I haven't seen the show, but the premise bothers me. Not because there's anything wrong with this, nor is there anything wrong with Buffy, or with River Tam. They're all fine characters and shows on their own. But added together I'm beginning to see them less as "strong, independent women" and see it more as "Joss totally has this superior-female sexual fantasy where he gets all hot at the idea of being beat up by a woman." All these characters are starting to feel less like characters to me and more like his personal, imaginary playthings. I had that thought a while back, and now I see there's a show where the characters are compared to dolls and have their memory wiped each week to suit their master. Is he a mind reader? How did he sense my suspicions and make an entire show about them? It feels to me like he's starting to parody himself, which is never a good sign. Again - I haven't seen it, these are just my feelings based on the concept.
I don't think we're supposed to be celebrating the brain-wiping. I think that's definitely supposed to be leaving the viewer a bit uncomfortable, while simultaneously being enough of a gray area not to make it obvious whether we're watching the bad guys or not.
I'm not so much talking about how it works inside the show, more that he went and found a way to make all-new female characters each week to suit his mood. Again, I don't mind the show, it just bothers me that it seems to be revealing more about Joss' mind than I care to know. If anyone else had made this I wouldn't be talking about any of this. I think Dr. Horrible was so great BECAUSE it strayed from this, in fact! I think Joss would do better if he was challenged to work outside his comfort zone more often. (Which is why I bring this up: the reviews seem lukewarm. I'd prefer to see him create successful shows. Hopefully this one does well. I doubt my concerns bother the average viewer so it shouldn't matter.)
Not impressed. Almost changed over to CLONE WARS. Basically, there's a mysterious enemy out there and the FBI agent out to uncover it all, like the reporter in The Hulk, or Starman or the military guy after the A-Team or Agent Ellison on Sarah Connor Chronicles or whoever was after The Fugtive. Toss in The Pretender meets Stepford Wives (the movie version...ick) meets something else I can't remember...brain wiped... I predicted this show gets FIREFLIED.
Well... have you ever written seriously at all? As for his characters, even if they are to satisfy some desire of his... being a writer that's his prerogitive, they've pretty much all been top notch characters and written into good stories.
Ummm.. where have you been? It started no less than 6 months ago. I'm not kidding. The show wasn't anything close to a win, and the ratings will prove it. Canceled within 5 episodes.
I doubt it will be axed within 5 episodes because I read they'd already taped 13 in an interview with Whedon yesterday, and he said himself that he was the first person that raised the question of whether or not they were glorifying prostitution or exploitation of women. I forgot to set my Tivo to record it, but I imagine they'll play the first episode again....
What kind of loser would start a campaign to save a show no one had seen yet? I can't understand that at all! (I recorded it but haven't watched it yet...will check it out a bit later)
The only show of his I watched on a regular basis was angel - this was just OK, I'd watch it if I stayed in and nothing to do but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it.
I'll have to check it out. I loved Buffy and Angel, but Firefly...didn't appeal to me. I'll give this thing a shot not because of Whedon, but because Eliza Dushku is great
This isn't anywhere near as good as Firefly, at least so far. The opening was less cheesy that Buffy's, though.
I find it curious that Fox is making this a 50 minute show like Fringe. I wonder how they decide this? And why not do the NBC thing of the 90s and "supersize" their hits like House and 24? That's basically 8-10 more minutes of TV, so it's pretty significant.
I have to confess to my deep and unabiding urge to secks Eliza Dushku within an inch of her life, thus making it an effort to evaluate the episode with equanimity. In the end, I concluded it was pretty solid. A lot of the advance reviews I read criticized her performance, but I didn't see a problem there at all. Tahmoh Penikett was also very solid; he's got screen presence and deserves to be on a big-time network show. I wasn't real happy to see they took Amy Acker, a strong candidate for Planet Earth's Most Adorable Actress, and scratched her face up and frumpified her hair a bit and so forth. Boo on that. By first episode standards, the exposition was not too burdensome, and the hostage-related stuff crackled along successfully. I was very impressed with the look of the show. Watched it in HD and it looked damned expensive, with the multilevel Dollhouse set itself a standout. The wood paneling, Japanese-style lamps and all that are gorgeous (unisex shower??). The big problem I see with the format is that it appears tailor-made to try and have "enough" of an episode-of-the-week feel to keep the ratings from steadily dropping. I read one critic who compared the slightly underwhelming feel of the result to the early episodes of Angel, which similarly was supposed to be episodic at the start--and instead quickly descended into super-complex, lengthy storylines filled with resurrections and events from other series and mystic mumbo-jumbo playing by its own rules, all of the sort guaranteed to utterly baffle a new viewer. Will the creative talents behind the series be able to resist the temptation to sort of abandon the pursuit of weekly ratings at some point and start navel-gazing? I was thinking about what Small White Car said above. Whenever the creator of a show has put himself out there as a public figure, giving interviews and such, people start looking for patterns in his work and reducing them to stuff like "that's his fetish" and so forth. There might be some truth in that and I was struck by it when watching this series...not so much in the episode itself, though the very scenario of the bunch of hot chicks who get dressed up for role-play every week, do something exciting and then get put in a drawer is easily classified under this heading. But what really made me think about it was the odd Dushku and Glau host segments. Their lines were cute at times, a little too hokey at others; I noticed that Glau seemed a little uncomfortable with the seedy, on-the-nose lines conveying "hey sci-fi geeks, make a date with THESE two hot chicks every Friday night." Amusingly, Dushku didn't seem remotely bashful about the whole thing, and projected full-force sex rays directly into the camera lens as usual. Anyway, what I got to thinking about was how Whedon had discovered Glau and given Dushku her most high-profile role as an adult to date, so seeing the two of them standing there in cute outfits selling it to nerds, it's not hard to make the leap to "Whedon has a type" and start searching everything you see of his for supporting evidence. If I had to predict the future for Dollhouse (and I don't have to, and neither need so many snide critics), I think the show's ratings will probably be okay, they'll get some sort of relatively short pickup, and then it'll abandon the casual viewer and become deeply masturbatory about its own mythology to plummeting ratings. It will be canceled after it is clear the slide is irreversible, and fans will blame Fox and curse it unrelentingly...despite the fact that this looks like a show with a comfortable budget and which has absolutely beaten me over the head with promotion. At some point, it's out of their hands. But a solid beginning, so I'll probably watch on through no matter what.
For the record, I have absolutely no problem with the hot chicks in the shower scenes, if it keeps the ratings afloat for the story side of things.