Will Josh Whedon ever return to tv?
- Thread starter Jayson
- Start date
I certainly hope he does at some point. His shows remain some of my absolute favorites. The biggest problems with his shows, though, are that they aren't easily accessible to a wide audience right off the bat. If he does return to TV, he needs to keep that in mind. He can have shows with weird premises, but they need to appeal to a larger audience, at least in the first season.
Re: Will Joss Whedon ever return to tv?
First: It's Joss, not Josh.
Second: FOX didn't "screw him over twice." One set of executives did with Firefly; a different set of executives gave Dollhouse a second chance by giving it a second season, which was pretty unexpected given the ratings of the first season.
Third: I agree. He needs to go to cable if he returns to tv. I imagine the box office performance of The Avengers will determine whether or not he starts looking to tv again any time soon.
First: It's Joss, not Josh.
Second: FOX didn't "screw him over twice." One set of executives did with Firefly; a different set of executives gave Dollhouse a second chance by giving it a second season, which was pretty unexpected given the ratings of the first season.
Third: I agree. He needs to go to cable if he returns to tv. I imagine the box office performance of The Avengers will determine whether or not he starts looking to tv again any time soon.
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The Avengers should establish Whedon as a full-time feature film director. He may have a hand in producing TV shows in the future, but if his film career remains steady then he probably won't be a showrunner again. The same goes for JJ Abrams.
He needs to do a show for cable. Forget broadcast.
Can we stop with this now? They put a sci-fi show on network TV, THEY TOOK A RISK. Could they have handled it better, sure. BUT THEY PUT IT ON. They didn't screw him over. People didn't watch it.
And DOLLHOUSE, ANOTHER sci-fi show, who ELSE is putting sci-fi on? FOX took another risk. They even gave him a SECOND SEASON.
NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE WANTED TO WATCH IT.
So, maybe FOX didn't screw over Joss, BUT THE AUDIENCE did.
They are the ones who didn't show up for Firefly, Serenity, OR Dollhouse.
I think Joss's future projects may be heavily influenced by the performance of "The Avengers." If the film is a huge success story, he may find himself sought out by Hollywood for more high-profile projects. Or, he'll be given the extra respect and clout needed to work on pet projects that interest him. I'd love to see him return to television, but preferably on cable where he'd be given more opportunity and creative freedom.
Well, if he ever does return he will go where the money is. I doubt he'll turn down FOX if they are willing to foot the bill!
However, I agree that going to network television is a mistake if you expect a series to go on for more than a few seasons.
I'd rather see him continue with films myself.
I'm a huge fan of Joss, but I was incredibly unimpressed with Doll House.
I'm a huge fan of Joss, but I was incredibly unimpressed with Doll House.
Frankly I have not been terribly impressed in the past with Whedon as a director. Serenity and the episodes of TV stuff he directed were competent enough, but really just average from a directing standpoint.
What made them work was some crackerjack writing. To mangle a quote, writing is Whedon's first best destiny. Anything that takes him away from that is going to be a loss.
What made them work was some crackerjack writing. To mangle a quote, writing is Whedon's first best destiny. Anything that takes him away from that is going to be a loss.
i have faith in joss, he is a good "character" writer and director, Buffy and Angel had shoestring budgets, but joss' writing skills made up for the budget. The eps he wrote and directed himself were some of the best stuff on TV...period
I wouldn't rule out a return to television for Joss but he is rather busy right now and not just with "Avengers". He has both "Buffy Season Nine" and "Angel and Faith" comics that he is heavily involved with. He hinted at SDCC that "Dr. Horrible" will return at some point as well. Not to mention his "Goners" project that has been on the back burner. I would say that he would return to television if the right project got his attention. Or if a "Dollhouse" situation came along.
That's a lame justification if you have previously did everything to sabotage the show and make it less likely that people would watch it, including canning an excellent pilot that had the character's backstories and introductions and would have been a lot more likely to draw people in than an OK episode that didn't work as a pilot (and I know because I first tried watching Firefly from The Train Job and was unimpressed, then when about a year later I tried with the actual pilot, Serenity, it was a whole different story), showing the episodes out of order, preempting it for sports events etc.
It's not the first nor the last time that a TV show was cancelled for low ratings after being treated stupidly by the network it was on (say, given a bad timeslot, moved around, poor promotion etc.) When a network treats a show like that, it's pretty hypocritical to blame it on "not enough people watching". If you did everything to not promote a show the right way and make it difficult for people to follow it, you can't expect a large audience. Hardcore fans might go out of their way to still watch the show despite the poor conditions to do so, but the larger audience and casual viewers can't be expected to do that.
But as DevilEyes pointed out, shitcanning the actual pilot episode - the very thing that is supposed to introduce the Firefly universe and characters to the audience - in favour of using a relatively average episode to kick start the show was an absolutely ridiculous decision. These people run a network and are supposed to know what they're doing. Everyone knows you show the pilot episode first, so the audience knows where they're at from the start. It's no surprise that many people tuned in to the "premiere" and probably felt like they'd missed something because the episode expected them to already know who everyone was and why they were doing the things they were doing.
So it boils down to one of two things; FOX were either incompetent, or they deliberately sabotaged the show. I'm putting my money on "incompetent", simply because it wouldn't make sense to deliberately sabotage the show they'd just paid for.
Hell, over here in the UK, the Sci-Fi channel aired all 14 episodes in the correct order, and the show became hugely popular. Granted, that was nowhere near enough to save it, but if a niche channel on a little island thousands of miles away can get it right, why couldn't the people who actually owned the show, and had a vested interest in it being successful, do the same?
Oh, I think it was incompetence as well. I don't subscribe to the "FOX was out to get Firefly" theory.
Of course they wanted the show to succeed. They requested a second pilot for that exact reason - they didn't think the original one was action heavy enough to draw in viewers.
So some blame has to be put on FOX for mishandling the show, and some on Joss for not making the show accessible enough to a general audience.
This is true. I actually tried Firefly in its original run and stopped after the second episode, "Our Mrs. Reynolds", which was even worse. Partly between my falling out over Andromeda and Enterprise I simply no longer had the patience to give yet another apparently painfully mediocre space opera show a few months of benefit of the doubt. Hell, I still remember the lenghty arguments about "Our Mrs. Reynolds" on these very forums (as I recall, Shepherd Book has a pretty asinine joke line that connects lechers to noisy people in movie theaters or something similar, and people were raking the show over the coals for this particularly weak writing).
So I stopped watching and I was completely unsurprised when the show was later cancelled, although the continued fan support and the existence of a movie threw me a curve.
All this said, "Serenity" is a stronger start, and the show isn't as bad as those first two aired episodes suggested to me.
Now, how Fox handled Firefly can be distanced from how they handled Dollhouse, mind. The show got a second season in spite of what were apparently low ratings, which doesn't sound much like an attempt to sabotage a Whedon product to me.
Which, again, would amount to being a failure on FOX's part. They failed to understand the show they'd just bought, and they failed to see their audience as anything more than a bunch of gunfire and explosion junkies, who wouldn't tolerate more than 10 minutes of talking in any given episode.
Sorry, and this is nothing against you, but I'm kinda sick of hearing that argument in relation to TV shows. I hate the idea that we have to forego complex or interesting storytelling, just in case Joe Idiot wants to start watching 10 episodes into a show and then starts complaining that he doesn't know what's going on.
If someone recommends a show that I'm not already watching, I don't jump in at the next episode and expect I'll just pick it up, and then brand the show unwatchable or too inaccessible because I was too stupid or lazy to catch up first. I'll go download the first episode from iTunes or wait for a repeat or something. You don't start watching films half an hour in and then complain that it makes no sense, so why do people excuse this behaviour with TV shows?
I love Joss. But Dollhouse, though rich in ideas, lacked in execution. Fox honestly was trying to make up for what they did to Firefly. But a better way to do that would have been to bring back Firefly.
