TV's like whitewater rafting: Without rocks, there wouldn't be rapids, and it wouldn't be as much fun. Rolling with it gave us Tara and Willow coming out. It gave us Spike falling in love with Buffy. Rolling with it found out that Anya and Andrew were comic geniuses. You plan your ideas and themes, and then you let the rest form naturally, and then it feels real. It doesn't feel like you're imposing something on everybody. Ultimately, the staff -- who are the biggest fan-geeks in the world, and I'm including myself -- when they watch an episode have to feel the way the audience does, and more importantly the characters have to feel the way the audience does. If the audience doesn't buy that Buffy's brought back from the dead, then Buffy can't buy it. They've got to go, "I can't believe this has happened. It's horrible." If the audience is feeling the loss of Angel and feeling that she can't have a relationship with Riley, she's got to feel the same way. You feel that out.

But sometimes you push back against some of the things the fan base, which is so possessive, wants.

Sure, yeah. There's obviously the fact that Angel has his own series now, so what are you gonna do? It's not like we're reading the Internet and going, "OK, Ain't It Cool says blah blah blah." We take our fan base's opinions and concerns very seriously, but at the same time we're the storytellers.

In terms of the Angel thing, the truth is that by Year 4 we would have been throwing up our hands going, "How can we possibly make this fresh?"

Often what the fan base wants is for two characters to get together romantically, but that often doesn't leave the narrative with anyplace to go.

It's Sam and Diane [from "Cheers"]. That's why we had Angel go bad when he and Buffy got together. Because -- and I've gotten into so much trouble for this phrase -- what people want is not what they need. In narrative, nobody wants to see fat, married Romeo and Juliet, even if fat, married Romeo and Juliet happen to be [Dashiell Hammett's detective couple] Nick and Nora Charles and they're really cool and having a great time in their lovely relationship and really care about each other and have nice, well-adjusted children. Guess what? People don't want to see it.

That was the problem we ran into with Riley. We said, "Let's give Buffy a healthy relationship," and people didn't want it. They did some great work together. But at the same time, when they were happy, it made people crazy. We found this with Willow and Tara, we found it with Gunn and Fred [from "Angel"]. It's fine for a while, but ultimately the course of true love is not allowed to run smooth.

Were there things you planned to do that you had to abandon? In particular, I know a lot of people who speculate that Buffy and Xander were once intended to get together.

That was fluid. The concept was in the air and they both sort of got pulled in different directions storywise and we didn't feel like there was some big point we weren't paying off, so we ended up not doing it. We liked him with Anya, and she had a lot going on, and it didn't really seem to be the thing. The concept was out there, but it was never a mission statement. A lot of concepts were out there, then you sort of wait and see. Besides, Xander got so much goddamn tail. I'm sorry -- that's a nerd? He went out with Cordelia, he had an affair with Willow, he lost his virginity to Faith. He nearly married Anya. The guy's James fucking Bond over here. It's a lie! It's a lie!

Anything else?

I had a huge arc planned for Oz.

That was a heartbreaker.

It was, and so Willow got her heart broken. I took what we were feeling and put it on-screen, so everybody would be on the same page.

What was your idea for Oz?

I mean the thing with him and Veruca, the female werewolf, and that triangle. That was going to run through a good portion of that season. I really wanted to see where we could go with that. Paige Moss was really cool, she did a great job. But she only did it for a couple of episodes because we lost the boy. But then four episodes later I got to meet Amber Benson [who plays Tara]. So, like I said, you gotta have the rocks.

Sometimes we had guest-star issues. Quite frankly, I had planned to see Tara again later this year and Amber decided against it. I'm not unhappy because we got to make the statement with [Willow's new girlfriend] Kennedy that you can move on and you can live. It's scary, and we've played a couple of episodes about how frightening it was for Willow to enter into another relationship, how it felt like a betrayal -- because it felt like that to the audience. That was an interesting place to go. You know what they say, every time a door shuts ...

Would Willow have become gay if Oz hadn't left?

It's very possible. The idea of exploring somebody's sexuality and that it would probably be Willow was out there. Then Oz left. And we thought, how do you follow Oz? People loved the shit out of him, though they hated him when he first arrived. The one romance that we could give her that would really affect people in a new way would be with a woman. We didn't know how far we were going to go with it.

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