Joss Whedon wins again.

[firehawk12]

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.

[Michael Chris]

I really enjoyed it.

[Othello]

Below average....

[JNG]

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.

[Lindley]

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.

[Colin Xavier]

Some ratings news, Dollhouse managed 4.72 million viewers with 2.0/6 for 18-49.

[Lindley]

Eh.

[Timby]

For once in a lifetime, my Mediacom DVR actually worked, and I watched the show this morning. I can't say I was terribly impressed. It wasn't bad, but nothing really grabbed me at all.

[bigdaddy]

JNG wrote:

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What kind of loser would start a campaign to save a show no one had seen yet? I can't understand that at all!

LOST fans. Before LOST started people thought it was doomed, no ads for it or anything, turned out to be a hit. Someone form LOST in the first season joked about how there are always "Save a Show" but never any "Cancel a show" websites, he would have liked to have seen a "Cancel 7th Heaven" website.

[Temis the Vorta]

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."

I'm seeing it as, "forget the chicks, where are the hot guys?" It's ok when a show has a strong, butt-kicking women, such as Larren from SG:A, but there must be a Shep in the show for her to beat up.

Anyway given the catastrophic premiere ratings, this is all the mootest of moot points.

[Campe98]

Mediocre at best. Whedon's done MUCH better. I'll give it a month to pan out and see where it goes from there.

[bigdaddy]

Campe98 wrote:

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Mediocre at best. Whedon's done MUCH better. I'll give it a month to pan out and see where it goes from there.

That's more than Fox will.

[JNG]

bigdaddy wrote:

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LOST fans. Before LOST started people thought it was doomed, no ads for it or anything, turned out to be a hit. Someone form LOST in the first season joked about how there are always "Save a Show" but never any "Cancel a show" websites, he would have liked to have seen a "Cancel 7th Heaven" website.

Maybe describing anyone who'd start such a campaign as "losers" was too harsh, but to me it is silly to be fighting (fighting who?) for a show you haven't seen. Imagine campaigning for months and then the show stinks.

But I'd like to point out that I remember a "Cancel Enterprise" web site and a "Cancel Tom Goes to the Mayor" site as well

[trekkerguy]

bigdaddy wrote:

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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.

Meh, ratings mean nothing. It's an excellent show.

[wamdue]

Colin Xavier wrote:

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Some ratings news, Dollhouse managed 4.72 million viewers with 2.0/6 for 18-49.

awful ratings, I was expecting at least 7 million for the first episode, damm you Sarah Connor