{"id":2688,"date":"2010-02-04T18:11:32","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T18:11:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ewanspence.com\/blog\/?p=2688"},"modified":"2010-02-04T18:13:09","modified_gmt":"2010-02-04T18:13:09","slug":"some-thoughts-on-dollhouse-and-joss-whedon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/2010\/02\/some-thoughts-on-dollhouse-and-joss-whedon\/","title":{"rendered":"Some thoughts on Dollhouse and Joss Whedon"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Dollhouse<\/a> is over, and there are sure to be papers, studies and exploration about why the show lasted just the two seasons. Was it the scheduling on a Friday night, the interference in the first batch of episodes by the Fox network, the lack of a character for the audience to identify with, the initial presentation of the subject matter\u2026<\/p>\n

The discussions will continue<\/a>, but when you break it down, Dollhouse had five different sections, each with faults and weaknesses. And in those, Whedon and his team will learn more lessons for their next series.<\/p>\n

1: The first half of Season One<\/strong>
Fox asked for the first episodes to be \u201cstandalone\u201d which managed to take the concepts of personally, identity and free choice and turn them into a strange mix of Joe 90 and Murder She Wrote. The underlying story struggled to break free, and it was impossible to get a hold of the characters that constantly changed their personality via \u201cthe chair\u201d that programmed their brains.<\/p>\n

2: The second half of Season One<\/strong>
Let off their leash to tell the story their way, Dollhouse found stable ground and expanded their world and characters. You saw that love never dies, and that the lead character was growing a constant conscious.<\/p>\n

3: The first third of Season Two<\/strong>
Confident in their storytelling, the mutli-episode arcs started to unfold and the show delivered what any good ensemble\/ongoing story needs to deliver. And it did. Part of this has to be down to Fox telling the crew that the thirteen episodes would definitely air on television so they could throw those concerns aside.<\/p>\n

4: The middle of Season Two<\/strong>
And then Fox said they were cancelled. But you\u2019ve got a bundle of episodes left, can you finish the story? Imagine lining up enough fireworks to last three or four years of plot,  and then told you can fire them all off in six episodes. Some of the delicacy had to be sacrificed, but the shocks and revelations came so thick and fast that for a brief moment Dollhouse was, hands down, the best thing on television. But the candle that burns so brightly\u2026.<\/p>\n

5: Finishing the story – the final two episodes<\/strong>
And then it was over. The final \u2018season\u2019 story suffered from a tiny budget and with only the regular stock of fireworks compared to those just fired off, it felt like it ran out of steam, but hey, the cliff-hanger paid off as one of the great TV twists. The very last episode carried on the tradition of the end of Season one by doing a throw forward of ten years to see where the big picture went. And in that, with huge brush strokes, we saw the promise of the TV show Dollhouse, and can go away with memories of stories that never aired and tech gone wild.<\/p>\n

\"Dollhouse\" In a few hundred years, this scene will happen aboard the Serenity\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

For the record I loved Dollhouse. Yes it was flawed, but it was a roller coaster, with a story, and managed to have a beginning, middle and end. With hindsight I would\u2019ve liked to see two things. Firstly dropping us into the middle of the story (section 2 above) so viewers could make an easy connection (which, as Dollhouse fans know, is where the initial pilot did drop us into).<\/p>\n

Secondly, the promo for the show was that this was about millionaires hiring out programmable people for their fantasies, when in fact it was actually an apocalypse\/end of the Earth story. A brave call would have been to make the first episode \u201cEpitaph Zero\u201d and do the throw forward right at the top, then snap back, safe in the knowledge that we\u2019re going to get to Mad Max territory \u2013 but the story is then clearly about how do we get there, not what Eliza Duskhu is going to be wearing this week.<\/p>\n

Hey, it worked for Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet!<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help wondering what would have happened if Dollhouse had been made not by Fox in the US, but by the BBC in the UK. Four seasons of say eight episodes each, would fit the Dollhouse world; there would be very little interference to chase ratings and we have a tradition of deep, layered programming going right back from the suicide ending of Life on Mars to the original Quatermass plays.<\/p>\n

So for all the noises of Fox asking for more series, overtures from HBO, and the cry of the fans to switch to online only, can I suggest to Joss Whedon that he politely declines all of those, and comes to the UK?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Dollhouse is over, and there are sure to be papers, studies and exploration about why the show lasted just the two seasons. Was it the scheduling on a Friday night, the interference in the first batch of episodes by the Fox network, the lack of a character for the audience to identify with, the initial presentation of the subject matter\u2026 The discussions will continue, but when you break it down, Dollhouse had five different sections, each with faults and weaknesses. And in those, Whedon and his team will learn more lessons for their next series. 1: The first half<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[576],"tags":[230,1604,408,1605],"class_list":["post-2688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mainstream-media","tag-bbc","tag-dollhouse","tag-fox","tag-joss-whedon","comments-off"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58Gl0-Hm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}