Joss Jumps ship: Dollhouse is done?

[Mr. Adventure]

I did raise my eyebrow a little when I heard he was directing Glee, apparently a few other people did as well. Whether you think its poo or not I could see Dollhouse having a hard time finding an audience, it's atypical fare, but I don't wish ill toward its fate or Whedon.

 

[Sci]

Wow, I love how much in denial he is.

Listen up guys, it's not his fault the show sucks and is doing so poorly! It's the ratings, meaning it's solely your fault! How dare you not acknowledge his brilliance and wonder! The show is perfect and flawless in all ways; it's not his fault the story is ridiculous, the acting is shite, or the concept itself is absolutely asinine. No! It's all your fault! Damn you for not finding a way to pad the ratings!

He said nothing of the sort; you are literally lying about what he said.

His actual statement was a joke -- i.e., "No, the fact that I'm directing an episode of Glee does not mean that Dollhouse is finished, our ratings mean that Dollhouse is finished." Which is both absolutely funny and absolutely accurate; his directing an episode of Glee means nothing for Dollhouse's future.

 

[bigdaddy]

The show had a great basic idea, modern day slaves with a twist.

The show is garbage, the main actress can't act and it's written badly.

The show got 26 episodes and that's 20 more than it should have.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

He has no one to blame this failure on except himself.

It was a horrible concept with an even worse execution.

The concept could have been executed competently, with a lot of reworking of the approach. A male lead character, for instance, might have solved several problems, because there would have been far less temptation to make him a poor widdle victim in a pathetic bid for audience sympathy. Just make the guy a bastard and dare the audience to watch anyway; hey, it works for any number of popular cable shows.

Getting a close-up look at Whedon's fetishes was kinda sickening. Sometimes, a writer's fetishes can be great fodder for drama, but Whedon's - victimizing women while pretending to "empower" them - was just kinda uninteresting and sad.

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.

DVR ratings can save a marginal show but the advertisers know that only 40% or so of those ads get watched (that's the last stat I read anyway), plus many ads have expiration dates (movie ads aired on Thurs for a weekend audience) so much beyond three days lag time, the advertisers aren't counting.

 

[Lindley]

Well, that's the problem with a show that's simply about exploring a high-concept SF notion: without "good guys", it's hard to know whether or not you're supposed to root for the people you're watching.

But it's not like those in the Dollhouse are explicitly bad guys either. Yeah, they're going to destroy the world, but they think they're doing something good. It's one of the best road-to-hell scenarios I've seen presented, anyway.

 

[Skywalker]

Well, if nothing else, at least the show introduced us to Enver Gjokaj, who I think is easily the best actor on the show (or at least has done the best with the material he's been given). I hope he lands on a new show after Dollhouse ends.

 

[Tomato]

Well, if nothing else, at least the show introduced us to Enver Gjokaj, who I think is easily the best actor on the show (or at least has done the best with the material he's been given). I hope he lands on a new show after Dollhouse ends.

He was in Taking Chance too. Another powerful movie. I think he only had 5 minutes but he blew the part right out of water.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

The concept could have been executed competently, with a lot of reworking of the approach. A male lead character, for instance, might have solved several problems, because there would have been far less temptation to make him a poor widdle victim in a pathetic bid for audience sympathy. Just make the guy a bastard and dare the audience to watch anyway; hey, it works for any number of popular cable shows.

I agree with this element, even moreso after seeing Victor act circles around Echo week in, week out. (Unfortunately, there would be no Dollhouse at all without Eliza Dushku. Still, a man can dream...)

Well, if nothing else, at least the show introduced us to Enver Gjokaj, who I think is easily the best actor on the show (or at least has done the best with the material he's been given). I hope he lands on a new show after Dollhouse ends.

I think that Enver Gjokaj will endure the same fate as another Whedon actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor. His career will struggle because he has 2 names that no studio executives can spell or pronounce.

Joss needs to give Amy Acker her own show.

Agreed. Actually, he might be a good choice of show-runner for the supernatural legal drama Goddess of Justice. (It's got a unique twist to it, yet it's in an established, easy-to-explain/market genre. I suspect that was one of the big advantages of Buffy & Angel and a big disadvantage of Dollhouse & Firefly. Joss needs to stop naming his own shows.)

 

[Kegg]

The concept could have been executed competently, with a lot of reworking of the approach. A male lead character, for instance, might have solved several problems, because there would have been far less temptation to make him a poor widdle victim in a pathetic bid for audience sympathy. Just make the guy a bastard and dare the audience to watch anyway; hey, it works for any number of popular cable shows.

Getting a close-up look at Whedon's fetishes was kinda sickening. Sometimes, a writer's fetishes can be great fodder for drama, but Whedon's - victimizing women while pretending to "empower" them - was just kinda uninteresting and sad.

Oh, very true. When all is said and done, Whedon's better at writing male protagonists because for him they come with comparatively little baggage (I liked Firefly, but the high class hooker with a heart of gold and the superpowered teenager are problematic characters, or agreeable fetish fuel depending on one's viewpoint).

That and we need more shows with bastard leads. Preferably bastards who are witty and sardonic and Michael C. Hallish.

I think that Enver Gjokaj will endure the same fate as another Whedon actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor. His career will struggle because he has 2 names that no studio executives can spell or pronounce.

I think Chiwetel Ejiofor is pretty awesome. Buckets of charisma and a wonderful piercing gaze. And if a dyslexic like me can be bothered to learn that name, there's no excuse for the rest of yous.

Still I'd never really thought of him as a 'Whedon actor', which may just be me.

(Also: Enver? It's spelt and pronounced exactly the same and is fairly simple.)

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

^I guess "Enver" isn't so bad. But "Gjokaj" just looks like a bad Scrabble hand.

 

[Bad Bishop]

I haven't learned the unusual names of some of the actors (and I'm not talking about Olivia Williams). Why bother now?

 

[bigdaddy]

Wow... there is a lot of BS here. :laugh:

As said Fox didn't make Serenity, it's also why they had to change the name of the movie because Fox owned the name Firefly.

Also Fox doesn't give a rats ass about Futurama, the only reason it's coming back is Comedy Central.

Also once again Dollhouse is trash, I blame it mostly on the lead actress not being able to act, she is horrible!

 

[RoJoHen]

Also once again Dollhouse is trash, I blame it mostly on the lead actress not being able to act, she is horrible!

Eh, I've never really seen this. She seems fine enough to me. Maybe not good enough to be the lead on a show, but she holds her own.

 

[Christopher]

Getting a close-up look at Whedon's fetishes was kinda sickening. Sometimes, a writer's fetishes can be great fodder for drama, but Whedon's - victimizing women while pretending to "empower" them - was just kinda uninteresting and sad.

Now, that is just ridiculous. That's like assuming that Arthur Miller's The Crucible expresses his fetish for persecuting witches, or that 1984 expressed George Orwell's fetish for authoritarianism, or that Huckleberry Finn proves that Mark Twain was a racist. Depicting something is not endorsing it. Plenty of fiction is about depicting something in order to condemn it, to force the audience to confront the difficult moral questions it raises. Whedon is using Dollhouse to examine complex, challenging questions of power, identity, and ethics, and it's downright juvenile to interpret them merely as the author's fetishes.

 

[Sci]

I think that Enver Gjokaj will endure the same fate as another Whedon actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor. His career will struggle because he has 2 names that no studio executives can spell or pronounce.

I don't really think Eljofor's been struggling. He's made quite a few movies since Serenity. It's just that he's a British actor who's based out of the U.K., so he tends to get cast in films that don't have as high of a profile in the United States.

 

[Kegg]

or that 1984 expressed George Orwell's fetish for authoritarianism,

Julia in 1984 always struck me as a tad fetishistic, actually. A beautiful woman who falls instantly in love with an unattractive man with few if any good points and quickly procees to make love with him? Sex as an anti-authoritarian political act?

And then there's that dream about her just ripping off her clothes in a single movement.

But, yeah. It's one thing to call someone's viewpoint ridiculous, it's another thing to do that and then present an opinion more worthy of ridicule. The point Temis observed about Whedon's women an accusation thrown in Joss' direction since before Dollhouse, so it can't be written off as part of his deathly serious examination of what happens to reprogrammable beautiful TV starlets.

Disagreeing with it is one thing, misconstruing it and proceeding to write a rather silly and humourless argument is something else entirely.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

or that 1984 expressed George Orwell's fetish for authoritarianism,

Ignoring for a moment the ludricousness of comparing deathly serious dissections of intolerance and state totalitarianism to a Joss Whedon series about gorgeous women and in reference to a Temis point which is just as applicable to Buffy or Firefly, so it can't be confined to the Dollhouse program:

Julia in 1984 always struck me as a tad fetishistic, actually. A beautiful woman who falls instantly in love with an unattractive man with few if any good points and quickly procees to make love with him? Sex as an anti-authoritarian political act?

And then there's that dream about her just ripping off her clothes in a single movement.

But, yeah. It's one thing to call someone's viewpoint ridiculous, it's another thing to do that and then present an opinion more worthy of ridicule.

I assume that was his point... If you're going to say that something is fetishistic just by being portrayed then the other examples are equally valid.

 

[Kegg]

I assume that was his point... If you're going to say that something is fetishistic just by being portrayed then the other examples are equally valid.

It doesn't hold up considering that the observation Temis made isn't unique to Dollhouse, so it's a perfectly legitimate criticism.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

I assume that was his point... If you're going to say that something is fetishistic just by being portrayed then the other examples are equally valid.

It doesn't hold up considering that the observation Temis made isn't unique to Dollhouse, so it's a perfectly legitimate criticism.

I don't see it. Yes he has female characters that get hurt, they are also strong characters, yes he has female characters who get helped out by men, but they're not weak willed and only helped by men, to pretend anyone, man or woman, doesn't need help from time to time, and never gets hurt is just stupid.

It's like the people who scream gay agenda, or daddy issues at Russell T Davis for Doctor Who, Sarah Jane and Torchwood. Sometimes people see what they want to see, or read too deeply in to things.

 

[Kegg]

I don't see it. Yes he has female characters that get hurt, they are also strong characters,

This is pretty much it. If 2, then 1, and also:

yes he has female characters who get helped out by men,

To follow. Nobody's being terribly original by pointing this out, least of all me.

Now, the debate rages ever on about Whedon's feminist credentials, but labelling the other side of the debate as ridiculous and then proceeding to paint a Whedon series in such a dry manner that one would believe sex never entered the intent of the execution is a tad excessive even for a devoted Whedonite.

Sometimes people see what they want to see, or read too deeply in to things.

I'd be reluctant to call myself a feminist, but even I am a little irked by it. I simply chalk it up to people having different fetish needs than me, mostly, which I'm fine with.