Joss Whedon is an Academy Award-nominated American writer, director and executive producer known as the creative force behind cult classic television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly.  His newest TV show is called Dollhouse.

Joss was born in New York City, the son of screenwriter Tom Whedon (The Electric Company and The Golden Girls) and the grandson of screenwriter John Whedon (The Donna Reed Show and Leave it to Beaver.)  As such, it’s often been said that Joss is the world’s first third-generation TV writer.

Joss is a graduate of Winchester College in England and received a film degree from Wesleyan University in 1987.

He first gained work on the television series Roseanne, but his first big break came when 20th Century Fox greenlit a little known screenplay called Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It starred Kristy Swanson as Buffy but director Fran Rubel Kuzui interpreted the movie a lot differently than Joss would have liked.  He saw it as a horror comedy poking fun at other horror movies.  The movie was only marginally successful, received poor reviews and was quickly forgotten.  Joss hated what happened to his script.

“I had written this scary film about an empowered woman, and they turned it into a broad comedy. It was crushing,” he said at the time.

Several years later, Joss reworked the script into a television series that went on to become one of the WB Network’s most successful shows.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer spawned its own spin-off show called Angel that was equally as popular and turned teenage actress Sarah Michelle Gellar into a household name.

The next big move for Joss was the creation of 2002’s illfated Firefly.  Firefly only lasted one season, but record-setting DVD sales of that single season led Universal Pictures to greenlight the major motion picture Serenity based on Firefly’s characters.  Many fans and critics blamed FOX for Firefly’s downfall, as the network played the episodes out of order and buried the show on Friday night, a night historically bad for ratings.

While known primarily for his work in television, Joss has also spent a great deal of time writing scripts for movies and comic books.

In 1996, he was one of four screenwriters nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the Pixar film, Toy Story.

He also wrote or co-wrote numerous other projects including Alien: Resurrection, Titan A.E., and Speed.  Joss was not credited in the movie Speed, but writer Graham Yost admitted that Joss wrote “98.6 percent of the movie’s dialogue.”  Speed was a commercial success and some of the movie’s lines remain in pop culture to this day.

Comic book fans know Joss as the writer of the Dark Horse Comics miniseries Fray, a futeristic spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

He worked his television shows into two other comic book series — Serenity: Those Left Behind, a three-issue miniseries based on the characters from Firefly, and a new Buffy comic that takes place immediately following the TV show’s series finale.

And although the Marvel Comics  series Astonishing X-Men was often delayed, Joss wrote the entire 25-issue run.  One of his stories in those comics actually was used as the basis of the 2006 film X-Men: The Last Stand.

Joss currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Kai Cole, and their two children, son Arden and daughter Squire.

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