
Joss Whedonâs Buffy The Vampire Slayer helped set off the TV-on-DVD revolution, with die-hard fans basically bludgeoning their friends with box sets so theyâd get on board and stop making fun of their âvampire-hunting cheerleaderâ show. But despite his personal contributions to our current binge-watching culture, Joss Whedon said heâs firmly against the model that allows viewers to shotgun whole seasons of TV in one big burst.
âI would not want to do it,â Whedon told The Hollywood Reporter this week, as part of a longer interview centered on Buffyâs 20th anniversary. âI would want people to come back every week and have the experience of watching something at the same time.â Whedonâwhose career has been relatively quiet since 2015âs Avengers: Age Of Ultronâthen dove deeper into the topic:
For you to have six, 10, 13 hours and not have a moment for people to breath and take away what weâve done ⌠to just go, âOh, this is just part seven of 10,â it makes it amorphous emotionally. And I worry about that in our cultureâthe all-access all the timeâŚThe more we make things granular and less complete, the more it becomes lifestyle instead of experience. It becomes ambient. It loses its power, and we lose something with it. We lose our understanding of narrative. Which is what we come to television for. We come to see the resolve. Iâm fond of referencing it, but itâs âAngela Lansbury finds the murderer.â Itâs becoming a little harder to hold on to that. Binge-watching, god knows Iâve done it, itâs exhaustingâbut it can be delightful. Itâs not the devil. But I worry about it. Itâs part of a greater whole.
That being said, Whedon is enough of a realist to accept that the new model is unlikely to go away. âObviously Netflix is turning out a ton of extraordinary stuff. And if they came to me and said, âHereâs all the money! Do the thing you love!â Iâd say, âYou could release it however you want. Bye.â If thatâs how people want it, Iâd still work just as hard. Iâll adapt.â