Buffy the Rules Slayer

How does Joss Whedon plan to settle in to his new television home, the testosterone-charged UPN, which has cage-matched its way into young men’s hearts by featuring wrestlers who attack each other with metal chairs and talk trash between gulps of Bud?

By writing and directing a musical version of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” a singing and dancing episode that Whedon, the show’s creator and executive producer, says he’s been itching to do. A splash of “Rent,” maybe some tap shoes, lots of feeling. Just right, Whedon hopes, for year six of what he describes as “one of the corniest and most overtly romantic series on TV.”

Any second thoughts, UPN, about shelling out roughly $2.3 million an episode to woo the cult fave from its fiercest rival, the WB? None, says Dean Valentine, UPN’s president. “I couldn’t have been more psyched when I heard about this episode,” Valentine said of the musical extravaganza, which is still in the formative stages. “I love any kind of fun twist on normal TV. Also, Joss is one of the few people who could do this and get away with it, and ‘Buffy’ is one of the few shows that could attempt this and have the audience go along with it.”

That episode had been churning around in Whedon’s mind for some time, long before he knew that “Buffy” would land at UPN, after a near-bloody scuffle with the WB, where the show’s fifth season wraps Tuesday.

For a guy who’s quick with quips and whose series relies as heavily on humor as on tension, Whedon couldn’t find anything funny about the fight over “Buffy.”

“It was debilitating, quite frankly,” he said just days after the announcement late last month that the show’s WB run would end. “The whole thing was wicked hurtful. But I just want to tell stories, and now I can continue doing that, so I’m pleased.”

The tenor of those stories won’t be changed by UPN’s male-skewing lineup. If anything, the network will mold the network to accommodate “Buffy,” a comedy-action-horror series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar that draws about 4.4 million viewers a week.

“You won’t see the Rock guest-starring on ‘Buffy,”’ Valentine said. “We would never want to change the very thing that attracted us to this show. Having a show of this quality will change us ... enabling us to attract more top-notch producers and broaden our audience and speak to young women.”

It seems natural to Whedon that a series about a group of outsiders should wear its square-peg-round-hole status like a badge of honor. “I don’t say, ‘How can I shock people?’ ‘How can I be unconventional?’ ” said the 36-year-old Whedon. “I think about doing something I haven’t done before. In this case, it’ll be like a classic old musical where the songs help tell the story. And people will sing things that they wouldn’t say.”

Before “Buffy” went on the air as a midseason replacement in 1997 and helped define the WB as a quirky Gen-Y haven, Whedon had said that unpredictability would be a key component. It would be vital, he believed, for the audience not to know from moment to moment or episode to episode whether the characters were going to burst into flames or into song. Those elements of surprise and comic-book humor have become calling cards for Whedon, an Oscar-nominated film writer from a television family who initially signed on for 13 episodes of “Buffy” and just wrapped his 100th.

“Buffy” became Whedon’s school, as he went from writer and novice director to experienced show runner, experimenting with the form along the way, from one episode stripped of music to another with virtually no dialogue (roughly 27 minutes of sustained silence). The latter was nominated for Emmy and Writers Guild awards.

“He’s that child genius who’s playing ‘Chopsticks’ one day and Mozart the next,” said David Greenwalt, a TV veteran who is a consulting producer on “Buffy” and an executive producer on its spinoff, “Angel.” Greenwalt was hired at the show’s outset by 20th Century Fox to fill in the experience gap while Whedon learned the fundamentals. “But he already had such a clear understanding of what was needed to tell the story,” Greenwalt says. “He knew so much instinctively. What he didn’t, he learned very quickly.”

In the coming year, Whedon will step up his outside activities, which already have included writing “Buffy”-related comic books and doing uncredited rewrites on feature films like Fox’s “X-Men.” He’ll work on a “Buffy” animated series, which is headed to Fox Kids Network in fall 2002, and a more adult spinoff series centered on magic shop owner-watcher Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) for the U.K.

Whedon recently signed a four-year deal with 20th Century Fox TV estimated to be worth more than $20 million. He also intends to continue writing films, but there are no plans for a sequel to the 1992 “Buffy” feature, which starred Kristy Swanson.

As another side project, Whedon recently wrote a song for a non-”Buffy” CD that cast member Head is producing. Fellow “Buffy” actors James Marsters, Alyson Hannigan and Amber Benson are contributing to the record too, which grew out of Sunday gatherings at Whedon’s L.A. home, where the cast would spend time reading Shakespeare and playing music.

Despite the other ventures, Whedon will stay intimately involved in “Buffy,” which closes out this season, he says, with a “major apocalyptic episode.” No cliffhangers, which he hates.

“Joss discovered there’s incredible satisfaction in developing characters over years and being able to connect with your audience by having the characters evolve,” said Gary Newman, president of 20th Century Fox TV. “I get the feeling he could continue this almost endlessly.”

As a writer-producer, Whedon has a level of control over his shows that he never had on films, some of which he describes as miserable experiences. The native New Yorker earned an Oscar nomination for his “Toy Story” script, wrote “Alien Resurrection” and did rewrites on “Speed,” “Twister” and “Waterworld.”

The idea for “Buffy” came nearly 14 years ago, when Whedon--a comic book fan and film buff--decided to tell a story in which the girl doesn’t get killed by the monster in the dark alley . . . she turns the tables. “I saw all those girls, like P.J. Soles in ‘Halloween,’ and I’m like, ‘They’re so interesting, they’re cute, they have sex, they’re fun to be around. Why do they always have to die? What’s going on?’ I felt bad for them.”

Whedon’s demon-fighter first appeared in a short film he made as student at Wesleyan in Connecticut. From the start, she was a female superhero, who still worried about her friends and what she would do for fun on the weekends. Definitely not a girlie girl. “She wore combat boots,” Whedon said.

Though it was still rough around the edges, the prototype showed Whedon’s potential on a number of levels, said Jeanine Basinger, chairman of Wesleyan’s film studies department, who was Whedon’s advisor at the university. “He’s a truly modern storyteller,” she said. “He combines the best of the past, a sense of myth, character, story and plot with modern trends. And he knows how to tell a story visually.”

After the feature film version, which Whedon felt camped up his original script in ways he hated, he conceived a small-screen “Buffy.” Everyone, it seemed, thought it was a bad idea. “The refrain was, ‘That’s a working title, right?’ ” he said. But by that time his show-business pedigree already included some high-profile film writing and script doctoring, and time as a writer on “Roseanne.” Besides, both his father and grandfather had written for and produced hit TV series, including “The Golden Girls” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

“I believed that a high school girl who killed vampires was going to be the sort of thing people wanted to see,” Whedon said. “It’s eccentric; it has mood swings. But as a concept, it’s like, so obvious.”

Once the show found a home on the WB (which is part-owned by Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times), he had the freedom to test the boundaries of the medium, Whedon said, because no one expected the show to succeed. (In those days, no one expected the young and struggling WB to succeed, either.)

Whedon always had faith that “Buffy” would find a niche. “When I say I’m not surprised that the show has gotten to 100 episodes, I sound like an ego with legs,” he said. “But the show makes sense to me, and I believed it would make sense to other people.”

Arguably, it has. There are thousands of Web sites dedicated to “Buffy,” where fans regularly talk in chat rooms about how the show has touched their lives. And there are fans among critics, with many including it among their top 10 picks for quality TV shows.

Through it all, Whedon remains the kind of guy who would rather stay home and watch DVDs with his wife, Kai Cole, an interior designer, than hit the Hollywood party circuit. He kept his beat-up 11-year-old Toyota Celica until a few years ago because he liked it. He’s tried to look the Hollywood-director part for advertiser upfront meetings in the past, Greenwalt said, but couldn’t seem to trade his khakis and T-shirt for something more formal. “He went shopping, but he came back with nothing,” Greenwalt said.

For Whedon’s part, he can’t imagine not taking risks on “Buffy.” “People might hate this musical,” he said. “I’m terrified of it . . . so that means I should do it.”

“Buffy” has also pushed boundaries with story lines in the 8 p.m. time slot exploring everything from sex between high schoolers to a young lesbian couple (when the characters went off to college and Hannigan’s Willow met Benson’s Tara). Benson didn’t know the characters would become romantically involved and share an on-screen kiss and the same bed in their dorm room when she accepted the part.

“I was nervous about doing it; I felt it had to be portrayed correctly,” Benson said. “Joss took us aside, and we talked about it. He has really taken the high road. There’s nothing gratuitous about it.”

WB executives declined to comment for this story, although network entertainment chiefs Susanne Daniels and Jordan Levin have been credited in the past with allowing Whedon to explore sensitive story lines without interference. The reason for that freedom, Greenwalt suggested, is Whedon’s “ability to overcome dogma and political correctness with humanity. . . . He makes you care about those characters and what happens to them.”

On the set of the 100th episode, Whedon spent roughly six hours working on a seven-minute emotionally charged scene in Giles’ magic shop that included all the principal cast members. At one point, he took Head aside for some refining.

“When he gives you a note, it’s like someone switches on a little lightbulb,” Head said later. “It’s lovely working for somebody as specific as he is. He can marginally, fractionally change something, and make it better.”

That often means pulling back. “It’s an actor’s instinct to show lots of emotion and cry,” said Head. “But Joss doesn’t like a great deal of emotion showing on camera. He says once you let the tears go, you’ve done the work of the audience for them.”

From the start, Whedon has focused the show on what he believes are shared experiences, among them the horror that is high school. “I wanted to deal with the very general ideas of alienation, isolation and humiliation that people go through,” he said. “I wanted something that spoke to people on a very visceral, adolescent level.”

The drama is usually lightened with some wackiness, showing that the characters don’t take themselves too seriously, and neither does Whedon. “There’s something very adult going on at its core,” Greenwalt said of “Buffy.” “And at the same time, there are all these teen high jinks. [Whedon’s] willing to poke fun at everybody in a good-natured way. And he’s willing to poke fun at himself. The juxtaposition of the great and tragic with the small and petty is what makes it work.”

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* The season finale of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on the WB. The network has rated it TV-14-DLV (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14 with special advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language and violence).