Free Joss Whedon: The Biography by Amy Pascale Page B

season—
Ferris Bueller, Working Girl
, and
Uncle Buck
were all canceled in short order as well.
    “It was a very talented ensemble and talented staff,” Joss says. “Ty King is an amazing writer, but there were many forces conspiring against us, people who just didn’t get the show.”
    The politicking going on behind the scenes compounded the disappointing ratings. It wasn’t as dramatic as the chaos on
Roseanne
, where Joss had already had his trial-by-fire initiation into the realities of Hollywood. But, again, he was able to step up and be an active part of the writing team, complete with a lot of all-nighters. It was his second chance to shine that didn’t quite deliver a Hollywood ending. On
Roseanne
, his chance had sort of been taken away from him, so he left. On
Parenthood
, the show was canceled before he could show what he could do.
    Yet the experience wasn’t without its merits. Joss’s major takeaway from
Parenthood
was his time spent in the writers’ room. In King, Joss found the guidance he’d longed for on
Roseanne
. King was easier for him to relate to than his previous coworkers; he was relatively young for a showrunner—roughly the same age Joss would be when running
Buffy
seven years later.
    At one point, the two were venting about the frustrations of the show. “This is terrible,” King lamented. “This is unbelievable what they’re doing. They’re killing us. This is just … I’m so angry.” Then he turned to Joss, with the biggest smile, and said, “This is so much fun.”
    “I never forget that,” Joss says. “It’s so true.”

    The following year, Joss didn’t pick up another television show gig, but his own personal narrative took an unexpected shift when Michelle “Kai” Cole literally walked into the room. She had been driving across country with Joss’s cousin en route to San Francisco. On September 6, 1991, the girls made a stop in Los Angeles, at Tom Whedon’s house.
    Kai and Joss both describe their meeting as something intense and immediate. “He was far across the room, and the first second that I saw him—I had one of those experiences, where he got closer,” Kai remembers. “He kind of came into my face really fast, but he didn’t move. It was sort of this weird, physical reaction that I had to him. It was instant, and we both had it. He says he was in lust at first sight.”
    That moment is captured in a photograph Joss’s brother Sam snapped within half an hour of them meeting. In the picture, Joss and Kai are both looking at each other. “He’s directly looking at me, smiling, and I’m sort of looking under my eye, looking over at him,” she describes. “It’s kind of an amazing thing to have a picture where you meet someone for the first time. And we’ve been together ever since.”
    He was twenty-seven, she was twenty-five. They’d both been working to define themselves on their own terms, each even choosing a new name that they thought fit better. They were well past the teenage awkward stage, yet their meeting was quite overwhelming for both of them. Both were very silent—unusually so, Kai explains—yet they were very aware of each other. They went out to breakfast with Sam and hardly spoke to one another. The first thing Joss said to Kai was “I like your boots.” Kai couldn’t find any words; she barely got out a “thanks.” That didn’t last for very long, though—the not-talking.
    They all went out dancing that night at Arena, a gay nightclub in Los Angeles. It was his dancing skills that tipped the scales, Joss jokes, and “the fact that we were at a gay bar and I was the only man that was interested in dancing with her—the lack of competition is what got it.”They just clicked from that time, Kai says. She did continue up to San Francisco but returned quickly. “We sort of celebrate [September 6] as our anniversary. It was very instant. Joss calls it the longest one-night stand, because we actually slept together that