WARNING!!
This article contains spoilers for viewers not yet up to Episode 13 of season 2!
Redefining the not-so-Untouchable Mere-Bear
Mere Smith, ready to kick
some demon ass!
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A native of Houston, Texas, Meredyth Smith grew up in a small Floridian town where she knew two things. She would one-day move to New York after graduating from Brown University in Providence and that sushi was not considered the Nouveau Cuisine of southern living. "Ugh. I hate sushi," declares Mere, "Seriously! Do you know what we call that where I grew up? Bait!" she states with a laugh. "Yeah, you put it on hooks and you get real food with that." Once she graduated from college she figured New York was about as far as she could get from her hometown. So, she headed to the Big Apple. "I lived in Park Slope [Brooklyn] and it was fantastic. I loved, loved, loved New York. I especially loved Brooklyn. I lived there for a year and then moved out to LA." For such a short stint in the city that never sleeps, Mere is considered somewhat of a cult hero for East Coast Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans. "I tend to make a big, obnoxious impression," she laughingly admits. She has achieved the ultimate dream of being in front of the television set, watching her favorite show one day and then being behind it the next, and not in that TV-baggy-pants-repairman-sort-of-way! This newly appointed member of the Angel writing staff took the time recently to confide in us about her emotional attachment to Darla, her Zen relationship with co-staffer Tim Minear and why she wishes she were C.J. Cregg.
Her path to Hollywood was not exactly the most direct route in following her ambitions, but the how, why and what of Fate's plan for Mere in no way plays out like the catalogue of Noir films that her present day sitch would have you believe. And if you think there was a moment when a revelation hit her, where she woke up one day, turned around, looked in the mirror and said, 'Hey, I want to be a writer when I grow up!' you are so mistaken, Skippy! "Damn, I wish I had that kind of story! That's so much cooler than how it really happened," she laughingly confesses, "I actually wanted to be an actor up until I was about 21, believe it or not. I majored in Theater but then my Junior and Senior years I started writing plays and directing them and I realized all the artistic control is on the other side. If I had a vision that I wanted to convey I couldn't really do it as an actor,
"Watching [Buffy] I realized that TV can be good which was just a foreign concept to me."
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because as an actor your job is to give what the director wants, so I started writing. Then I discovered that I never should have been an actor, ever! (laugh) That was the turning point, once I realized that I didn't have to do acting to do something creative I was like, 'I'm never doing that again'.
"But here's the only cool twist of my story. The reason I wanted to write for TV was because of Buffy." Mere explains the first time she saw the show, "I saw 'Welcome to the Hellmouth' and by the time Cordelia got to the line, 'Gym class was canceled due to the extreme dead guy in the locker.' I went, 'This is my show!' Watching that show I realized that TV can be good, which was just a foreign concept to me being brought up on all this crap. As soon as I realized that TV can be funny and be smart and actually mean something I said, 'Ah, this is it, I need to do this'. Joss [Whedon] is a genius. I know everybody says that but I'm just adding to the cacophony of people saying it."
"Gym has been cancelled
due to the extreme
dead guy in the locker."
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We're going to compile a list soon of all the people that have stated this little underlying fact about their much beloved boss. Mere just laughed and emphatically agreed, "Everybody says it around here, every single person, everybody! There's nobody smarter, and nobody funnier, and nobody kinder. He's just - he's it. He's that guy, you know. He's that one guy and I'm so lucky to be working for him. Sometimes I look around and I'm just like, 'How in the hell did I get here?' I must have saved a bunch of orphans from a burning building in another life because that's the only way to explain how I got so lucky."
Mere may have started out luckier than most critical admirers of Buffy who generally seem to discover the show later in its evolution. Something must have caught her by those little hairs on the back of her neck and dragged her into this mad and undeadly world we're all so crazy about every Tuesday night. "You know the funny thing is, I almost didn't see it," she admits. "I didn't have a TV in college because I was poor and living in a basement. I had a boyfriend at the time who had a TV and I just so happened to be sick on a Sunday where I would usually be in rehearsal for a play. I was flipping around because I never watched TV and came upon Buffy the Vampire Slayer [reruns] and I thought, 'Oh, this is gonna suck! I'm just gonna watch it and laugh at it', and ever since then I was totally hooked, just completely hooked. I mean my friends knew not to call me on Monday nights at first and then Tuesday nights, they just knew better. Anytime the phone rang I would get so pissed!" she states with a definitive laugh. Just as unusual as Mere getting hooked on the series right from the start is her choice of favorite episode. Without even taking a beat she replies,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
season 2/Episode 7
“Lie To Me”
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"'Lie To Me,' absolutely. I think it is the most structurally perfect episode of television ever written. It's got everything you look for. It's got the humor, it's got the action, it's got the emotional resonance. It literally is a structurally perfect episode and I think it's a very good example of a Buffy episode, that it's got this combinations of all those factors and ya know, the fact that Joss wrote it didn't hurt it."
Congratulations were in order as Mere became a full-fledged Staff Writer this year on Angel. During season one her writing talents were more than merely obvious where she was quickly promoted from her beginning position as Script Coordinator. Now part of the amazing team that drives the proverbial stake through the hearts of Angel fans each week, we couldn't help but ask this former Bronzer, 'How cool is that?' "Thanks, oh I can't even tell you, I'm just so excited to be here." But she's quick to confess her initial fears, "I'd say the first three or four months that I was here I don't think I put anything up on my walls because I was prepared to get fired at any moment. I was bracing myself emotionally to get fired because when you're a big fish in a small pond like - I grew up in this small town, that was one thing, but then you get to college and you learn that people are a lot smarter than where you came from. And then I had the same thing when I got here. It just felt like everybody was so smart and so talented and that at any minute Joss was going to walk in the door and say, 'You know what? You're an idiot, leave.' But luckily they've let me hang around a little while." That's good for us. "Well, I don't know about that, but it's good for me!" she follows with a laugh.
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