"Before hooking up with the slayer circle, young Jane served on the writing staffs of sitcoms like ELLEN (during its final, best, “lesbian” season)"

Or, as some call it, the season where everything became about Ellen being gay, it stopped being funny, and, oh yeah, we all stopped watching it and it got cancelled.

I got a chill when she wrote: ...but I'm not Tivoing FARSCAPE reruns or anything.

'Cause right now, I'm, uh, Tivoing FARSCAPE reruns to see the ones I missed the past two seasons.

Nice interview.

brother_grady | July 03, 16:53 CET

The last part of the article isn't showing up for me; grrrr, curse you bad html!

Does anybody else think Jane should just take over the Star Trek franchise? Cause her 5-minute series pitch got me excited about Trek for the first time in years.

[Edited to add] Ok, on IE I can see down to where she mentions The Lovely Bones, then there's a bunch of white space. In Netscape, I only see down to where she tells her agent her Dream Job is BUFFY. Time to send an email to AICN.

[ edited by wren on 2003-07-03 15:57 ]

wren | July 03, 17:49 CET

Yeah, I've tried Mozilla, Camino, and Safari and can't see the end of the interview, either. ARGH! Blasted stupid IE bigots. This could be the first time in weeks that I have had to open IE.

And brother grady, gotta disagree with you, that last season of Ellen was hilarious. If you stopped watching it, how do you know whether it was funny or not? For example, the episode where Spence got hit on the head and dreamed he was in gayland and was the only straight guy, that was SO funny (5.15, "It's a Gay, Gay World"). I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if Jane had a hand in writing that particular episode.

OK. I just checked, and it was written by David Walpert, not Jane. Oh well. Still hilarious, though. And let's see, Jane wrote "Womyn Fest" which was good, and had Sarah McLachlan in it, for pete's sake! And Jane's line in "Like a Virgin "the trained seal does most of the work". I could go on, but hey. And no, not all the episodes were about being gay at all. There were a few that focused more on Paige, there was one that dealt with a death in Laurie's family, there was a nother that was about parenting.

And the one with Sean Penn where he totally upstages Emma Thompson's coming out was possibly the funniest ever. And the finale had a great tribute to Lucy.

[ edited by chickenbird on 2003-07-03 18:08 ]

chickenbird | July 03, 19:50 CET

I've done a horrible thing. This is probably breaking about 14 Whedonesque rules, but you can click here to see the entire interview if you're having browser issues. I dug it out of their source code and cleaned up the html. Enjoy!

wren | July 03, 20:23 CET

Wren, thanks for doing that, great. Saved me from having to open IE. Loved the part about the bunnies, loved it. And the "MAYBE JONATHAN ISN'T ALL THAT DEAD! HE COULD GET BETTER!" She really loves that character. Boy howdy.

chickenbird | July 03, 20:31 CET

And brother grady, gotta disagree with you, that last season of Ellen was hilarious. If you stopped watching it, how do you know whether it was funny or not?

You know, Chickenbird, you're right. I'm not sure what the timing was in terms of Ellen's coming out and which season that was, so maybe I bailed before the last season. I know that until she came out, I used to love the show, and then afterwards, it seemed that BEING GAY AND LOVING EVERY MINUTE OF IT superceded every other aspect of the show, so I left. Wouldn't mind being proved wrong if there were somewhere showing it in repeats. Wonder why ABC Family doesn't ...? Oh, I get it.

brother_grady | July 03, 22:17 CET

Safari 1.0 (v85) works just fine for me. So I guess Konquerer on Linux/KDE should do as well.

PowerToThePeople | July 04, 00:03 CET

Oh my god, I *love* this woman. She digs all the stuff I dig, except for the Law and Order thing. Land of the Lost! I'm dyin' here. And the Star Trek pitch--paging Paramount! Hire Jane Espensen!

lynsa | July 04, 01:40 CET

make with the funny-type words

Heehee, so that's where it comes from. Could somebody please remind me: who do we have to blame for, "Wanna come with?"

[ edited by babykarret on 2003-07-04 01:12 ]

babykarret | July 04, 03:07 CET

as I've stated before on this site, "Wanna come with?" is regionalism. Though with JE from Iowa, it's probably her fault.

jack knight | July 04, 03:25 CET

jane is cool, she'd so make a great luncheon date. is she my age, in her 40's...? the way she speaks and writes is totally reminiscent of my teenaged years...

"wanna come with" was something we said back in the 70's, so it was at least also regional to 1970's toronto. a sentence like "make with the funny" is just old-jewish-person-speak (all my friends were jewish and we imitated their bubbies and zeydahs), and again my teenaged crowd always spoke like that. we also said "not" and "way" and shoved eachother like elaine from seinfeld did. it's completely disarming seeing that sort of stuff crop up on tv and in movies 20-30 years later :-D

t r a c y | July 04, 05:43 CET

Another regionalism heaped on the ME crowd is "I'm not much with/for [the] (blank).". Coming from Maryland, I've been using that for as long as I can remember. My two favorite uses being "I'm not much with the smalltalk." and "I'm not much for politics.".

stavrogin | July 04, 08:35 CET