Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Better Days and Other Stories by Joss Whedon 'The Nevers' is the Worst of Joss Whedon. This overcrowded, faux-empowering HBO sci-fi series is a wholly original disappointment. Welcome to Up Next , a column that gives you the rundown on the latest TV. This week, Valerie Ettenhofer reviews The Nevers, the ambitious HBO series created by Joss Whedon. Pop culture lovers have spent a lot of time over the past few years discussing the dearth of original stories on our screens. Regurgitated content is bad. We want big! We want bold! We want a story that’s not a remake, reboot, prequel, sequel, or adaptation, damn it! The HBO series The Nevers , which was created by Joss Whedon before his exit as showrunner last November, is a flashy, wholly original failure that reminds us to be careful what we wish for. In some ways, small-screen stories don’t get much bigger and bolder than this one. The Nevers is a steampunk sci-fi Victorian ensemble period piece. In its spare time, it’s also a crime drama, an X-Men -like superhero saga, and — with all the subtlety of a hammer over the head — a story about women. Every few scenes, someone in The Nevers talks with importance about women as a collective: the strong, the downtrodden, the underestimated, the dangerous. Years before Whedon was accused of serious workplace misconduct by several actors, he made the ambitious and beloved woman-led series Buffy the Vampire Slayer . Though the series had its flaws, it was, at its best, an ass-kicking take on the evils of patriarchy. Any Buffy fans who held out hope that the creator would have a more evolved take on female empowerment more than twenty years later — or who would even settle for a rehashing of the classic series’ thematic greatest hits — will be sorely disappointed by The Nevers . The series is a crude caricature of a feminist work, if that. It’s the sort of cartoonish series in which a round table of white men appears in the very first episode to make their mustache- twirling, villainous opinions of powerful women abundantly clear. With the exception of its ultra-basic ideology, The Nevers is overstuffed on every level. Aside from the veritable genre Mad Libs mentioned above, the series also includes a myriad of unremarkable and at times indistinguishable characters. Amalia True ( Laura Donnelly ) and Penance Adair ( Ann Skelly ) are introduced as our two heroes. Amalia is “touched,” meaning she suddenly developed superpowers three years ago, along with countless other women across England. Penance has a penchant for mechanics, while other touched women have abilities, ranging from the talent to sing magic songs to the admittedly rather useless power to tell anyone the time without a clock. True and Adair live at a place called The Orphanage, where other touched women gather. They sometimes rescue touched women who are misunderstood by their families and hunted by others, but they also keep finding themselves face to face with a serial killer named Maladie ( Amy Manson , sporting a look that hilariously calls to mind Sheila the She-Wolf from GLOW ). The Nevers is muddled, overcrowded, and less-than-engaging despite its complex lore and flashy special effects. Nearly every emotional beat in the first four episodes misses the mark, in part because characters aren’t given the scene-time needed for viewers to form any substantial opinion of them. As a long-time Buffy fan, I’ve often found myself rationalizing that classic series’ questionable sexual politics, but The Nevers makes Whedon’s narrative preoccupation with sex and punishment impossible to ignore. Amalia is the series’ would-be protagonist and most fleshed-out character, yet her personality hinges on past trauma that’s led her down a specific self-destructive path. When she lists her unhealthy coping mechanisms, she adds sex with strangers, and she’s later seen trading “a kiss for a pint” at a local pub. Similarly, Maladie is described as a woman who mixes violence and pleasure and is quickly revealed as a trauma victim herself. Essentially, these are both underwritten depictions of PTSD, ones that attempt to tie together sexuality and emotional “brokenness” in a clumsy, unconvincing way. “How are we ever going to see justice if we aren’t a part of justice?” a character says in a later episode, and it’s a line that would mean something if it weren’t thrown into a series that’s crammed with things like goofy-looking CGI laser guns and superpowered brothels. There is an effortless balance to some of Whedon’s earlier works, including Buffy , Firefly , and even Dr. Horrible’s-Sing-A-Long Blog , that made it possible for high- concept genre elements to coexist naturally with human stories. That balance has evaporated, leaving an insubstantial, silly story in its place. Some of The Nevers ’ first season was filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Philippa Goslett was announced as Whedon’s replacement in January, two full months after he stepped down. Either of these behind-the-scenes interruptions could be responsible for the series’ choppier elements, but neither fully explains away its many confounding choices. There’s always a unique disappointment that comes with realizing that an artist we once considered great is actually quite the opposite, but it’d be a mistake to dwell on this single narrative failure when the TV landscape is ripe with truly empowering and complex female stories in a way that it wasn’t when Whedon first came into power. Try Alena Smith’s Dickinson , or Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You , or Noelle Stevenson’s She- Ra and the Princesses of Power , or Pamela Adlon’s Better Things . The list goes on and on, but The Nevers isn’t on it. A Brief Tour of Joss Whedon’s Many Controversies. On Wednesday, actor Ray Fisher fired off a tweet accusing producer Joss Whedon of “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable” on-set behavior toward the cast and crew of Justice League . Whedon inherited the superhero consortium movie from its original producer, Zack Snyder, and addressing the handover in 2017, Fisher — who played Cyborg in the film — initially described Whedon as a “great guy,” adding that Snyder “picked a good person to come in and finish up for him.” Joss Wheadon’s on-set treatment of the cast and crew of Justice League was gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable. He was enabled, in many ways, by Geoff Johns and Jon Berg. Accountability>Entertainment — Ray Fisher (@ray8fisher) July 1, 2020. In a tweet on Monday, however, Fisher said he would “like to take a moment to forcefully retract every bit” of that statement. He has also accused producers Geoff Johns and Jon Berg of enabling Whedon. I’d like to take a moment to forcefully retract every bit of this statement: pic.twitter.com/1ECwwu6TG1 — Ray Fisher (@ray8fisher) June 29, 2020. While Fisher did not go into detail as to the nature of Whedon’s alleged behavior, he is not the first one to accuse the producer of creepy and upsetting comportment. Fans have speculated that Whedon fired an actor over her pregnancy. Actor Charisma Carpenter played a pivotal role on Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well as its spinoff, Angel . Ahead of season four of Angel , however, Carpenter informed production that she was pregnant, which is allegedly when things started to deteriorate. In the fourth season, her character’s story arc took a strange turn for the outlandishly evil, culminating with a coma from which she never emerged. At the time, viewers wondered if Carpenter had been written out of the series because of her pregnancy, speculation Whedon appeared to refute in a 2003 interview with TV Guide . He said that Carpenter’s storyline had simply played itself out, adding that any reported tensions between himself and the actor were “stuff between us and not stuff that I would talk about in an interview.” In 2009, however, Carpenter suggested that her pregnancy had indeed been a factor in her departure from Angel . “What happened was that my relationship with Joss became strained,” she said at that year’s DragonCon convention, according to the Telegraph . “We all go through our stuff in general [behind the scenes], and I was going through my stuff, and then I became pregnant. And I guess in his mind, he had a different way of seeing the [fourth] season go.” She went on to say: I think Joss was, honestly, mad. I think he was mad at me and I say that in a loving way, which is — it’s a very complicated dynamic working for somebody for so many years, and expectations, and also being on a show for eight years, you gotta live your life. And sometimes living your life gets in the way of maybe the creator’s vision for the future. And that becomes conflict, and that was my experience. Carpenter suggested to Complex in 2018 that production did not sufficiently account for her pregnancy in setting the schedule, compounding her devolving relationship with Whedon: “It wasn’t necessarily graceful on either side. So it was difficult, I think for them to accomplish what they needed to accomplish with a female lead in the position I was in but these things can be done and they have been done and they’ve been done gracefully in the past with other productions, I’m sure.” Whedon’s ex-wife has accused him of posturing as a feminist to hide his infidelities.