Not so shiny: Plenty of drama for Buffy creator Joss Whedon
— Bernard Zuel, Sydney Morning Herald, August 25, 2010
More seriously, he says that the cancellation of Firefly not only made him “the sourest man alive” but had an unexpected and potentially devastating side effect.
“I stopped having ideas, which for me is an extremely rare experience,” Whedon says. “It was something much more subtle [than losing hope], it took away my ability to think in terms of episodic television. For years.”
[snip]
“You have to have a certain naivety, almost Memento-like, and get bitch-slapped over and over. You’ve got to go in with an enormous amount of confidence because everyone is going to question everything you do. You have to be the person who believes when nobody else does.”
It seems that rather than the five stages of grief, for writers there is just one stage: wiping your memory and starting again, like the characters in Dollhouse.
“Yeah, pretty much. Anger, anger, anger. Anger. Bargaining,” he deadpans.