Jane Espenson Biography

Jane Espenson (born July 14, 1964) is an American television writer and producer.

She has worked on both situation comedies and serial dramas. She had a five-year stint as a writer and producer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and shared a Hugo Award for her writing on the episode "Conversations with Dead People". Between 2009-2010 she served on Caprica, as co-executive and executive producer for the television series. In 2010 she wrote an episode of HBO's Game of Thrones, and joined the writing staff for season four of the British television program Torchwood, which aired on BBC One in the United Kingdom and Starz in the United States during Summer 2011. She is currently working as a consulting producer and writer on ABC's 2011 series Once Upon a Time, and has co-written and produced her first independent original web series with co-creator Brad Bell, entitled Husbands.

Early life

Espenson grew up in Ames, Iowa. As a teenager, Espenson found out that M*A*S*H accepted spec scripts without promise of payment or future work. Though she wasn't an established writer at the time, she planned to write her first episode. She recalls, "It was a disaster. I never sent it. I didn't know the correct format. I didn't know the address of where to send it, and then I thought, they can't really hire me until I finish junior high anyway." While Espenson was studying computer science and linguistics as a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, she submitted several spec scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation as part of a script submission program open to amateur writers; Espenson has referred to the program as the "last open door of show business."

Career

Her next break was in 1992 with a spot in the Disney Writing Fellowship, which led to work on a number of sitcoms, including ABC's comedy Dinosaurs and Touchstone Television's short-lived Monty. In 1997 she joined the staff of Ellen as a writer and producer.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

After a year, Espenson decided to switch from comedic to dramatic writing and applied for a position at Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In 1998, Espenson joined Mutant Enemy Productions as executive story editor for the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Espenson wrote or co-wrote twenty-three episodes, starting with "Band Candy" and ending with Buffy's penultimate episode, "End of Days." After her role as an Executive Story Editor, she was promoted to a Co-Producer in season four. In the fifth season she was promoted again to a producer. She took up the role of supervising producer in the sixth season and was promoted once more to a co-executive producer in the final season.

She wrote episodes both humorous (e.g. "Triangle" and "Intervention") and serious (such as "After Life"). Espenson and Drew Goddard co-wrote the seventh-season episode "Conversations with Dead People," for which they won the Hugo Award for Best Short Dramatic Presentation in 2003.

In addition, Espenson is credited as the writer or co-writer of the following Buffy episodes:

Episode number	Title	Credit	Original air date
3.06	"Band Candy"	Writer	November 10, 1998
3.11	"Gingerbread"	Teleplay (story by Espenson & Thania St. John)	January 12, 1999
3.18	"Earshot"	Writer	September 21, 1999
4.03	"The Harsh Light of Day"	Writer	October 19, 1999
4.08	"Pangs"	Writer	November 23, 1999
4.11	"Doomed"	Writer (with David Fury & Marti Noxon)	January 18, 2000
4.12	"A New Man"	Writer	January 25, 2000
4.17	"Superstar"	Writer	April 4, 2000
5.03	"The Replacement"	Writer	October 10, 2000
5.11	"Triangle"	Writer	January 9, 2001
5.12	"Checkpoint"	Writer (with Douglas Petrie)	January 23, 2001
5.15	"I Was Made to Love You"	Writer	February 20, 2001
5.18	"Intervention"	Writer	April 24, 2001
6.03	"After Life"	Writer	October 9, 2001
6.04	"Flooded"	Writer (with Douglas Petrie)	October 16, 2001
6.05	"Life Serial"	Writer (with David Fury)	October 23, 2001
6.12	"Doublemeat Palace"	Writer	January 29, 2002
7.03	"Same Time, Same Place"	Writer	October 8, 2002
7.07	"Conversations with Dead People"	Writer (with Drew Goddard)	November 12, 2002
7.08	"Sleeper"	Writer (with David Fury)	November 19, 2002
7.14	"First Date"	Writer	February 11, 2003
7.16	"Storyteller"	Writer	February 25, 2003
7.21	"End of Days"	Writer (with Douglas Petrie)	May 13, 2003

She also co-/wrote several comic book stories for Tales of the Slayers, Tales of the Vampires and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, the one-shots Jonathan and Reunion and the limited series Haunted.

Battlestar Galactica and Caprica

Espenson joined the crew of Sci Fi's Battlestar Galactica (BSG) just after Battlestar Galactica: Razor, BSG's first television movie, was conceived. As one of BSG's co-executive producers, she has worked on every fourth season episode starting with "He That Believeth in Me"; she was also the writer of "Escape Velocity" and "The Hub" and co-wrote The Face of the Enemy webisodes. Prior to joining the show's staff she wrote one third season episode and co-wrote another. In August 2008, the Los Angeles Times broke the news that Espenson is the writer behind BSG's second television movie, The Plan, news confirmed in her writer's blog. In January 2009 it was announced that she had joined the spin-off series Caprica as co-executive producer and would take on showrunner duties midway through the first season. Espenson later gave up showrunning duties to focus more on writing.

Torchwood

In August 2010 it was announced that Torchwood creator, lead writer and executive producer Russell T. Davies had hired Espenson to write for the show's fourth series, Torchwood: Miracle Day to be broadcast in 2011. She later confirmed that she will be writing episodes 3, 5, 7 and co-writing episode 8 (with Ryan Scott) and episode 10 (with Davies). Prior to her involvement with Torchwood, Espenson had claimed to be a fan of the series, particularly the third series, "Children of Earth". To tie in with the launch of Torchwood: Miracle Day, Espenson and Scott collaborated on the Starz produced 2011 Torchwood webseries entitled Torchwood: Web of Lies, which stars American actress Eliza Dushku. Following the broadcast of each episode of "Miracle Day" on Starz, Espenson wrote a blog on AfterElton mixing her reaction to the episode with behind the scenes information on the devising process.

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and Husbands

In January 2011, Entertainment Weekly announced that Espenson and fellow Buffy writer Drew Z. Greenberg would be writing a pilot for Syfy's version of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). She told io9 that "The version we're proposing is quite different in tone and content from the original." She added "We took the basic premise of a Ghost Detective and his still-living partner and invented our own take on it." In 2011 she also co-wrote and produced her first independent web series, entitled Husbands, which revolves around the life of two newly married gay men. The series premiered Tuesday September 13, 2011.

Once Upon a Time

In May 2011, Espenson was brought on to the ABC fantasy series Once Upon a Time, as a writer and consulting producer.

Other

Espenson has written episodes for several other television shows, including episode 4.17 ("Accession") of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, an episode ("Shindig") of Firefly, an episode ("The Gamble") of The O.C., and two fourth season episodes of Gilmore Girls. She has also worked on Angel, Tru Calling, The Inside, The Batman, Andy Barker, P.I., Jake in Progress, Dollhouse and is the co-creator of Warehouse 13.

Espenson is the editor of Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly (BenBella Books, 2005, ISBN 1-933771-21-6), a collection of non-fiction essays on the short-lived television show Firefly.

Linguistics studies

Espenson studied linguistics as an undergraduate and graduate at University of California, Berkeley. She worked as a cognitive linguistics research assistant for George Lakoff, who acknowledged her work on the metaphorical understanding of event structure in English and credited her with recognizing the existence of the phenomenon of location-object duality in metaphors pairs. Lakoff also mentioned her year-long work on the "metaphorical structure of causation" in the acknowledgments section of Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999, ISBN 0-465-05674-1).

Production credits

Television

Year	Title	Credited as		Notes
		Screenwriter	Producer
1994	Monty			Episode written: "The Principal's Interest"
	Dinosaurs			Episodes written: "Driving Miss Ethyl" "Variations on a Theme Park"
1995	Me and the Boys			Episode written: "The Age of Reason"
1996	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine			Episode written: "Accession"
	Nowhere Man			Episode written: "Zero Minus Ten"
1996-1997	Something So Right			Episodes written: "Something About Jack's Ex" "Something About Thanksgiving" "Something About a Silver Anniversary" "Something About Secrets & Rules"
1997-1998	Ellen			Episodes written: "Like a Virgin" "Womyn Fest"
1998-2003	Buffy the Vampire Slayer			23 episodes written, 88 episodes produced
1999-2000	Angel			Episodes written: "Rm w/a Vu" "Guise Will Be Guise"
2002	Firefly			Episode written: "Shindig"
2003	The O.C.			Episode written: "The Gamble"
2003-2004	Gilmore Girls			Episodes written: "Chicken or Beef?" "The Reigning Lorelai" 22 episodes as co-executive producer
2005	Tru Calling			Episode written: "In the Dark" 6 episodes as co-executive producer
	The Inside			Episodes written: "Skin and Bone" "Gem" "Aidan" "Everything Nice" 13 episodes as co-executive producer
2005-2006	Jake in Progress			Episode written: "The Two Jakes" 20 episodes as co-executive producer
2006-2009	Battlestar Galactica			Episodes written: "The Passage" "Dirty Hands" "Escape Velocity" "The Hub" "Deadlock" 20 episodes as co-executive producer
2007	Andy Barker, P.I.			Episode written: "Fairway, My Lovely" 3 episodes as consulting producer
	The Batman			Episodes written: "The Joining: Part 1" "The Joining: Part 2"
	Eureka			Episode written: "Family Reunion"
	Battlestar Galactica: Razor Flashbacks			7 episodes as co-executive producer
	Battlestar Galactica: Razor			TV movie
2008-2009	Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy			10 episodes as writer and executive producer
2009	Dollhouse			Episodes written: "Haunted" "Briar Rose" 8 episodes as consulting producer
	Battlestar Galactica: The Plan			TV movie
	Warehouse 13			Creator Episode written: "Pilot"
2010	Caprica			Episodes written: "Gravedancing" "Apotheosis" 17 episodes produced
2011	Game of Thrones			Episode written: "A Golden Crown"
	Torchwood: Miracle Day			Episodes written: "Dead of Night" "The Categories of Life" "Immortal Sins" "End of the Road" "The Blood Line" 10 episodes as co-executive producer
2011"present	Once Upon a Time			11 episodes written 37 episodes as consulting producer
2013	Once Upon a Time in Wonderland			1 episode as consulting producer

Online media

Year	Title	Credited as		Notes
		Screenwriter	Producer
2011	Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight			Motion comic
	Torchwood: Web of Lies			Episode written: "Missing Day: Part 1"
2011"present	Husbands			Co-creator, 19 episodes as writer and executive producer

Awards and nominations

List of awards and award nominations

Year	Award	Award category	Title of work	Result
2003	Hugo Award	Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form	"Conversations with Dead People" (Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode)
2009	Streamy Awards	Best Writing for a Dramatic Web Series	Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy
	Emmy Award	Short-format Live-action Entertainment Program (shared with Ronald D. Moore, David Eick, and Harvey Frand)	Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy
2012	Writers Guild of America Award	Drama Series (shared with D. B. Weiss, George R. R. Martin, David Benioff and Bryan Cogman)	Game of Thrones
		New Series (shared with D. B. Weiss, Bryan Cogman, David Benioff and George R. R. Martin)
	Indie Soap Awards	Best Writing (Comedy) (shared with Brad Bell)	Husbands
	Hugo Award	Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form (shared with David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, Bryan Cogman, George R. R. Martin, Tim Van Patten, Brian Kirk, Daniel Minahan and Alan Taylor)	Game of Thrones, Season One
2013	International Academy of Web Television	Best Writing (Comedy) (shared with Brad Bell)	Husbands
	Indie Soap Awards