Free Joss Whedon: The Biography by Amy Pascale

fight sequences to come.

    Joss’s frustrations were relieved for a time when he wrote the script for the episode “Brain-Dead Poets Society.” Tom Arnold, another writer on the series who was famously engaged to Roseanne at the time, championed Joss’s work and covertly showed his script to her. “That was the first script of mine she actually read,” Joss remembers.
    After reading it, Barr had lunch with Joss. “It was quite extraordinary,” he said. “The good Roseanne came to lunch. She got it and she was very excited about it, and it was a really fascinating time.” She asked him how he, a twenty-five-year-old man, could write a middle-aged woman with such authenticity. Joss responded, “If you met my mom you wouldn’t ask.”
    In the episode, middle child Darlene writes a poem for her seventh-grade English class. When the thirteen-year-old tomboy is asked to read it at the school’s Culture Night, however, she balks. Roseanne, who wrote poems when she was younger, is excited to finally have a connection with her daughter and doesn’t understand the girl’s reluctance. Darlene fights to stay home and watch a basketball game with her father but eventually loses to her mother’s demands.
    It was his first script that ended up on the television screen largely as he wrote it, and the episode foreshadowed the way he would address the uneasiness of growing up in
Buffy
. Another comparison can be drawn between Darlene’s desperation to keep her identity very separate from her mother’s and Joss’s own reluctance to follow his father into a television writing career.
    In the finished episode, Darlene’s poem, “To Whom It Concerns,” starts from a sarcastic, apathetic place (“To whom it concerns, my ma made me write this / And I’m just her kid, so how could I fight this”), but ends on a beautiful, quiet note that cuts to a thirteen-year-old girl’sdesire to be heard, while still scared of the visibility that would entail (“To whom it concerns, I just turned thirteen / Too short to be quarterback, too plain to be queen. / To whom it concerns, I’m not made of steel / When I get blindsided my pain is quite real”). It is one of the most memorable scenes of the entire series—but this version of the poem wasn’t penned by Joss. The version in his draft was about basketball. “It was about Michael Jordan,” Joss explains. “It was prose, didn’t rhyme, it wasn’t about her emotions; it was actually just a poem.”
    The young writer who fretted over unnecessary script changes had now seen his work rewritten for the better. Perhaps the simplicity of Darlene’s poem in his draft was a reflection of his own youth and inexperience. The man who would later stress to his
Buffy
writers that every story must be about the emotional journey, that no episode was “just about the monster,” still hadn’t gained the experience to know that such a pivotal poem couldn’t be “just” a poem.

    By the time “Brain-Dead Poets Society” aired, it was the second half of the season. The politics on the show were still in flux, and on March 27, 1990, executive producer Jeff Harris resigned by taking out a full-page ad in
Daily Variety
. The show’s remaining higher-ups became increasingly insular, and Joss felt shut out. Worse, his writing assignments dried up. “Chicken Hearts,” the thirteenth episode of the twenty-four-episode season, was the last for which he received a writing credit. He had the financial security he craved—story editors on
Roseanne
made at least $3,000 a week—but the junior writer who had handed in six scripts now found himself with nothing to work on.
    Instead of continuing to sit in the office and write nothing, Joss decided to focus his energy on an idea for a movie script that had been brewing for a while. It would be a revisionist take on the “girl in a dark alley” trope from so many popular horror films of the 1980s, in which a young woman—usually a blonde—makes