Joss Whedon

Okay, so you’re a big-time movie star now.

You’re justifiably eager in awaiting the premiere of your major motion picture, "Serenity" at the end of the month, and you’re talking about how hot you are to make the Wonder Woman film.

And maybe it’s hip to be that famous Hollywood guy who writes comic books now.

But it’s not enough. Not nearly.

You are a man of television. You got your start way back when writing for the "Roseanne" sitcom. And it’s through the magic of TV — the intimacy and familiarity of a weekly series — by which you turned a crappy movie (Remember, you said yourself you cried at how bad it was when you first saw the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" movie.) and shaped characters we truly cared about and told stories which really mattered. In the end, you created what’s today regarded as one of the great TV series of all time.

Heck, TV is in literally in your blood. Your granddad wrote for "The Dick Van Dyke Show," and your father worked on the 1970s sitcom, "Alice."

It’s time that you plot your return to the small screen.

No doubt you may still be a little bitter at the way your earlier TV career ended. No one would blame you. But times change, and the climate would be more favorable now for your return.

The big broadcast networks are all buying scifi series again.

However, even if the new shows "Invasion," "Surface," and "Threshold" all were to tank, the success of "Battlestar Galactica," "Stargate Atlantis," "The 4400," and the like means there is both the audience for genre series and the networks out there willing to buy them and support them.

Even the WB is back in the genre game with its new series, "Supernatural," starring Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles as brothers seeking answers behind their mother’s strange death and their father’s disappearance.

Former WB chief Jordan Levin— the man who canceled "Angel" — is gone, and the suits who took his place have since hinted that they sort of regret Levin’s decision to axe your show.

Maybe you can finally get that Spike-centered TV movie off the ground you and James Marsters have been talking about for what seems like forever.

But don’t rely too heavily on reviving the Buffyverse. The effort to launch the animated "Buffy" series seems be languishing, and as much as we still love watching the reruns on FX, "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" may be one train that’s left the station; it’s day having come and gone.

That’s okay. Being Joss Whedon, you must have 1,000 good ideas bumping around in that head of yours.

Our love for your work is not limited to Buffy. As you know, the very fact that you were able to sell Universal on "Serenity" is due in no small part to us fans snapping up so many DVD copies of "Firefly," your short-lived Fox series. (Hey, if somehow you got a show on the Home and Garden Network, we’d watch that, too.)

Speaking of FX, the folks who run that cable network have been methodically building their stable of original series. Maybe they’d be in the market for a new genre series.

Whether it’s at FX or elsewhere, though, the trick is to go somewhere where you almost couldn’t fail. To avoid a repeat of the "Firefly" fiasco, in which Fox killed that great series after just a handful of episodes, you need a deal with low expectations, kind of like you had when you first sold the WB on Buffy.

You’ll need the room to fly under the radar and build an audience, which is the formula that worked so well to ultimately grow "Buffy" into the phenomenon that it ultimately became.

Where you went wrong is going for the big-time deal with Fox with "Firefly," where expectations were just too high.

It also means doing it cheap. You’ll need a budget closer to the one you had when you launched "Buffy," not the eye-popping $2 million per episode you had on "Firefly." Sure, big budgets are great, but the larger the budget you have, the bigger the bull’s eye you’ll also have on your back.

And you being Joss Whedon, you wouldn’t need to spend big to make a series that we’ll all watch. You just require good stories that need telling, and good actors to tell them. I know both of those are well within your grasp.

While you’re at it, try getting the band back together, to borrow a phrase. Give David Fury, Jane Espenson, and the rest of your old staff a call. How great would it be to re-form your old production house, Mutant Enemy?

How sweet would it be to hear a little "Grr Aargh" at the end of the end of a new Joss Whedon-led production? Just think about it. The fans would go nuts.

Nobody’s saying to give up the moviemaking. I’ll be the first one who will be thrilled to see "Serenity" become such a blockbuster that it will guarantee a string of sequels long into the future.

But you have proven to be the master of multitasking. Back when you were simultaneously running "Buffy," "Angel," and "Firefly," you were saying all over the place how crazy you were to be taking on so much at once.

We all know you were saying it with a little wink and nod. You were clearly having a blast, you were at the top of your game.

All I’m saying, Joss, is this: We love you. Come home. Please.