Joss Whedon

Five hours and fifteen minutes.

That’s how long it took for the smallest seed of a campaign by television fans to support the striking Writers Guild of America to take root and grow. It was November 5, 2007, the day before the strike was set to commence, and it happened on the Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) weblog whedonesque.com. The discussion thread where it all began reads something like this:

“Kinda short notice, but anyone interested in getting up a collection and sending some pizzas over to the front of Universal Studios?” (C.A. Bridges, 1:57 CET)

“If somebody sets up a Paypal and offers to order the pizzas it should be good to go.” (gossi, 2:15 CET)

“I talked to the guys at my regular pizzeria…. They said they can have a large order ready any time around lunchtime as long as it’s called in in the morning.” (dreamlogic, 4:37 CET)

“OK, stop sending payments. I’ve got enough for the pizza.” (dreamlogic, 7:12 CET)

Television fans have always been taken for granted. For decades, network executives have been able to cancel shows and program freely knowing the ratings would still be there in the fall. “If we air it, they will watch” was the unofficial mantra. Sure, there were exceptions, most notably the campaign to save Star Trek from cancellation in the 1960s, but most efforts by fans to influence the network decision makers were swatted away with the assurance there would be no major repercussions.

Then came the Internet and its promise of being a social unifier. Fan websites of practically every show on television now exist and flourish, with legions of supporters. More importantly, these fans are intelligent, resourceful and persistent, making it harder for them to simply be ignored. And one of the largest collections of online fans belongs to Whedon, who created Angel and the short-lived Firefly as well as Buffy.

If anything, Whedon fans are resilient, have a “can-do” attitude and demonstrate an amazing ability to unify and expand their efforts. Thus four days after pizza was delivered to the front lines of striking writers, a new website was launched. Named Fans4Writers, it was started by members of whedonesque but had a larger purpose; as the website itself states, “It quickly became clear and necessary for the effort to encompass more than just a single group of fans. As such, Fans4Writers is not just for one fandom. It is not just for ‘genre’ fans, television fans or movie fans. This effort belongs to fans of ALL striking writers.”

It wasn’t long before blogs and fansites for shows as diverse as 24, Battlestar Galactica, Las Vegas and The Unit added banners of support as well as links to Fans4Writers. New websites like Office Fans for Office Writers, set up by viewers of the NBC comedy, popped up on the Internet landscape. Criminal Minds Fanatic even auctioned off a can of beef stew autographed by the writers of Criminal Minds to benefit the staff of the CBS series who were adversely affected by the strike. Before anyone knew it, a full-fledged movement was apparently underway.

But it seems that movement was only slightly noticed by the mainstream media, and even then more by web-based offshoots of the mainstream like Scribe Vibe: Variety’s WGA Strike Blog. It did, however, garner the attention of those it was supporting, and not just in a small way. Slightly over a week after the strike began, a group of television showrunners met to discuss the fan outpouring.

“The point of the meeting was that the WGA is aware of—and a little blown away by—the passion, tenacity, and organizational savvy of the online community,” Joss Whedon himself posted on whedonesque. “The ‘Jericho’ nuts are the stuff of legend. Whedonesque and the creation of Fans4Writers were spoken of in awed whispers.”

The “stuff of legend” comment refers to the cancellation of the CBS freshman series this past May. Probably 99.99 percent of all fan-driven campaigns to save a cancelled show end in failure; Angel, after all, remained dead despite blood drives and a billboard truck patrolling the streets of downtown Los Angeles, and even a strategically-placed Ferris Wheel could not bring Everwood back. But fans of Jericho borrowed a page from Roswell (which has the distinction of being cancelled after each of its three seasons) and how it was rescued the first time when fans bombarded the WB with bottles of Tabasco sauce, a favorite of one of the show’s characters. In the season final of Jericho, Skeet Ulrich shouts “Nuts” when confronted with a surrender ultimatum from a nearby town intent on overrunning his own. Fans rallied around that battle cry and in turn bombarded CBS with forty thousand pounds of peanuts. And guess what? It worked. Jericho will return at some point in 2008 with seven additional episodes.

The purpose of the meeting Whedon attended—which reportedly involved showrunners Ron Moore (Battlestar Galactica), Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy), Rob McElhenney (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), Stephanie Savage (Gossip Girl), Carol Barbee (Jericho) and Bill Prady (The Big Bang Theory), among others—was to find a way to tap into the fan’s energy and utilize it to everybody’s advantage. Thus a little over a week after the launch of Fans4Writers came Pencils2MediaMoguls, with the goal of sending pencils to the network and studio heads to show support for the striking writers. As of November 24th, two-hundred eighty thousand pencils had been purchased by television fans.

Can it make a difference? Can the fans truly have a say in this labor dispute? Only time will tell, but the movement has proven that television fans are not to be taken lightly nor are simply drones who will follow the dictates of network television. They are intelligent enough to understand the issues involved in this strike, imaginative enough to find ways to take a stand and strong enough to not be denied their due as an involved third-party in the raging conflict. Joss Whedon and the other showrunners who met on November 14, 2007, understood this, as the Whedon post on whedonesque demonstrates:

“There are no longer two sides to this struggle; there are three. The audience has a voice, and a right to be heard…. There was no one in that room who didn’t understand that they were there BECAUSE OF YOU, because you guys have already proven yourselves not just dedicated fans but an active, forceful community. Take a moment to be all up in yourself. Now get over yourself. Now doubt yourself. Now hug yourself. Now touch your knee – Hah! Didn’t say ‘Simon says.’ Like, ever. FOOLS! It’s you unauthorized-knee-touching fools who are proving that the internet is indeed the line in the sand (‘…must be drawn Heah! This fah! No fuhther!’), for it’s the one medium the congloms don’t control. Televised news is largely ignoring us, the print media is eating Nick Counter’s astonishing lies like candy they get paid to eat, but you upon the ether… you haven’t been silent and you can’t be silenced. Go ahead. Touch that knee. Simon be damned.”

Perhaps that is the greatest strength and true legacy of the current fan movement, and the role of online fandom in general: not so much to influence the network television suits but to merely support and stand behind the creators and writers whose shows resonate with viewers. Television is no longer simply about entertaining; shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Jericho and even Grey’s Anatomy define our times as much as anything. These shows debate issues of morality and tell stories that we all can relate, unite us as a community like no other medium and even help shape our lives.

The creators and writers of these shows, meanwhile, must maneuver their way through the upper echelons of network television, worry about overnight ratings and deal with the constant threat of cancellation. Movements like “Save Jericho” and the outpouring of support that Fans4Writers represents are ways for fans to let these scribes know their struggles may actually be worth something after all, and even energize them to continue onward.

It has yet to be seen if the Les Moonves or Rupert Murdochs of corporate America take notice of Pencils2MediaMoguls, but if the effort allows television fans to stand on the virtual front lines of the writer’s strike, side-by-side with the likes of Joss Whedon, Ron Moore and Shonda Rhimes, that may in-and-of-itself generate enough synergy to alter the television landscape forever.

And that is a legacy worth striving for.