For those of us with advanced reading skills, the second line of the second paragraph says they will probably get cancelled because they have low ratings.
And the third line of the second paragraph says "But I kid." Why this haste to assume the worst? Yes,
Dollhouse has low ratings by conventional measures, but its bump in ratings when DVR figures are added in is kind of spectacular. So not a lot of people are watching the show as it airs, but a whole bunch of them are recording it and watching it later. And that's something the network is taking into account, which is why they've committed to showing at least the entire current 13-episode order. In olden days, they would've pulled the show already, but the way people watch television is changing and it's no longer reasonable to rely solely on conventional ratings and old assumptions.
That article is making a huge leap to a conclusion when it claims the show is doomed just because Whedon's doing a one-week directing gig on another show. That misunderstands the way television works in
so many ways. I mean, if Whedon was able to have both
Buffy and
Angel on the air simultaneously, why would that writer assume he was incapable of producing one show and being a guest director on another at the same time? He certainly did it often enough with
Buffy/Angel.
This is a question I keep asking. Why do these guys keep wasting their time with Fox?
Because FOX buys their shows. Really, FOX's reputation for being hostile to genre shows is undeserved. The reason it's cancelled so many genre shows over the years is because it's
bought so many more genre shows than just about any other major network. Every show gets cancelled eventually, so if there are more genre shows on FOX, there will be more genre cancellations on FOX.
Not long ago, on another board, I did some calculations for how many SF/fantasy shows the various major networks have aired over the course of their lifetimes, using Wikipedia's lists of each network's shows, which are no doubt incomplete but at least in the ballpark. Here's what I got, calculating from the date of the earliest primetime genre show I could find for each network:
FOX: 1.27 shows/year (28 genre shows in 22 years, since
Werewolf in 1987)
UPN: 1.25/yr (15 genre shows in its 12 years on the air)
The WB: 0.92/yr (11 genre shows in its 12 years on the air)
ABC: 0.91/yr (42 genre shows in 46 years, since
The Outer Limits in 1963)
NBC: 0.57/yr (28 genre shows in 49 years, since
Boris Karloff's Thriller in 1960)
CBS: 0.42/yr (21 genre shows in 50 years, since
The Twilight Zone in 1959)
The CW: N/A (too young for any statistically meaningful estimates, and its genre shows are mostly inherited anyway)
If we limit it to the span of time that FOX has been airing genre shows (i.e. 1987-present), ABC stays roughly the same, NBC goes up to 0.73/yr, and CBS goes up to 0.55/yr. But their relative rankings remain unchanged.
Of course, this isn't a valid comparison of the relative
success of genre shows, since many lasted for a very short time; a smaller ratio of new shows per year could mean that the ones they had lasted longer. But it says something about the networks' relative
willingness to develop and broadcast genre shows.
And of all the broadcast networks, FOX is more or less tied with UPN as the most genre-friendly network, the one that's made SF and fantasy shows the largest part of its schedule over the span of its existence. If any network deserves a reputation as hostile to SF, it's CBS. (Indeed, the only reason its figure isn't even lower is that I counted
Gilligan's Island and
Green Acres as half a genre show each.)
There's also the fact that the people in charge of FOX today are not the same people who were in charge when
Firefly was broadcast and cancelled. It's a totally different executive regime now. So the answer to "Why do they still go with FOX?" is that it's not the same FOX.
I'll be the first to admit I haven't bothered getting into Dollhouse because I was pretty confident it would be cancelled quickly. I probably made the right call.
No, you probably didn't. It's a good show, and it will have gotten at least two complete 13-episode seasons, each of which has a satisfactory degree of closure. You should definitely check out the DVDs, at least. Indeed, maybe it's better to see the first season on DVD than in first-run, because you can see the progression of the storyline more clearly.
