Say that someone wanted to write a fantasy piece that got people excited about character interactions in the same way that people
got excited about the various works of Joss Whedon. What form of written word would you say best captures that kind of episodic soap-opera feel?

Various ideas occurring to me include:
- Write a serial, a weekly or monthly short story or novelette in the 10,000-word range. (Then find out how to make money on a serial in this day and age.)
- Write a novel that has a built-in serial format, so that it feels more like reading a dozen novelettes than like reading a novel. (Then convince an editor that this is a viable novel concept.)
- Write a fantasy series like everyone else and just focus on character development. Don't worry about trying to capture the episodic feel. That isn't what grabs the Whedon crowd.

Part of this is actual writing thinking, and part of this is just having picked up the Buffy graphic novels. It's interesting looking at how attached people are to the characters, how they hand on the interplay between all the leads, how they look forward to the arrival of guest stars, all of that. I'd love to figure out how to replicate that kind of audience attachment (with the understood caveat that "write interesting characters well" is part of this, and if I can't do that, no amount of aping is going to help me).