The Whedonverse is in the Rebel Alliance

How a small band of sci-fi geeks is leading Hollywood into a new era.

As these guys know well, fandom saves shows. Fans wrote letter campaigns to save recent faves such as Jericho and Firefly. (Jericho was saved ; Firefly wasn’t but went on to sell more than 200,000 DVDs in six months.) When Star Trek was almost canceled after its second season in 1968, a massive letter-writing campaign resurrected it for one more round. And after the show went off the air, fans kept the characters alive by creating stories of their own, which they would publish in zines and swap at conventions. "They had nowhere to go, and they wanted the show to go on," Moore says.

After becoming friends at Cornell University, where Moore received a library award for having the biggest collection of Star Trek books, Moore and Shankar came full circle as writers on the early 1990s Star Trek series The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, ushering the former fanboys into the new class of Hollywood writers and producers. Moore, Shankar, and this emerging crop of writers began communicating with fans online, figuring that was exactly the kind of dialogue they had wanted with the Star Trek and Star Wars creators back in the day. Not only was it cool, it was a way to essentially build the value of their intellectual property. "If you can actually find people who like your stuff," Moore says, "there are probably enough people who can make it a going concern for you — if you can find them, if you can monetize them."

And there is one member of the Geek Elite — their Jedi master — whom they all point to as their inspiration. "That’s the genius of Joss Whedon," Grillo-Marxauch says.

It’s a Smurf-blue morning as Joss Whedon, a gawky 43-year-old with short, wavy brown hair and a gray T-shirt, jogs up to his office in Santa Monica. Whedon works in a residential neighborhood, in a Spanish-style bungalow neatly decorated with gothic figurines and framed anime art. "I’m a huge fan of the Final Fantasy film," he says as he heats up a pot of breakfast tea after his run. As his peers attest, Whedon defined a new generation of nerd worship with his iconic late-1990s series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cheeky pop-culture powerhouse about a blond teenage demon killer. Then he continued his reign with a Buffy spin-off, Angel, and later Firefly. Today, he’s working on his next series, Dollhouse, which follows a young woman who can be imprinted with different identities to accomplish a variety of missions.

While not always runaway hits on the air, Whedon’s shows are renowned by his peers for spawning some of the most thriving aftermarket around. Whedon sheepishly admits his shows "do crazy" on DVD, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Whedon’s achievement, say his fellow geeks, is not just creating an isolated TV show but also building a universe that has earned its own nickname, the Whedonverse. As Lindelof puts it, "The Whedonverse was, like, if you have a core fandom, how do you get that core fandom to buy a lot of shit ?" And perhaps more important, how do you sell them all that stuff with integrity, so you don’t end up burning your biggest fans ?