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Joseph (Joss) Hill Whedon is quite possibly the first third-generation television writer. He has ventured out of writing into producing and directing and dived back into it by creating comic books and composing music. His most notable success was a seven season television show, but we will get to that later.

Writing is clearly a family trait for him. His late mother, Lee Stearns, a teacher, had written several unpublished novels. Tom, his father, was a writer and co-executive producer for The Golden Girls and writer for The Electric Company. John Whedon, his grandfather, wrote for The Donna Reed Show, Leave it to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show^.. One of his brothers, Zack, worked as a script writer on Deadwood and another brother, Jed, is a video game composer.

To kick-start his TV career after a short stint writing for Roseanne, Whedon chose to write a horror story with comedic overtones. This became Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The premise came from the blond girl in horror films who always ended up dead - “I wanted, just once, for her to fight back when the monster attacked, and kick his ass.” During production he felt there was creative conflict; he left the movie to its demise. Although he is still credited as the writer, Whedon feels his vision did not contribute to the movie. Buffy would not remain in her grave long, as his wife predicted “in a few years…make it again, the way you wanted to.” Whedon’s desire to slay the film world was unrelenting.

Whedon worked as a script doctor for several years. His credited work includes: Toy Story, Alien Resurrection, Titan A.E. and Atlantis: the Lost Empire. Uncredited draft work was done on the scripts for Speed, Waterworld, Twister and X-Men. The credited writer of Speed, Graham Yost said, "Whedon wrote 98.9 percent of the dialogue." Whedon refers to this period of his life as his “crappy film career”, because little of his work survived.

In 1997 Gail Berman, executive with Sandollar Productions, felt it was time to resurrect Whedon’s character Buffy. She thought that “there was much more to this guy and his vampire slayer than any of us could have imagined.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer found her new home on television as a low budget mid-season replacement with little chance.

Whedon felt that the first episode of Buffy was the beginning of his career and the first time he had told his story the way he wanted. “It was never about the monster. It was about the emotion. The monster [of the week] came from that.” The vampires’ relationships were as multifaceted as the human’s.

Whedon gained a reputation as a brilliant writer, especially for his dialogue. Buffy developed a unique language. He added ‘much’ to adjectives, creating catchphrases like ‘Rude much?’ Another habit was adding the suffix ‘-age’ and ‘–y’ to verbs, constructing words like ‘lurkage’ and ‘unmixy’.  Masters describes how Whedon’s reaction to hearing reports that Buffy’s success was due to it’s dialogue prompting the episode ‘Hush’ - an almost dialogue free episode. Nicholas Brendon, Buffy’s Xander, describes it as “the scariest episode…ironically without dialogue.”

The show's creator tried his hand directing some episodes of Buffy with outstanding results. His other positions included executive producer, writer, song composer and actor. Marti Noxon, writer and executive producer on Buffy, describes him as “one of the busiest people I know…His brain just doesn’t work like the rest of us mortals.”

Four seasons into Buffy, Whedon created the spin off about the main 247-year-old vampire Angel. Whedon was the executive producer of the series, and also directed and wrote several episodes. He also made a hilarious dancing cameo appearance.

Eventully, science-fiction show Firefly, a show set 500 years in the future was written. He applied himself to this show as much as his others, including writing the theme song. Whedon was devastated to see only 11 of the 14 episodes aired and screened out of sequence. The show was cancelled, but this was not an indicator of the show’s success. In the first four months of the DVD release 200,000 copies were sold, clearly demonstrating the strong fan base.

Whedon still wanted to finish telling his story, so he took the cancellation of Firefly as an opportunity to work on his film career. He announced he had been working on a script about Firefly. Firefly fans rejoiced at some closure, in the form of the film Serenity. This fulfilled his desire to create something “100 people needed to see…rather than a 1000 would like to see.

During the 2007-8 Writers Guild of America strike Whedon was a prominent figure, when not in the public’s eye he was working on his most recent project.  Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog frayed from his usual small and large screen and comic formats. The self-funded online musical series was co-written with his brothers and Jed's fiancée, Maurissa Tancharoen. The three acts (about 42 minutes combined) were streaming free for a limited time in July 2008. The musical was created exclusively for Internet distribution via i-Tunes, but it proved so popular a DVD release is in the works. The supplement online comic Captain Hammer (Nemesis of Dr. Horrible) will be available in print alongside various other ‘horrible’ merchandise.

Joss Whedon has “a lot more creepy stuff swirling around in the back of [his] mind.”  Rest assured he is far from finished slaying the television, film and comic industry. Perhaps his own children will be the first fourth generation television writers. We’ll just have to wait and see.