Joss Whedon

Joss Whedon

“A lot of my stuff that, particularly in Firefly, but even in Buffy, is twisted Elizabethan. A lot of it is stuff taken from Westerns or movies from the 1940s, or things that have gone so far out of style that you can create your own version. I just love language.” — Whedon on how to write for teenagers

Highlights: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Angel (1999–2004), Firefly (2002), and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2008). You may also have seen his films The Avengers or The Cabin in the Woods this summer.

Influence: Whedon experimented with genre long before other showrunners, creating silent and musical episodes of Buffy, and instead of imitating teenagers in his dialogue, he created a new sort of slang which has since been appropriated by fans (it’s also worth mentioning that he influenced the discourse around the show directly with the coinage of “BYO subtext“). And while Dr. Horrible wasn’t exactly TV, critics called the web series a watershed practically the instant it was released and shut down the Internet; its DVD commentary (entitled Commentary! The Musical) didn’t exactly start musical-commentary trends everywhere, but it’s certainly a rare gem worth revisiting (see Whedon’s Heart, Broken).

Supplemental Reading: Check out Slayer Slang, an entire book dedicated to the Buffyverse lexicon.