FOX Renews "Dollhouse"

I'm really excited, and surprised, by this. "Dollhouse" is dark, thought-provoking, and frequently downright disturbing. And, in the course of a 12-episode first season, it didn't hit its stride till halfway through. It was buried on Friday nights, paired first with "Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles", a show I liked a lot but one that suffered a sophomore slump mid-season, and then with the already-cancelled "Prison Break".

But, as Maureen Ryan points out, the TV world has changed.

More...

Could the tyranny of the Nielsen overnight ratings be over? If a network like Fox, which is not known for its sentiment and softness, renews a show like "Dollhouse," the paradigm has surely shifted.

Fox didn't renew "Dollhouse" because the show's fans would have been sad about the Joss Whedon show's untimely death. Fox doesn't care about how viewers feel (you saw "Moment of Truth," right?). No, Fox renewed "Dollhouse" because it thinks it can make money off the project -- enough to keep the enterprise profitable.

Fans have always been passionate about their favorite shows, but now they have far more ways to show it. Viewer passion translates to increased viewing in all these different arenas, which ultimately translates into more money in the pockets of the media companies.

The lesson the networks should learn from this new paradigm: Take chances.


The campaign to renew "Dollhouse" probably wouldn't have caught fire had Whedon never been allowed to make the weird, unsettling, unexpectedly moving and complex show that he ultimately came up with in the second half of "Dollhouse's" season. When shows are given time to develop, when they're allowed to be different, when they're allowed to be ambitious and strange and challenging -- all that can lead to the kind of fan passion that we're talking about here.

"Dollhouse" pulled big audiences via DVR and online viewing, and pre-orders of the season 1 DVD have been very strong (it's currently #9 in Amazon's sales rankings of TV box sets). Viewers today aren't limited to the ones who can sit down in front of their TVs each Friday night 9/8 central. And a good thing too; most of the cool people are out doing fun stuff while I'm at home glued to the tube. I wouldn't want them to miss out. :)

From what I'm reading, I can glean that FOX expects reduced costs and a new creative direction for the second season. I have a tiny, niggling fear that the show will develop "Murder One" syndrome, retreating from the absorbing arc of the last six episodes back to "assignment of the week" episodes in order to attract more casual viewers. I really, really hope that doesn't happen. Joss Whedon is a consummate storyteller, and he and his writers excel at bringing fascinating characters to the screen and letting us watch them grow. More of that, please!

And big thanks to FOX for taking another chance on this show.

Andy Hallett Dies

Thirty-three is too young. Andy played Lorne, the green singing demon with a heart of gold on Angel. He died after a five-year battle with heart disease.

I feel so badly for his family and friends. The news report says his dad was with him when he died. It's just not the natural order of things for parents to bury their children.

Rest in peace, Andy.

via Whedonesque

Dollhouse was...

not very good. I don't even know what else to say. If it was anyone but Whedon, I wouldn't be giving this show a second chance.

And for as much as I loved Dushku as Faith, the only sense of a real actor in the entire show was Harry Lennix. Everyone else was just being a pretty face.

Smile!

Prop 8: The Musical

Clever lyrics, a message of inclusion (from Jesus himself!), and Neil Patrick Harris -- what more could we ask?



H/T Birmingham Blues reader (and brother-in-law) Tony, who sent me this link from the Los Angeles Times. The first comment cracked me up:

This video is actually blasphemous to Christians and will change no minds, imo - in fact, it will just backfire. It shows typical Hollywood irreverance and misunderstanding of Christianity. Jack Black as Jesus is really bad.

Really? I didn't know one could blaspheme a fellow human. I thought that was reserved for the higher beings. Methinks someone is getting above himself. And Jack Black as Jesus actually reflects the Gospel message of love. What a concept!

****

Whedonverse connections: NPH, of course, and Adam Shankman. And there may be others that I missed. :)

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

If you're a Joss Whedon fan in need of a musical fix, or even if you're not, go watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day, and Nathan Fillion. Acts I and II here, Act III coming on Saturday.

Moderator, Unlock This Post at Once

XKCD does Wikipedia:



The cartoon is funny...but the sequel is fucking hilarious. Just how meta can meta get?

Hat tip: The Dork Monger.

(In other geek-related news, I really hope this guy wins.)

Totally the most important post of the week

Joss Whedon writes about Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along:

ONE WEEK ONLY! AN INTERNET MINISERIES EVENT!

"Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog" will be streamed, LIVE (that part’s not true), FREE (sadly, that part is) right on Drhorrible.com, in mid-July. Specifically:

ACT ONE (Wheee!) will go up Tuesday July 15th.

ACT TWO (OMG!) will go up Thursday July 17th.

ACT THREE (Denouement!) will go up Saturday July 19th.

Read it all! And sing along!

Deborah and Roberta on Whedonesque

Their Mad Men blog, Basket of Kisses, gets a mention. Excellent!

Vampire Slayer Saves Reporter's Soul

NPR's Jamie Tarabay says Buffy DVDs helped to keep her sane during her time reporting on the Iraq War from Baghdad. If you're a fan, you'll likely nod your head in understanding -- and quote the dialogue along with the audio clips from the show. If you've always wondered what all the fuss was about, this will help explain it. Give it a listen.

via Whedonesque

Monday non-movie review

I didn't actually watch any movies this week. I know, right? Anyway, here's some reviews of some other stuff I've been doing.

Arthur and I have been re-watching Angel on DVD. His homework schedule has been light for the first time since entering high school, so I suspended my Netflix account for a month and we've been spending "family time" watching 1 or 2 episodes a night, and are currently up to episode 19 (of 22) of season 2.

I got on board late with Buffy and Angel, watching Buffy in reruns after it was all over, and starting Angel reruns from the pilot while season 4 was still in prime time. I fell in love with Angel right away, and really thought it was better than Buffy. On re-viewing, I can see why some people never got bit by the Angel bug. Season 1 is choppy and inconsistent. Some of the episodes are outstanding, but overall, the show struggles to find a voice. In episode 18, though, Faith is brought in. What works is that Faith epitomizes what becomes Angel's unique voice: The gray area of redemption.

While Buffy battles evil and works to draw a line in the sand, with her always on one side and evil always on the other, Angel is about the fluidity of the line and the place of individuals on either side of it. Angel is a vampire with a soul. Faith is a slayer gone evil. Both can be redeemed. Angel is about regret, remorse, atonement, and vengeance. That last is the tricky one, as season 2 progresses, Angel becomes more interested in fighting the enemy (Wolfram & Hart) than saving souls, and this is all it takes to push him dangerously close to switching sides.

Watching a television series is making me very conscious of the craft of writing. Seeing how a bit of dialogue is inserted for exposition; when it works, when it doesn't work. There are scenes that are stiff, there are people being told things they already know. Nonetheless, I stand by my contention that Angel is one of the best things ever televised.

Angel: After the Fall is a "season 6" continuation comic book. Despite Joss Whedon's hand in the plotting, I'm just about ready to give it up. The premise is that the culmination of the grand cliff-hanger battle that ended season 5 was the transporting of the entire city of LA into Hell. The hellish illustration is murky and hard to follow. Characters from time to time shine through, but there's too much going on. Hell is a busy place; it's hard to get a feel for what's important when there are SO MANY demons and so much muck and so much RED.

Duma Key is Stephen King's latest, and for regular reader of King's work, it is especially remarkable. I'm not a King fanatic, but I've read many of his books, and as far as I know, this is the first one written in a first person voice. It's a remarkable change for a writer of fifty or so books, and it brings a new sensibility to the pages.

Edgar Freemantle is simply nothing like a King character. He's something like King—being a middle-aged man recovering from a body-crushing injury—but his voice has never before appeared in a King book. He's wealthy, down to earth, direct, and confused. He speaks of his pain, his marriage, his daughters, and the growing mystery surrounding his time on Duma Key in an intimate and personal way. His new friend Wireman, his neighbor on Duma Key, is perhaps a more typical and stylized King character, but the friendship has a unique feeling.

Edgar, a construction company owner, was crushed by a crane. He has lost an arm, has a brain injury, and is rehabbing a crushed hip. He has rented a house on an isolated Florida Key to recover and paint. Once there, he gradually learns that there may be a supernatural reason that the prime real estate of Duma Key is relatively uninhabited, and that his own injury may have a supernatural component. Well, we expect this of King, but the horror is not the focus of the novel; the characters are.

The horror side of the plot bears a definite similarity to The Shining; the confluence of psychic people, a violent past, and an isolated location, but that part of the book is not nearly as important as the characters. This is a book about people.

I wrote an extensive review (seriously, 2000 words—what was I thinking?) of The Bond Code by Philip Gardiner at my James Bond site. The book is about the occult influences on Ian Fleming and James Bond. You might be interested.

(Hellish, yet angelic, cross-post)

First, the Bad News:

It's on Fox. And we know what that means.

Now for the good news:

It's a great day for fans who are looking forward to Joss Whedon's new FOX series, Dollhouse. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator's latest foray into television is about a girl named Echo, played by Eliza Dushku, who is part of an elite group of people known as "dolls." These dolls are humans who have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas, making them the perfect undercover operatives for dangerous assignments.

It was previously announced that actors such as Olivia Williams and Tahmoh Penikett (Battlestar Galactica) would be in the cast, and now two more familiar names have been announced for prominent roles: Harry Lennix (24) and former Angel actress Amy Acker....

Acker, who played Fred/Illyria on Angel and also had a villainous role in the final season of Alias, will play Dr. Claire Saunders. Saunders is the smart yet sad caretaker of the dolls who may have a crush on a nerdy programmer in the office. This is more of a recurring role, so Acker may not appear in the pilot episode of the series.

I knew Joss and Eliza were doing a project, but...Amy Acker! Can I just say: squeal!

Also, the always-wonderful Olivia Williams.

There's also a guy in the cast named Enver Gjokaj, which makes this possibly the first-ever TV series with two Albanian-Americans in leading roles.

First March of the Mutant Enemy

This is nearly a month old, but the WGA strike is still on...and since we're talking about the Whedonverse anyway...here's Mutant Enemy day on the picket line:

Lots of familiar faces there (besides Joss): Nathan Fillion, Jane Espenson, Ron Glass, the guy who plays Nishka...and many more. And yes, it's one more touching reminder that Joss Whedon really does have the best fans.

Remember: the AMPTP is The Alliance. Or maybe Wolfram & Hart.

(Part 2 is also fun.)

A Little Fangirl Fun

Neil the Ethical Werewolf has posted the GOP primary field and equivalent Buffy villains. I'm particularly amused by Fred Thompson as The Judge and Ron Paul as Moloch the Corrupter. Neil equates Rudy Giuliani with Angelus, which works if you see Rudy as pure evil and loving every minute of it, but a couple of commenters point out that he looks quite similar to the Gentlemen in Hush. Check it out (and be sure to read the comments; the whole thing is a hoot).

She Would Sure Be a Better Governor Than That Other Guy

I'm probably the last person in the western world to be aware of this, but apparently next January there's a TV series designed expressly for those of us who'd love to see Summer Glau kick some more ass. I'm naturally dubious about anything on broadcast television (and it's Fox, so if it's any good they'll just cancel it), but the trailer (and user comments) look promising. Lena Headey looks good in it, too (best known as Blanche Glover in Possession). But mainly: Summer Glau kicking ass. What more do you need?

(Hat tip, embarrassingly enough, to Jonah Goldberg, who is dubious--which is yet another recommendation.)

Whedon on Miranda

So I haven't watched my winsome Serenity DVD straight through yet, but I did watch with the new commentary track on. Whedon did a cool thing, which was to watch his original commentary track before recording the new one so that he was sure not to repeat himself.

Anyway, the commentary was good, except that with these group commentaries, you can't always tell who's talking. Adam Baldwin is especially tricky because a Firefly fan is used to his accent, and that's not real, so he sounds nothing like Jayne.

Anyway, Joss was saying that the original script was 190 pages, and he had to get it down to 120, and Nathan Fillion asked him what was in the 190 page version (Ron Glass said "Me! Me!") and Joss said "Basically, all of Season Two" and one of the guys asked "What about the second half of Season One?" And Joss said, "Good point! But no, I always pictured Miranda as being at the end of Season Two."

Which is, like, amazing to me.

I have to say, when I saw the movie (and I guess I shouldn't spoil it by saying what Miranda is or anything), I didn't have the sense that Miranda was planned as the solution to certain series mysteries. It felt like it was the movie version. So I'm stunned to learn that, indeed, the answers to so many of our questions were intended to be found there all along.

Probably the coolest tidbit on the commentary. My respect for Whedon just grows and grows.

(Time for some thrilling cross-posts)

The Sopranos Finale

The thousands of imaginary people who regularly ask for my opinion on one issue or another are now demanding to know what I thought of the Sopranos finale, which apparently a lot of people hated.
I thought it was the perfect ending: Tony is a more effective sociopath, thanks to therapy; Meadow is joining the dark side and A. J. is bought out of his incoherent idealism with a job in the movie industry; Carmela, of course, has been fully complicit for a long time, to the point that many were speculating about her taking over the business after Tony; and the rest of their lives will be exactly like the last five minutes, full of tension and dread, never knowing which of several swords of Damocles might happen to fall at any given moment.

Jody reminded me of another movie with a similar ending (that similarly divided viewers): Limbo, John Sayles' slice of life in Alaska. A plane approaches; the people on board are coming either to rescue or to kill our protagonists. The screen goes white before we find out which it is. It's frustrating, yes, but that's the point: what matters is not the result but the choice they make in that moment.

Which of course takes us back to TV land, and another series finale. The latter half of Angel's final season is rushed, the plotlines unduly accelerated, a result of its untimely cancellation. The final episode, though, is great...and the ending is perfect: the surviving heroes in an alley, about to do battle with an army of demons. The result isn't what matters; it's the battle, the act of doing battle, that's the point. It's about the choices.

Which is what Angel was always about. The whole series is summed up in a bit of dialogue from the final episode, an exchange between Gunn and Anne¹:

GUNN: What if I told you it doesn't help? What would you do if you found out that none of it matters? That it's all controlled by forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive, and they will never let it get better down here. What would you do?

ANNE: I'd get this truck packed before the new stuff gets here. Wanna give me a hand?

And The Sopranos, too, is about choices--destructive, life-shattering, selfish, soul-killing choices, the flip side of Angel, but choices nonetheless. (I can hear Dr. Melfi saying "we make choices".) And so it ends as it had to end, with the characters having made their choices; it's not about the result. The sardonic vision of a dysfunctional family finally united by their limitless corruption--it's a nice touch, a grotesque parody of a happy ending, but it's not the ending that matters. They die, they live with it, it's all beside the point. What matters is the choices they made.


¹Formerly Lily, formerly Chanterelle; a character who made stunningly foolish choices early on, who with Buffy's help and by Buffy's example found the strength to deal with life, who now devotes her life to helping kids who are in the kind of trouble she was in.

Serenity Named Best Sci-Fi Movie in SFX Poll

[Hi! This is Kathy from Birmingham Blues. Thanks to Tom for inviting me to post here. Although I usually focus on politics, I thought I'd start off with the Whedonverse.]

This is great news to a big ol' Joss Whedon fan like me. I loved Serenity, although I loved Firefly even more. And Buffy even more than that.

Speaking of Buffy, the Season Eight comic is now available. I'm not sure I want to read it, since I have my very own concept of the series aftermath. Knowing Joss's penchant for not-so-happy endings, I think I might like mine better.

Hat tip to Chet, from whom I pretty much stole this post. And, of course, crossbow-posted at Birmingham Blues.

The Party of Gaknar

I'll admit it: reports of Rove's optimism have me spooked. I can't help it. I'm a Democrat; I expect the worst.

Which is I'm so glad to see Josh Marshall provide a little perspective:

Why is Karl Rove so confident? What does he know that the Dems and the pundit-predictors don't?

The answer is really, really simple: nothing. There's not anything he knows. In fact, he's not even confident. It's a bluff.

Marshall goes on to tell a story from 2000 that illustrates what Rove is trying to do now:

Conventional logic would have dictated sending Bush to swing states like Florida....[Rove] chose instead to send Bush to California and New Jersey -- states Bush could only have any hope of winning in a blow-out....Rove figured that he could accomplish more through convincing mainly the press, but also activists and even highly-plugged voters, that Bush was going to win big than he would by sending his guy into a state like Florida for some last minute retail politicking.

It's the bandwagon effect. Psyche out the other side. Act like you're winning and you'll charge up your activists/voters and demoralize the folks on the other side. Mainly, get the press to believe your hype and they'll do the charging up and demoralizing for you. As it happened, it was a really dumb decision in 2000. If not for faulty ballots and election stealing, Bush would have lost Florida and the presidency.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Literally. Fear is all they have.

The big kind of fear--the fear that triggers latent authoritarianism--we can fight only in limited ways. The other kind of fear, though--the demoralizing fear Rove seeks to induce in us--is entirely within our control. As the election approaches, we need to keep in mind Marshall's admonition...or better yet, just remember two words:

Actual size.

[That's all, folks]

Spread the Serenity Love

Via SAP and Shakespeare's Sister, respectively, comes news of two Serenity-related events.

First, June 23 is Serenity Day--a day on which fans all over plan to buy Serenity to demonstrate to Universal the purchasing power of the Browncoats (the goal, of course, is to get them to greenlight a sequel). Own it already? No problem; donate it to charity, send it to the troops, use it to convert a friend, or whatever.

Meanwhile, there's going to be a whole bunch of benefit screenings of Serenity, with the proceeds going to Equality Now (Joss Whedon's favorite charity). It's a lot of fun in a very good cause.

[Cross-posted at Property of a Lady]

[That's all, folks]