of the world hinges on the fate of the Eggplant of Mystery. And Barney (Brynn Hambly), one of Cherub’s crime-fighting team, joined the group after narrowly escaping a life of eternal pie-eating in the lemon meringue dimension.

Fans of Angel revel in Cherub’s many satirical references to the original show, but the series also appeals to people who hate Angel, or who just get a kick out of zany parodies.

Although Star Trek and Doctor Who have spawned their share of fan films, and Halo its crop of machinima, the Whedonverse is tailor-made for fannish appropriation. Whedon courts fandom the way other creators court coke-saturated meetings with network honchos. He posts regularly to fan websites and message boards, and sometimes slipped little references to fans into his shows — even, occasionally, taking fans’ suggestions about character development.

Five years ago, some British Buffy fans made one of the first widely watched Whedonverse fan films, Fluffy the English Vampire Slayer. (A few years later, another group created Barry the Demon Hunter, whose first episode was, according to the show’s website, made for 50 pounds ($93) using "a small handheld Panasonic camcorder and two torches for lighting.")

Today in Australia, a precocious 17-year-old high school student named Emma Paige-Langley has written and is currently directing two episodes of Buffy that take place after the series finale. Three trailers for her show, available on YouTube, are slick and exciting — and have been downloaded more than 5,000 times since they were posted in mid-May.

But productions can be much bigger. The Canadian crew of Into the Black, a soon-to-be-released web drama set in the Firefly universe, boasts professional special effects designers and TV industry insiders — the cast recently had beers with Firefly lead actor Nathan Fillion. And 2005 Firefly parody Mosquito was directed by an award-winning short filmmaker, Nathan Town, who doesn’t shy from including a fan film on his résumé.

Stephen McCandless, the sole financier behind Cherub, is hoping for more than a résumé-builder. He wants to make the series the flagship show on his Caution Zero Network. "This is a guerilla sitcom, but it’s also an entrepreneurial venture," he says in a low voice as, 3 feet away, Moore helps the actors rehearse their pirate accents. "We’re going to start out selling T-shirts and DVDs, but eventually we’d like to have online ads or possibly sell episodes as downloads for smartphones."

Already, McCandless has several other series in the works: another sitcom with Cherub lead Harris, and a soap opera about polyamorous people directed by Moore. Another planned series is about "Seattleite eco-feminist vampires, who are really concerned with eating organic."

Onstage, Johnny Mildly-Irritating walks a plank. "Let’s get another take," Moore suggests. "We need you to make an ’eep’ noise this time." Between takes, Moore reflects on why he’s drawn to this story. Partly his interest can be traced back to the same geekiness that has inspired him to collect dozens of Buffy and Angel figurines. But more than that, he loves theater. Moore and most of the actors on Cherub have known each other for years through their work at Seattle’s experimental Annex Theatre. "Parody isn’t the most respected genre, but we take it seriously," he says with a grin that belies his words. "Besides, parody is forgiving of production mistakes."

By lunch time, Moore calls a wrap on the final scene of the pirate episode. "Ladies and gentleman, that’s how long it takes to film an episode of Cherub — about three hours," he announces grandly. McCandless grins — those are words every producer wants to hear. It’s easy to believe that one day soon, the format this cast and crew are pioneering will challenge network TV the way blogs have challenged publishing.