By Todd VanDerWerff
When Joss Whedon’s latest series, Dollhouse, began back in February, it was kind of a mess. An INTERESTING mess, to be sure, but it felt like it was a series that was fundamentally missing something at its core, which led it to flail around a lot, trying a number of things that just didn’t work. Fans of the show and the man behind it have tried to blame all of this on the network airing it, Fox, unfairly believing that just because the network mishandled Firefly, it was going to mishandle Dollhouse as well, simply to mess with Whedon, apparently (regardless of the fact that entirely new people, much more friendly to TV auteur types like Whedon, were in charge), but even Whedon himself has admitted that at first, he was having trouble coming up with the kind of show he wanted to make. A lot of TV sci-fi fans tuned in, weren’t quite sure what was going on in this tremendously un-Whedon-y Whedon series, shrugged and tuned out.
So let me say to them something that might sound surprising: If we remove business matters from the equation, Dollhouse is the one series I believe emphatically deserves to come back, but I’m basing that as much on the show’s potential, something that seemed in short supply back when it started, as what it’s actually accomplished.
First, let’s deal with economics, since there are very few ways to paint that picture as rosy for Dollhouse. It performed relatively well when it was paired with the very similar Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, especially for a Friday night. Since it’s been paired with the marked-for-death Prison Break, though, it has slid and slid and slid until its first-run viewing numbers have skipped from awful past abysmal to atrocious.
The show does alright on online streaming services like Hulu.com and also sells well on iTunes. The DVD and BluRay sets are both selling fairly well in pre-orders on Amazon.com, and the DVR replay numbers are also solid. This is one of the few shows on the air that very nearly overtakes its first-run numbers with DVR numbers. Normally, networks don’t value DVR numbers as highly as first-run numbers (though this is changing), but Fox’s unique gambit to sell less ad time during Dollhouse but price it at a premium may mean that, as with Fringe, which has a similar ad revenue scheme, DVR viewers sit through the ads, which last only 60 or 90 seconds instead of nearly five minutes. Still, it’s hard to make an economic case for keeping this show around, even if you account for the fact that Whedon’s fanbase is a passionate one, willing to buy new DVD release after new DVD release for as long as Fox can keep coming up with new special features to slap on each release. Whedon’s shows are among the few in TV to enjoy extraordinarily long tails, to the point where Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel, have essentially become licenses for the company to print money.
But few of us become TV fans because we really love the intricacies of network scheduling and pulling apart ratings data (there are a few folks like this, and they seem to mostly hang out here). We’re fans because we engage with the material on some creative level, and creatively, Dollhouse is, if not soaring, at least gliding. As it entered the back half of its first season, Dollhouse showed the potential to become Whedon’s most mature and intriguing work, as well as the potential to become one of the best science fiction series of all time. Unlike most TV creators who take years off (Whedon hasn’t had a series on the air since 2003, and he’s spent the interim mostly seeing lots of movies fail to come together), Whedon seems to have been watching other TV shows and taking notes, figuring out what it was that they did well and then seemingly saying to himself that he, too, could do that, maybe even better that.
It behooves us to remember, of course, that the show isn’t perfect. For all of Whedon’s faith in series lead Eliza Dushku (who plays the doll Echo), the actress has only been up to what she’s been asked to do sporadically. Whedon has never had as strong an eye for casting as his closest TV look-alike, J.J. Abrams. For every Nathan Fillion in Firefly, there’s a Marc Blucas in Buffy – someone slightly out of their depth who has a look that fits the character more than the soul of that character. Whedon’s exceptionally good at figuring out how to write to these various actors’ strengths, though, and he’s very good at directing his stars when he gets the chance (witness how the occasionally moribund Sarah Michelle Gellar lights up the screen like a genuine movie star whenever Whedon directs an episode of Buffy).
The problem here, though, is that the part Dushku is playing may be essentially impossible for someone with an established persona – ass-kicking chick – to play. Hell, it would be hard for MOST people to play, but Dushku has to portray a number of different people but still keep a certain element of a core soul present in all of them. It’s a tricky balancing act and one neither she nor the show have quite figured out just yet. (It’s worth pointing out that Dichen Lachman (Sierra) and Enver Gjokaj (Victor), who also play dolls, seem to be doing a better job of managing this trick than Dushku, but neither also comes with the substantial baggage of having played characters recognizable to genre fans in the past.)
There are plenty of other things that don’t quite work in the show, but they’re all things that also make me think the show has more potential than most watching it are willing to let on. For example, the fact that nearly everyone in the main cast is involved, somehow, in perpetrating a form of slavery and is therefore morally monstrous is something the series seemed too interested in glossing over for too long. At the same time, by trying to win our sympathies for both the people running the Dollhouse and the people they are exploiting, Whedon is muddying the “this is good, and this is evil” lines that he played within so directly in his two most popular shows.
Whedon is a creator uniquely obsessed with shows about the role of community and the individual’s place within that community – really, the only TV creator AS fascinated by that idea is maybe David Milch, whose Deadwood and its wide sweep of humanity seems an obvious inspiration for this series. What he’s trying to do is no less than get you to look at this story from every perspective, to realize that the usual good vs. evil trappings that underpin much of genre TV are outdated in the wake of things like Battlestar Galactica. Dollhouse is, then, about TWO communities – the people doing the exploiting and those being exploited – and how they come into conflict with each other. It clearly sides with the powerless residents of its universe, but it also knows enough to know that those in power think what they’re doing has a good side, even if they admit most of the people involved are only chasing sex fantasies.
And, the thing is, it’s not easy to conclude that they’re wrong. Obviously, the overarching goals of the organization are monstrous, but they do weird, pro-bono cases, and there’s been numerous hints that if the technology fell into the wrong hands, the consequences could be disastrous (a major story arc centered around an NSA agent who had hoped to co-opt the technology for the use of the government). As Whedon’s shows have grown up, his view of the universe has as well. No longer is this a place where there are dark things, sure, but there will be heroes riding in to save the day. Here, when Echo finally frees all of the dolls, it’s just not going to work. The dolls are basically walking, talking infants, unable to care for themselves. This episode would have been the end of any other sci-fi series, but Dollhouse slots it eighth, and it gives us our closure before realizing the falsity of such promises.
I’m also not terribly sympathetic to the claim that this show abandons Whedon’s trademark pop-culture-infused patter in favor of dark dialogue. For starters, the patter was getting tired (even Whedon seemed to admit as much in press for Firefly, when he frequently said that one advantage of setting a show that far in the future was that he couldn’t fall back on the pop culture crutch). For another thing, while the show can be funny, it needs a grounding in the darkness that is its reality that constant joking would undercut. If my thesis is that Whedon has been watching a lot of great TV and figuring out how to infuse it with his sensibility, then I’d say the tone of the show suggests he’s been mainlining Battlestar Galactica DVD sets. The series has that same sense of grim determination, of apocalypse right around the corner, of people backed up against the wall and only cracking wise in instances of gallows humor. That so many of the fans are bemoaning the lack of snap-crackle-pop dialogue suggests that they’re unwilling to follow Whedon on his artistic evolution, and in that case, I say he doesn’t need ‘em.
I’m severely tempted to OVERpraise Dollhouse (this is a “Save That Show!” article, after all, and such things inevitably end up skewing towards overpraise). So even as I’m thinking about the fact that centering so much of the show around personality-less blanks may not have been such a good idea and bemoaning the fact that the season finale was good but not as impressively, effortlessly terrific as the episode that preceded it, I find myself drifting back to thoughts of the stories this show COULD tell, of the ways it was teaching itself to expand its narrative (the ninth episode – the skewed format “A Spy in the House of Love” – was one of the best episodes of television I saw all season).
To a real degree, being a TV critic is about being a soothsayer, about glancing at the elements of a show that’s not QUITE clicking and deciding if it will gel with time or just fall apart into morass. Everybody has their hits (I totally called 30 Rock, everybody!) and misses (I believe I once said Brothers & Sisters was going to be the next thirtysomething), but the central problem is picking out which shows are going to click and which are going to utterly dissolve.
To a real degree, this relies on looking at the creative talent behind a show and also assessing what COULD happen under the best possible circumstances. And I have no qualms in saying that Dollhouse is thematically richer than anything Whedon has attempted so far and, indeed, has the makings of an all-time sci-fi classic. It gets at ideas of who we are as people and what it takes to create an identity better than just about any show I can think of. It’s obsessed with ideas about the artist’s relationship to his characters. The idea that we are nothing more than electrical impulses, than data, is so rich that I’d be surprised if Whedon COULDN’T get seven seasons out of it. It's a show about whether we are our memories or whether they are us, sort of an action-adventure Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (a connection I'm forever thankful to Scott Tobias for making).
So, yeah, this is me imploring Fox to not get rid of this show. It’s not perfect, and its first season had a ton of cringe-worthy moments. But there’s a terrific show in there and a longtime TV creator trying to take the next big step in his career. Evolutions are always scary because they involve so much change and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get to the next step. Whedon’s trying something vastly different and, potentially, vastly more interesting than anything he’s ever done before with this show, and he deserves another season to figure it all out.
(It's here that I point out that if you haven't watched Dollhouse, but this has made you curious, several episodes are available on Hulu.com. While the early episodes are not there, I'm not sure they're strictly necessary to figure out what's going on. Do check out "Needs," "A Spy in the House of Love" and the two-part finale.)
House contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark and co-host of the podcast TV on the Internet. His writing also appears at The AV Club.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Hey, Fox. Save Dollhouse
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19 comments:
I should say that this post places me in direct opposition to most of the Internet, which wants Chuck saved. I really like Chuck. In its second season, it was unquestionably a better show than Dollhouse. But there is less room to grow for Chuck and more upside for Dollhouse. Ideally, though, both come back, but the loss of Dollhouse would upset me slightly more.
This is the type of article people need to be writing/reading, instead of the squealing: OMGsaveitOMGI'mgonnahateFOXiftheydo!
Dollhouse was off to a rocky start (can the pilot be one of the weakest hours of TV Whedon has ever written/directed?) but once it got "it" right, the show -as you say - glided and showed the promise all of us Whedonites were hoping for.
Omega definitely opened up enough avenues and mysteries for me to be utterly intrigued about what Whedon & co. have cooked up for season 2, where hopefully they'll be smoothing out the chinks that are glaringly obvious from some eps in S1.
I think Joss also sees the ESOTSM parallel, as evidenced by the use of Beck's brilliant ESOTSM soundtrack track "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" which I repeat-1'd all the way home after watching the season finale.
Thank you for pointing out what so many reviewers have failed to mention, and what was my principal problem with the show up until the last few episodes, which is that most of the people working in the Dollhouse are sociopaths. So, we are asked to either identify with the sociopaths, or a bunch of tabula rasa zombies who have no character to speak of.
Personally, my biggest stumbling block with the show in its early episodes was how we, as viewers, were made complicit in the Actives' slavery. I just couldn't morally stomach watching these people be prostituted out for 7 potential seasons (which, in true Whedon fashion, has become part of his point). However, I think the show has found its thematic footing, and I feel much more confident now that it's on the right track. There *has* to be more.
I also agree with your point about Dushku. I keep thinking of Alias, where Sidney was asked to perform characters on almost every mission, but yet there was the core character for us to root for. Granted, JG was an unknown at the time, but she was still believable 5 seasons and 3 major motion pictures in. Yet I think, in the endgame, all that's really important is that Dushku nail Caroline.
Thanks for the ever-insighful review, and, indeed, save this show!
Luckily, Chuck vs. Dollhouse isn't a zero-sum game, as they air on separate networks. That way, we can add Better of Ted to this, as well!
I love your article, Todd. It was brilliant and had a flow to it that was easy to read.
Save Dollhouse! It has such great potential to become an even better show. From social commentary to individual character portrait expositions to morally grey and black issues being delved into. It's wonderful.
Wow - a logical, well thought out argument for the renewal of Dollhouse. The internet isn't full of idiots after all.
First off - this is great. It really explains the strengths and weaknesses of the show well, but most importantly it highlights Dollhouse's potential to be great. How many people would think a show called 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer" could be so great, and who knew how immense the backlash would be over Firefly's cancellation (so much so that we got a movie out of it)?
Fox just has to trust the fact that Joss is a brilliant man, and once he gets into the swing of this show, the fans will come - even a second season could potentially turn the whole show around, bring in more viewers and up the ratings.
I'd hate to see another show of his get axed after only one season, especially not one that has so many as of yet unexplored frontiers.
A decent contribution but there are two points I question.
1. I don't think earlier Whedon series can be fairly represented as good versus evil scenarios in which the hero rides in to save the day for the good side. At least since the 'Angel' eisode in Buffy Season 1, the good evil polarity has been questioned as has the idea of a purely good hero. Todd is in danger, here, or mistaking the dramatic format of good versus evil with the moral vision expressed through the unfolding of chatacters and story line.
2. In early episodes of *Dollhouse*, Whedon does not hit us over the head with the message These People are Evil. What would the point be? The viewer can see this is an evil enterprise. What Whedon does is invite us into a world of ambiguity in which people in an inherently evil enterprise sometimes do good things, have community with each other, have likeable aspects, or bad aspects we can recognise in ourself. This increases the dramatic shock at the moment when our noses really are rubbed in the evil. It seems peculiar that Todd criticises Whedon for lack of moral complexity in earlier series and then criticises Whedon when he takes a very subtle approach to presenting evil.
Also Todd suggests that ealier series apart from *Firefly* are overdependent on pop culture reference, and quotes Whedon in support. Well maybe Whedon was relieved to have a new context in *Firefly* but the reliance on pop culture references declines, and is ironised, in later seasons of *Buffy* and *Angel* anyway.
Overall a very good well reasoned discussion from Todd.
I don't know if I'd call myself a "Whedonite", but I am a fan. (I watched Buffy and Angel, but I didn't really consider myself a fan until I was introduced to Firefly).
That being said, I love Dollhouse. Yes, it did have a rough start, but to be honest, even when it was rough, it seemed far better to me than a good 75% of the shows that are being praised right now. Maybe I'm just picky, but Terminator, while reasonably good, couldn't hold my interest. It has a vast amount of potential, and can easily be extended into a multitude of story-arcs.
I sincerely wish I had (or had access to) some sort of influential website so I could do my part and write a vast, detailed article like this.
For the moment, I will simply implore Fox to re-sign Dollhouse and give it a time slot it can survive on. (Sorry, but Friday nights are NOT TV nights for just about anyone).
1. Yay, people putting into words what I think!
2. A point of disagreement: I think the first few episodes ARE at least somewhat important to watch. They set the scene, set up the relationships between recurring characters -- perhaps it could have been done more gracefully and more efficiently, but you can't just leave it out.
Barry:
Unquestionably, the morals in the Buffyverse are more complicated than a simple good/evil paradigm, but they're also a good deal less complicated than either Firefly or Dollhouse's worlds. In Buffy, in particular, the idea of having a "soul" as a proxy for having some sort of conscience is often a little TOO easy. Buffy's one of my ten favorite shows of all time, so I clearly don't think this is such a big deal (indeed, since it's a show about teenagers growing into young adults, some black-and-white morality is, perhaps, necessary), but its morality is not as complex as something like Dollhouse. (I can get into this more, but declaiming at length on Buffy tends to turn the discussion into a Buffy one, and I'm not sure that's needed here.)
As to your second point, I was trying to say that I mostly DISAGREE with people who read the Dollhouse staff as unrelentingly evil. I think they are flawed people who do very bad things, and it's a point in the show's favor, I think, that it doesn't continually remind us that the things they're doing ARE bad and trusts us to catch up. Sorry if that point was unclear.
I think part of why the second half of Dollhouse's season became so compelling is a coincidental bit of meta that got grafted on. The first several episodes, whether through network interference or Whedon and company still feeling their way through the concept (I suspect a combination of the two), felt anonymous and work-for-hire. Echo's various undercover adventures had some nice moments here and there (and Lachman popped from her first appearance) but mostly played out with the vague, perfunctory air of, well, a hooker servicing her client: the action beats and jokes lined up where they should, but strictly by rote, and you knew the show kept glancing at its watch when you weren't paying attention.
When Echo was revealed to have a mission--and the Dollhouse a greater, darker meaning--the show didn't just shrug off its indifference. It found a purpose of its own, and a voice, achieving the same awakening its hero strives for. (Though I'm sure that Alan Sepinwall is correct in his supposition that we're not on a journey to resurrect Caroline but rather for Echo to grow and coalesce into her own, distinct, personality.) And as different as the show's back nine seemed from where it had started, it stretched to match.
Stretched? Practically exploded. When the pilot had Echo implanted as an abuse survivor the potentially intriguing notion that great achievement is indivisible from the great pain that drives it was briefly flagged only to be dropped for a noxious bit of plot mechanics, the method by which our bad guy of the week gets spotted. Whereas "Briar Rose" returned to the conceit and crafted a riveting examination, tender and fearless, of the horrific ways that a victim's guilt and fear intertwine, how however blameless you are, "every time somebody calls [you] a victim...[you feel] like the biggest liar in the world."
(Note that the pilot was written by Whedon and "Briar Rose" by Jane Espenson. I'm as big a fan of Whedon as the next fellow, but part of his genius is getting excellent talent in the writing room and letting them run with his big ideas.)
"...Whedon is muddying the “this is good, and this is evil” lines that he played within so directly in his two most popular shows."
A potential hint of how much he intends to do so is his comment that he has six (or seven?) seasons plotted out to tell the whole of the story. As I understand the show's backstory, Echo is now somewhat over a year into her five-year contract with the Dollhouse. Assuming the terms of her contract are met, why on earth would she stick around past her release? In the highly unlikely event that Whedon gets as long as he wants, are we heading for an endgame similar to Angel season five, only shaded thoroughly in gray?
Having said all that (and sorry for the length), in deference to barefootjim, if network renewal truly were a zero-sum game I'd probably root for Better off Ted, which is no less concerned with the impossibility of drawing a moral line between yourself and your corporate controllers, and offers the marvelous spectacle of Portia de Rossi's disdainful preening to boot.
Bruce: Better Off Ted definitely deserves a return engagement. There's a show that REALLY found its voice after a shaky couple of episodes. It's one of the better comedies on TV after only seven episodes, and between it and the already-renewed Party Down, it's been a great spring for new TV comedies.
I'd like to respectfully dissent. I realize that you're speaking of the potential of _Dollhouse_ and acknowledging that it hasn't quite lived up to its promise, but I still feel you're being a bit too easy on it.
In particular, I don't feel _Dollhouse_ ever honestly demonstrated the moral complexity you claim for it. Sure, periodically Topher or Adelle would proclaim "We're humanitarians," but I don't recall any storyline that actually demonstrated that fact -- even Boyd never seemed to buy that line, despite being moved up to head of security (with access to more info about the Dollhouse's activities). I suppose one might counter with the Briar Rose case, except that I thought that case was a novel idea of Topher's (and hence indulged because, well, Topher has to be indulged sometimes). The _Dollhouse_ organization came across as flatly evil because, regardless of its rhetoric, it basically acted evil. As Frank Lapidus noted last night on another show that uses a similar gambit, only bad guys feel the need to regularly proclaim they're the good guys.
Indeed, instead of any moral complexity I felt we instead got corporate malfeasance and incompetence. Adelle using Victor, Topher using Sierra, Adelle allowing her dead friend to use Echo, November being repeatedly imprinted with a single identity, Alpha escaping (and returning), the NSA infiltrating -- not to mention at least two cases (the kidnapping opener and the club flashback with Alpha in Whiskey in the finale) with the client nearly getting killed. If the show hadn't been so self serious I would have thought Whedon was making a corporate satire in the midst of a collapsing economy -- an understaffed business with terrible management and an unsustainable business model nonetheless survives through (indirect) corporate welfare.
I would, in fact, like to defend the much-maligned "mystery of the week" aspect of the show. _Dollhouse_ regularly took ideas that could make for compelling stand-alones and made thuddingly boring episodes instead -- the episode about the woman who wants to experience her own funeral turns into a by-the-numbers murder mystery is surely the prime example, but I'd argue that the cultist episode (could have been a great episode about faith) and the Elgin marbles episode (could have been a great episode about politics) also represented lost opportunities because they traded single episode complexity for vague "stage setting" involving the larger arcs of the show. Nevertheless, the potential was, as was a supporting cast -- Laurie, Lachman, and Gjokaj were all great -- who could have delivered on such stories. (I can't have been the only one to find Gjokaj's Reed Diamond impersonation awesome, can I?) I'd be happy to have _Dollhouse_ return if it would give up the silly multinational conspiracy angle and give me a self-contained episode that delivers.
Thanks so much, this is a great analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Dollhouse! I'm totally with you, and have huge faith that they can make it something amazing. Hope they bring it back!!
I don't see why you have to downgrade Whedon's past work to praise Dollhouse. Surely Angel's Wolfram & Hart is the precursor to the Dollhouse -- I'm sure the thematic resemblance would be even stronger if Angel had gotten one more season.
Latest anon: I'm not downgrading it. (See above, where I call BTVS one of my ten favorite TV shows of all time.) Moral maturity does not necessarily always equal "good," and, indeed, TOO MUCH moral maturity might have felt odd in the more adolescent worlds of BTVS and Angel.
Some really good points; you made me want to go back and watch it, and i was happy sitting around waiting for the next season.
One quibble i have, though; "Obviously, the overarching goals of the organization are monstrous, but they do weird, pro-bono cases, and there’s been numerous hints that if the technology fell into the wrong hands, the consequences could be disastrous (a major story arc centered around an NSA agent who had hoped to co-opt the technology for the use of the government)" - seems like a very 'American' thing to say - a self-centred corporation has the power to wipe peoples minds for the services of the rich (and the money to compel people to submit to this), but it's the *government* getting their hands on it that's the REAL danger! I took the implication as being that it's already in the wrong hands, the tension-inducing threat is simply having it get into even *more* wrong hands.
When Joss Whedon’s latest series, Dollhouse, began back in February, it was kind of a mess. An INTERESTING mess, to be sure, but it felt like it was a series that was fundamentally missing something at its core, which led it to flail around a lot, trying a number of things that just didn’t work.
I think we've been spoiled by shows like "LOST" and "HEROES". We expect or demand that shows with multi-seasons arcs to start on a high note, instead of allowing it to develop and find its voice. We've lost any semblance of patience. And that's sad. Especially since shows like "LOST" and "HEROES" have failed to maintain its quality from their first seasons.
I believe that it's best for a series with a multi-season arc to flail a little at the beginning, so that it would be allowed to grow.
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