Evolving story arcs, dark scribblings and new networks.
Chantelle Putter: As a writer/producer/director on Buffy, how much influence have you had on the show’s characters, and where would you like to see them end up?
The influence varies. Joss has very strong ideas about the overall pattern of the show, what’s going to happen in the course of a year. He usually comes in with a general shape and then from episode to episode the different writers pitch wrinkles on that.
I’d say [that] as the years have progressed, Joss is busy with his empire, so there’s a little more time to discuss and bring in other ideas. It varies from show to show. I think that every writer sort of brings their personality to the show and that’s reflected in the episodes and in different characters.
I’ve been accused of being the sort of pain and chains girl. My episodes are often about dark issues and nasty sex. Joss would say that until I got this show, it wasn’t quite as nasty, and I take that as a compliment.
Host: Do you think you’ll continue to specialise in that area, or will you do more comedy?
I love to write all kinds of genre and all different kinds of stories, but I definitely am drawn more to the darker side of things. The things I’m definitely drawn to are more melodramatic, and that’s OK - we all have our favourites.
It takes me a long time to write a good joke. There are a lot of people here who it’s second nature to. We sort of assign scripts based on people’s loves and first abilities.
Jasmine B: I was curious about the change in networks. Has it involved any particular changes in style or approach?
The benefit has been fairly clear. We have the full support and full promotional push of a network in our sixth season, so that’s a huge big deal. Most of the time, a show’s support is waning [at this point] and you’re just going from day to day, but we’re a new show to UPN and we’re very exciting to them.
So, they’ve been doing a lot more promotion and really putting us in the public eye again. As a result, we’ve got some new viewers this year, and that’s really great - to breathe fresh life into a the show that’s been on for a long time is really difficult and they’ve been doing a really good job, so that’s been great.
The other part of it is, creatively, they were happy with the show when they bought it, so they were pretty committed to just staying out of our way. That’s been great because generally we didn’t have a lot of input from the WB on the direction of the show creatively and we were used to that, so that was something that was of concern as to whether it would stay like that.
