The Point Radio: Why Jane Espenson Is So Proud Of HUSBANDS

  From BUFFY to ONCE UPON A TIME, Jane Espenson has written some great TV but her proudest accomplishment is the web series, HUSBANDS, now starting a new season on a new home, The CWSeed. Jane talks about why the show just keeps growing, plus the Alluring Amber Benson fills us in on her guest shot on HUSBANDS and that classic BUFFY Musical. And Shark Fever isn’t cooling off. SyFy tosses out another film in the genre, GHOST SHARK. We talk to the writer/director about how SHARKNADO was just a lead in for his film. Oh yeah, and Affleck will be Batman. Just deal with it. This summer, we are updating once a week – every Friday – but you don’t have to miss any pop culture news. THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other  mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

Hello, it's Mike Raub. Welcome to The Point, where all parts of pop culture come together. She's been behind so much great television, but now Jane Espenson's greatest work may be just on the web. We talk about the phenomenon of husbands coming up.

And speaking of phenomenons, well, sci-fi gives us another shark movie, and Ben Affleck is Batman. Just deal with it. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point, The Point radio, get The Point radio.

Jane Espenson has been involved with a lot of great TV, both as a creator and a writer, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Warehouse 13 to Once Upon a Time. But when I sat down to talk to her, she told me that there's one thing she's most proud of. Husbands, I am most proud of husbands, which I didn't write alone.

I wrote it with Brad, but I think it is, Jaws always says, have a reason to tell the story. It's something that you personally care about. Your personal credo should be inside the story that you're telling. And I found someone who shared a credo with me, and we made a show that says the thing we want to say.

And that's why you do this. Now online with its third season and a new home on the CWC, Husbands is the world's first marriage equality comedy. Doing a spin on the usual newlywed situation and telling the story of a same-sex couple, caught in a new relationship and trying to make it work.

The series has not only attracted a lot of viewers, but a number of big-name guest stars as well. And I asked Jane how she managed to pull them in. It hasn't even been pulling them in. It's been like, we planted this flag and then people ran up to the flag and saluted it.

It's been, the response from performers has been amazing. And from crew members. People want to come work on our set and be a part of the show. We had a bunch of volunteer PAs this last time, like running around and getting things for us and help decorate the house and everything.

Like people are really drawn to this project. One of the more recent guest stars is actress Amber Benson, who got a role that, well, had a lot of meat to it. We took all the weird, charismatic, religious, anti-gay, we took all of that, combined it into a ball of like weird suburbia.

And that's what I played on husbands, a very unhappy, screaming woman, all about not wanting these guys to get married. It was so much fun to be such a weirdo bitch. Husbands are smart and funny, but without any of the usual fantasy elements that Jane's been involved with.

Yet it's huge in what we call the geek community. And Jane told me she knows why. I also think there's a huge amount of overlap between the geek community and the gay community that hasn't always been acknowledged. There's a whole convention called BetCon that we go to every year that's exactly about that

overlap. And I think there's something about being an outcast that everybody in those communities understands. And this sort of, I think there's a lot that you can identify a lot. A lot of people can look at Cheeks and Brady and go like, oh, I get them.

I understand them. They feel like real people who are like me. Amber has her roots in that same community dating back to her days on Buffy the Vampire's Lair and including that fan favorite musical episode. That's my favorite episode.

I mean, come on. To get to do a musical, first of all, get to do a Buffy musical. Come on. Sing with, you know, Anthony Stewart Hadd, who is just like, you know, before Tony. When I saw that Tony and I got to do a duet, I was like, ahh.

I was so excited. But I do have to say, I think I got the best song. Sorry, boys. Sorry, James and Tony. A lot of folks don't realize it, but even before Buffy, Jane's early work on television

included the 80s classic, Dinosaurs. Oh my God, it was so much fun. It was, that was my very first time I was ever in a writer's room. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was just looking around me with great big eyes.

And, oh, just like Cheeks and Brady in their new marriage, I was making every mistake but learning from them. And I had the best time. And getting to go down on that stage. The whole stage was built three feet off the ground so that the puppeteers could be

under the stage for the hand puppets. So you walked up these stairs. It was like no other stage in town. There were these enormous, you could walk up and try to hug the dinosaurs. You couldn't get your hands more than, it was extraordinary.

It was such a, and you knew at the time, like, this will never be done again. This is something just for this moment. It was amazing. It's a new season of Husbands right now on The CW Seed at cwseed.com. There's a lot going on.

Here's the very latest in pop culture. Everybody has an opinion and there's a lot more controversy to come online and off as the word came out that Warners is cast the new Batman for the upcoming Batman Superman film and that is Ben Affleck. The story progressed online first is what a lot of people thought were a joke and now

with a petition at Change.org where so far over a thousand people have signed protesting the casting of Ben as Batman and Bruce Wayne. There'll be jokes, there'll be controversy, there'll be snarky comments but there's no turning back Warners has set the film to begin production early in 2014. Some good news in the gaming world.

It looks like Gen Con had their biggest year ever with almost 50,000 unique attendees at the recent convention that put it up about 20% over where it was last year as well. When you look at the last five years Gen Con has continued to grow. The four day gaming convention has grown 75% over the last five years. Yahoo has released the official trailers with their fall comedy lineup with eight original

web shows featuring people involved like Jack Black, John Stamos, Ed Helm, Cheryl Hines and more. The shows include Tiny Commando with Zachary Levy, Losing It with John Stamos, Ghost Girls, We Need Help, The Fuzz, Flipside and others as well and you can see them all and see regular episodes too of course at Screen.yahoo.com.

Few more success stories from Network Television. TBS has renewed Sullivan and Son, Men at Work and Deal With It for more seasons. A third season for each of those shows with the premieres to be announced sometime in the near future and a summer success story. Hollywood Game Night on NBC has been granted a second season.

There'll be 10 new episodes of that show that will premiere on the network next summer. After the recent success of Two Guns on the Big Screen, Boom Studios is getting even more attention from Hollywood. Next up will be Dayman, the first issue of which just recently hit comic stores, written by Matt Gagnon and Michael Allen Nelson and drawn by Brian Stelfreeze, it tells the story

of a group of humans who are charged with protecting vampire overlords while they sleep during the day. Universal has optioned the film in the hopes of making it an action horror franchise sometime down the line. Now that X-Men Days the Future Past has wrapped the tension at Fox is now turning to the Fantastic

Four reboot and their creative consultant Mark Millar says that you can expect a big tie in between those films. Look for some sort of Fantastic Four involvement in an after credit sequence in X-Men when it hits theaters next year. And of course Fantastic Four is set to be rebooted and in theaters in 2015.

Hoping that lightning strikes or bites twice, Sci-Fi Network's latest addition to the shark phenomenon is the movie Ghost Shark, written and directed by Griff Furster, who told me that getting the final script wasn't that easy. Before we actually settled on the story that you have seen, there were three very, very different ideas for it.

So we knew what we wanted the villain to be when we first came up with the idea, but we weren't too sure about the story. So we worked together with Sci-Fi for probably about six months just on the treatment phase and came up with three different stories. And finally the third one, the guy at Sci-Fi thought we nailed it and we proceeded with

the screenplay from there. So it was a bit of a lengthy process, but it was definitely for the best because the stories were very, very different before we actually nailed the right one. So it was just a little bit of trial and error and they were all good stories, but finding the one that was perfect took a little doing.

Sharks are pretty high properties right now, especially with the success of Sharknado. I think Sharknado is a nice lead in for Coach Shark. I do. Those guys are good friends of ours and it's a Sci-Fi original filmmaker. It's very incestuous.

So I worked with that writer and that director before and we're all kind of rooting for each other and we were all very pleased to see Sharknado become the Twitter phenomenon that it has. And at the end of the day, they're very different movies with a very different group of filmmakers, even though we're all friends.

But I think they complement one each other nice. So how did Griff get this project to Sci-Fi? I was involved in this film from the ground up, really. Me and my partners at Active Entertainment met with Tom Batali and his team over at Sci-Fi. We kind of collectively came up with the title, Go Shark first.

And then after that, we went into several different variations on the story that would eventually become Go Shark. So that's kind of, that's how it all started for us. In the cast is actor Richard Mall. You remember him, the big guy from Dinkcourt.

And I asked him how he got involved with it all. Certainly. Well, the way I got involved was like this. The phone rang one day and they said, how would you like to come down to Louisiana and do a movie called Go Shark?

And I said, well, let me think about it. Okay. And that's how I got involved. And it was actually my maiden voice to Louisiana. So it was a pleasure in that.

That was a pleasure meeting and working with Grit first. His father, Steven first, I've known for a long while. I don't know Steven real well, but he, I believe he guessed it on Nightcourt. And he was, of course, we know him from Animal House and he was a contemporary of mine on the NBC lineup with St. Elsewhere.

Because that was going on when Nightcourt was going on. And I think we might also have worked in a film in the former Yugoslavia, just to show you how far back we go. An NBC movie the week. I think he may have done that as well.

But it was fun. It was challenging. I don't know. It was an emotional role to be serious with you. And I worked hard on that and I hope I didn't freak everybody out getting into the various

moods. But that was challenging and just keeping one's energy up and giving your best every time you could. That's challenging too. But there's also a real sense of fun with it because of the type of film it is and the

people you are working with. Find the next showing of Go Shark right now. Look it up on scifi.com and on Sci-Fi on Demand. The boys, the boys, the steers what's cool. There's a milestone to celebrate when you hit the comic stores this week.

But we'll get to that in a little bit. Among the other things you should be looking for. Well, if you're a fan of the kid-like superheroes, you know what they did with the Marvel kids and the tiny little Batman characters and little Gotham. Well, how about Any Bitty Hellboy?

First issue of that is out this week from Dark Horse. Last of Us American Dreams number one gets a third printing too this week as well. It's a little expensive but maybe worth it. It's the Superman Batman series by Jeff Loeb and of course a number of different artists. Collected all in one absolute Superman Batman hardcover for just under $100.

A little cheaper is an American vampire anthology which has all new material in it from Vertigo. And a Batman Incorporated special number one too this week from DC that has a number of those characters with all new material. And finally the Trinity Ward tie in this week, Justice League number 23. The 100 penny press series continues from IDW this week with a Teenage Mutant Ninja

Turtle issue. And again, it's only a buck. From M.H. Lazarus number two gets a second printing and there's a third issue of Lazarus out this week. And for Spawn fans, Spawn Dark Ages complete collection is in.

It's just under $60 bucks, about $59.99 to be exact. And finally for Spider-Man fans, Amazing Spider-Man number 700 finally gets a fifth printing from Marvel. But even better than that, The Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus volume one is finally back in print. All those beautiful early issues of Spider-Man, great work by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and

it's available too for just under $100 bucks. And a celebration of sorts, previews hits issue number 300. It will be in stores this week telling you the comics that will be in those stores in November. You can spend all those big dollars in a comic store near you and there's a number of them.

Find them with the comic book locator service at 1-888-COMIC-BOOK or with an app that's available in the iTunes app store. You can also check a website called BuyMyComicShop.com. That's a wrap for this podcast. You do know you can subscribe to us in the iTunes podcast directory and never miss anything

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