The humor is definitely much better than the story. There’s whole seasons of his shows that are crap as far as story and characterization, but that still bring the snark.
Man, all this Whedon idolatry is scaring me at the moment.
Anyway, I kind of agree with the OP, in that what’s original or interesting about Whedon’s writing is all in the snarkiness, which is fun in small doses. But there is more to his writing than this, which is probably what keeps the fans going:
- geeky characters they can relate to
- ongoing soapy situations
- cod mythical/superhero plots.
Like Harry Potter, it isn’t just one thing that makes it popular, it’s an amalgame of stuff that is already well known for bringing in fans.
You left out what I consider one of his biggest strengths:
-He kills his characters off without warning.
It’s very, very, very rare in storytelling for the stories to be so lethal to main characters in this fashion. I don’t care whether you’re talking Westerns, mimetic fiction, speculative fiction, myths, or straight up action movies: deaths tend to be telegraphed. Whedon doesn’t telegraph, and so death in his stories hits really, really hard.
Overall, what makes him so good, IMO, is that he takes risks in his storytelling.
Daniel
But…but…Angel as a Muppet! That’s comedy gold! 
I, for one, like the snark, but the melodrama and romantic polygons get dull very quickly. And sometimes, it feels like Whedon kills off characters just so he can go: “AHA! Death to a major character! Didn’t see THAT coming, didja!”
I saw this link in the thread about Serenity, and it seems appropriate here, too.
Orson Scott Card’s comments on Serenity.
While I don’t always agree with OSC, I think his comments are spot on here.
To be fair to the OP, the thought has crossed many a great mind. Whedon himself was once afeared that his only real talent was in writing snarky dialogue. He considered the possibility that he was a hack of the highest level, and was just fooling us all.
I’m sure every writer, at some point, fears the same. Maybe not publicly, but there’s that demon of doubt which creeps into bed with you at 3:00 AM, whispering “hack…hack…hack…” until you squirm. Most writers, I believe, learn to dull the demon with alcohol or prolificness, sometimes both. But he never goes away.
What did Joss do?
He wrote 30 minutes of television with no dialogue of any kind. Just to see if he could do it.
And gave the world Hush. One of the best episodes of television ever.
Above all, this is a guy who is always pushing himself with one high-concept yet accessible stunt after another, just to see if he can do it. Television without a net. Will he stumble and break his neck one of these days? Perhaps. We were all waiting for the ambulance when we heard about the musical, admit it. But, time after time, he pulls out a beautiful swan dive and pulls off not only a stunt, but a magnificent story.
How easy would it be for him to become a Kevin Smith? Love the guy, but he hasn’t challenged himself since Dogma. He’s too afraid of failing to try. (His demon bears the name Mallrats, methinks.) I think your criticism would be more rightfully lobbed his way.
It was “Once More With Feeling” that drew me in.
As for Kevin Smith - I’m pretty sure Mallrats predates Dogma by a large margin. Didn’t you like Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back?
VC03 - I have only seen you on the SDMB for a bit but have enjoyed a lot of your comments on music - and I hope you have enjoyed mine; your comments on my posts have been positive. With that in mind, I have to say I think you would benefit from a closer look at Whedon’s work. All of the posts here elaborate why - bottom line: Whedon takes a fantastic situation and uses it as a metaphor for the human condition and populates it with 3-D characters - then he makes it easy to swallow with snappy dialogue. But is the substance - both the metaphors and characters - that give his work heft.
He’s really quite good and getting hung up on his dialogue is not giving him enough credit.
As a musician, I have a theory about what makes a successful song - take incredibly depressing lyrics and wrap them into an upbeat, poppy song with an indelible hook in the chorus - see Help, Message In a Bottle (or pretty much any Sting song), Paint it Black, Won’t Get Fooled Again, etc… I think Whedon does this with his stories - takes substantive settings and plots and makes then easier to take with the dialogue. But don’t let the dialogue fool you.
Yes, it does pre-date most of his work. And it still haunts us all. I enjoyed J&SBSB, but it wasn’t ground-breaking, revolutionary or even technically good. It wasn’t Smith pushing himself into waters even he feared were over his head. It was funny snarky dialog. It was fun, but it was laurel-sitting. [/hijack]
I agree with the OP. I could never get into Buffy, and as for Firefly, if you can’t see that all the characters are blatant rip-offs from anime, well… all I can say is you should learn a lot more about the genre before you call Joss Whedon “original.”
Cowboy Bebop called, Joss, they want their concept back.
It might be a ripoff of anime (I really can’t be bothered to debate that) but even if it is ATleasteveryone DOESN’T TALK likethiswithstopsandSTARTSand norythmand crappywriting. And they don’t move at 4 frames a second.
Give me Firefly any day.
I can see that you’ve never seen Cowboy Bebop, or you wouldn’t be insulting the writing or the animation quality. CB is one of the most critically acclaimed and fan-favored “adult” style anime series. While it true that low-end anime like Pokemon is commonly done at 4 fps, CB is not of that type.
I guess I just don’t get it… I saw Serenity, and thought-- meh… It was OK, but seemed targeted at the pre-adolescent boy market. I’d pit almost any episode of the new Battlestar Gallactica on the SciFi channel against this movie any day of the week.
If by “at some point,” you mean “nightly,” I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Creating characters that you care about and occassionally killing them off isn’t anything new. Neither is taking interesting characters and putting them in a fantastic way-more-interesting-than-our-own universe. Soap Operas have been doing this for decades.
I’m not saying it’s not legit to like Whedon, or that for some reason people shouldn’t. But he’s not particularly revolutionary. People have stretched film lightyears farther than Whedon, or anyone else, will ever be able to stretch television. He does what he does well, but he is far far away from the artistic edge.
FWIW, I consider his dialogue to be one of his biggest faults. All his character talk, well, like a character that Joss Whedon wrote.
I have seen it. I didn’t like the writing, the animation or the character design. I’ve yet to see an anime that didn’t look like it was made on the cheap compared to American animation and didn’t have the English voice actors doing ridiculous sounding fast talking to keep up with the mouths of the Japanese speaking characters.
Give me Firefly any day.
Has anyone else ever killed off a major character in the first episode of the show? Granted, Jesse wasn’t a “major” character, but he was third or fourth in the credits.
You think Cowboy Bebop was original?
I’m sick of people saying that Joss isn’t original. First of all, no one particularly said he WAS original. No one came in here and said “What’s the best thing about Joss? That he does things no one has ever done before in the history of mankind”.
Secondly, he IS at least somewhat original. Maybe it’s just taking old elements and using them in new ways, but almost everything has been done in SOME way so far. No single aspect of Buffy or Firefly may be original, but each of them, as a whole, is VERY original.
Thirdly, who cares? Since when is "everything must be groundbreaking"a requirement for anything?
Let’s not and say we did.