Post by Gin on Jan 25, 2009 15:24:36 GMT 1
from Denofgeek.com
A look at the promise and science of the new Joss Whedon series, premiering in February...
Joss Whedon’s imminent new series concerns operatives so secret that even they don’t know what they’re up to. In the illegal federal operation known as the ’Dollhouse’, agents are imprinted with cognitive and muscle-memories adapted to their latest mission, and conclude their assignments by being wiped of any recollection of them. The series centres on Echo (Eliza Dushku), a ’doll’ or ’active’ who begins to attain self-awareness, and (presumably) to learn from her experiences in some way that the mind-wiping process should technically render impossible.
Fiction about amnesia and disassociation strikes a predictably popular chord with the youth demographic unsure about its own identity or place in the world, but the fascination transcends demographics: the notion of rearranging, erasing or artificially augmenting our own memories is the stuff of both fantasy and nightmare, from Neo’s suddenly ’knowing’ Kung-Fu after a dose of Tank’s skill-stacks in The Matrix, to the instinctive horror of forgetting crucial experiences, as with the numerous victims of the ’neural neutraliser’ in the Men In Black movies.
Altering memories via technology remains in the realm of science-fiction; neuroscience is still obtaining early theories from phenomena that it barely understands. Baffling synergies emerge from the hard facts, such as the damaged brain’s capacity to restore cognitive memory from areas of the brain which are not associated with it.
In order to develop the science-fictional tools needed to manipulate memory, science needs to individuate the relationship between cells and memory. The day that the current mystical veil on memory is lifted and thoughts finally become classified as ’tissue’ will be a politically problematic one at best. At worst it will be an ideological and ethical earthquake.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that this moment of revelation is coming up: the research of psychoneuroimmunologist Dr. Paul Pearsall provides a strong indication that memory is meat - unless, of course, one wishes to interpret his findings in a supernatural or spiritual sense.
Certainly Pearsall’s various studied case-histories of transplant patients provide creepy moments to match the plot set-ups of schlock horror such as The Eye (2007), or the Michael Caine film The Hand (1981); a gay woman in her late twenties receives the heart of a nineteen year-old heterosexual vegetarian girl and gives up meat...and women; an 18 year-old boy writes a poem about ’giving his heart’ to ’Danny’, and the young woman (called ’Danielle’) who receives his heart in a transplant is able to finish the lyrics before they are completely read out to her the first time; a middle-aged white man receives the heart of a young black man, and inherits his donor’s love of classical music. The donors were anonymous in these cases, these facts assembled instead by research. The stories are numerous, and if true either bespeak proof of a supernatural world...or evidence that our very memories can be cut out of us with a scalpel, and are therefore ultimately subject to science, as in Dollhouse.
This is not to say that your ’mojo’ can be removed in the style of an Austin Powers movie, any more than your DNA can be ’removed’ with a mouth-swab. Even putting aside the notion of genetic memory, there’s a lot of evidence that nature, ever a pessimist, stores memories in more than one place in the brain, and Dr. Pearsall’s transplant anecdotes - which concern the transfer of hearts rather than brains - posit the possibility that memories may be ’backed up’ in the most basic proteins of our bodies.
One theory of cellular memory suggests that the neuropeptides thought unique to the brain may in fact permeate all the cells of our bodies, and most particularly the heart, which has such a high quantity of peptides as to present a particularly fruitful area for study. If there should turn out to be a ’special’ relationship between the two organs, we’re all going to feel pretty silly for abandoning that romantic conceit as children...
In terms of SF tech, nothing qualifies more as a predecessor to Dollhouse than Gerry Anderson’s final ’Supermarionation’ series Joe 90. Here the young adopted son of a brilliant scientist receives implants of brain patterns from highly specialised personnel in order to undertake special-agent missions for one of Anderson’s typically global peace-keeping forces, the World Intelligence Network. The ’Big Rat’ (Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer) was the very psychedelic spinning machine that not only made the transference process visual but provided a golden excuse to re-run stock shots each episode. Joe himself kept a continuous memory, unlike the ’dolls’ in Whedon’s series, and never seemed to have any unwarranted side effects, such as an urge to ogle centrefolds or start smoking (God knows, everyone else did in Gerry Anderson shows). On the other hand Joe needed some nasty-looking souped-up NHS specs in order to stay in touch with the implanted abilities.
I suspect that Whedon’s ’dolls’ will have rather more emotional points-of-vulnerability, with a more ambiguous treatment of the source brain-patterns that our heroes will receive in the show; the difficulty in sifting practical abilities from emotional impressions and non-essential memories when sourcing implantable material is bound to emerge. In yet another real-life transplant case, a young girl who had never experienced any emotional problems led police to the killers of the donor of her new heart, after being plagued by nightmares about being murdered. To what extent, then, will the living templates of Dollhouse adopt more than just the skillset of their donor minds...?
The character without memory is instantly sympathetic, as they can hide so little from us, and we have seen the narrative dynamic before in Angelheart, Total Recall, Memento, Resident Evil, Dark City, Regarding Henry and many others - and in many cases, the ultimate truth at the end of amnesia was an ugly one. Will Echo find out that she was once Faith?
Though he only went through the process once, Peter Weller in Robocop (1987) is another Dollhouse analogue, and the emotional dynamic of Paul Verhoeven’s film centred on Murphy’s struggle to re-invent himself with the tatters of his old personality, much as cynical megacorp OCP had reinvented his body with cybernetic technology. Robocop’s reply when asked his name by the head of OCP at the movie’s end is one of the big cheer moments of the dehumanising, yuppified 1980s ("Murphy!"), and Eliza Dushku’s search for ’integration’ is surely set to be the emotional heart of Dollhouse. If we’re lucky, there’ll also be a ton of good one-liners on the journey there.
’Integration’ describes the elusive stage in the treatment of multiple-personality disorder where the patient combines the various traits of their ’cast of characters’ into one cohesive and continuous personality, an ascension out of the darkness and confusion of insanity into the life-challenges that the patient had been fleeing before. In terms of the general culture of Whedon’s target audience, the ’hook’ in Dollhouse is surely the struggle to be accepted (and presumably appreciated) for who one really is; people have the right to reinvent themselves, but doing so on an ad hoc and daily basis is chaos and self-negation.
But that’s a mission-statement aimed at broader demographics than those which likely interest Joss Whedon. I can’t help but feel that there’s a reason the show is called Dollhouse and not Toy House. I’m not convinced by the inclusion of the male ’doll’ Victor (Enver Gjokaj); outnumbered by his two female colleagues (Dushku and ’Sierra’, played by Dichen Lachman), this sounds like the Token Guy, Dollhouse’s own ogleable Angel, there to provide balance and backdrop to another Whedon exploration into the female psyche, the fascination - if not obsession - that threads his career. Guys will tune in for Dushku as they did for both her and Sarah-Michelle Gellar in Buffy, but Dollhouse is x-chromosome all down the line, from the evidence of the set-up.
Hey, sounds good to me.
Dollhouse premieres February 13, 2009 on Fox.
from Fanpop.com
We’ve all spent months being told why we should worry about Dollhouse, but here are some good reasons we shouldn’t.
1. Joss’ respect for his fans.
Joss has always been very candid with his fans. He tells us things other writers/producers wouldn’t. When he says he thinks the show has a shot and is on the right track, history indicates he has earned the benefit of the doubt.
2. Joss’ respect for his work.
One source of the fan-freak outs is the knowledge that Fox has been making some ’suggestions’ to Joss about things like the tone of the series. I believe in the level of care Joss puts into his work. Do you really think he would make a change that would ruin the show?
3. Fox’s bad reputation.
As much as we all like to call them stupid (they have cancelled some amazing shows) Fox is run by business people. And having the rep as the network that cancels shows after 1 season is very bad for business. I know of many people who have made it clear that if this show isn’t treated fairly they will never watch Fox again. And I’m pretty sure they know it too. Joss has said they have realised that sci-fi doesn’t usually grab an immediate audience. Essentially telling a show’s creator that they understand the show wont be a huge success for a while is a big swing in attitude for them.
4. Reviews of the pilot.
Reviews have been ok. Seemingly an even mix of compliments and doubts. The thing is, as much as I love everything Joss writes, pilots aren’t his strong point. Do you know anyone whose favourite episodes of Buffy are the first few? or the first few of Angel? when he has this kind of story to tell the first episode is never his best. I’ve also found that I never appreciate the first episode of a Joss show till I’ve seen the next few. Once you know more about the characters, once it’s not all explaining the mythology of the show, his pilots start to shine. So having complimentary reviews about what will probably be the worst episode he writes is a fantastic sign. (I say ’worst’ in comparison to what he’ll write after that. It will, of course, still rock.)
5. Terminator: Sarah Connor chronicles.
Not only is that show a sign of Fox’s less trigger happy attitude (Hey, a sci-fi that made it to a 2nd season) but I really feel there will be some Dollhouse/T:SCC fan solidarity. Not only are they fans of a show that’s in the sci-fi genre featuring a lot of strong female characters (so they are all clearly potential Joss fans) but they know what it’s like to be the Fox show everyone thinks is next for the chop. Though people feared the friday slot, I actually think this pairing is going to reel in fans we may not have otherwise had.
6. Because we’re freaking people the heck out!
seriously, would you want to give a chance to a show that all the fans were preparing eulogies for before it even started?
Finally, the most important reason to me. Because this is great. After all this time we have another Joss show. Are you really going to enjoy watching it if all the time you’re watching you’re subconsciously waiting for it to get axed? We’re about to have shiny new Joss work! This isn’t a time for a case of the angries, this is a time for a Numfar style dance of joy!
from Tvsquad.com
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding Joss Whedon’s new television brainchild, particularly since it became slated for Friday nights (it premieres on Feb. 13 at 9 PM ET). It’s difficult to judge a Joss Whedon show by a single episode since the creator relies so much on serialized storytelling, so let’s start with the facts.
Joss Whedon is a versatile writer and has no difficulty in producing shows that nobody expects. For example, Firefly was nothing like Buffy. Similarly, Dollhouse is very different than Whedon’s previous television ventures. This could be why Fox relegated it to Fridays. Perhaps they fear change.
Eliza Dushku plays Echo, who is a (seemingly unwilling) participant at a location in Los Angeles code-named "The Dollhouse" (Joss has learned a lesson since his Buffy and Angel days and never names a program after a character on it). The Dollhouse is an illegal facility, but it survives and thrives because the people behind it and the people that use its services are too powerful to be touched by the law.
Each participant is called a Doll or an Active. The Actives can be programmed with different personalities which fulfill specific needs for The Dollhouse’s clients. Those needs could be personal or professional. The first episode is a psychological thriller and not a gun-fest or fight-fest like his previous works. The pilot teaches the viewer about the life of Echo. We get a sense of who she is, and who she isn’t. In this instance, she is programmed with the personality of a hostage negotiator after a wealthy man’s daughter is kidnapped.
Apparently, the process in becoming an Active is painful, as we witness a woman being initiated into the program during the course of the episode. It certainly brings into question whether the Actives are there voluntarily. During the episode, Echo begins to break her programming which undoubtedly foreshadows upcoming stories.
We also learn what Dollhouse is and the main players behind it. We meet Adelle DeWitt (played by Olivia Williams), who runs the place; Topher Brink (Fran Kranz), an amoral nerd who runs the software that keeps the Actives programmed; and Boyd Langton (Henry Lennix, whom I recognized from the Matrix sequels), a former law-enforcement officer who now works for The Dollhouse as Echo’s "handler" (a position that entails both supervision to prevent deviation from her programming and bodyguarding her). Whedon-alum Amy Acker also makes an appearance on the show as a facility doctor with a scarred face.
Sub-plots abound within the show. Tahmoh Penikett (Helo from Battlestar Galactica) plays an FBI agent obsessed with finding The Dollhouse. He seems to have an unhealthy infatuation with Echo. Future episodes will probably explain why.
The show has a strong cast and Eliza Dushku is terrific in her role. The Dollhouse set reminds me a bit of the Wolfram and Hart offices from Angel.
The episode was okay as a stand-alone, but not great. As mentioned, I don’t think anybody should judge a Joss Whedon production by the first episode. Whedon weaves an intricate web and it usually takes a few episodes to get involved. I’m looking forward to the journey.
from Salon.com
Time to program your DVRs! From new shows like "Dollhouse" and "The United States of Tara" to countless returning favorites, an embarrassment of mid-season riches is upon us!
It takes about a week to adjust to being on vacation. At first, the mind can’t relax. It makes lists. It gets fussy over dinner, or obsesses over college savings plans. By the middle of the second week, the mind finally loosens up. That’s when you find yourself flipping through catalogs for hours, or picking lint off your sweater in a semi-hypnotic state, until you forget who you are, where you are and what you were doing.
In this cruel modern world, just as the stress of your work life finally subsides, just as you start to feel happy and numb like an overfed donkey, it’s time to get back to work. I need four weeks of vacation time, minimum! I want to wander aimlessly, nibbling on clover, in a daze. Instead, just as I get the laundry done and sit down to read a book, my holiday break is over.
And it takes about two weeks to adjust to being back at work. I tried to explain this to my husband yesterday: The mind doesn’t want to do a job. The mind wants to go to the mall and gaze at the intricate, almost balletic movements of the hot-dog-rolling machine at Orange Julius. The mind wants to take a nap. The mind wants a doughnut.
My husband had to run. He had stuff to do. The mind felt jilted. But the mind thought that some stale gingerbread cookies might take the mind’s mind off how jilted it felt.
Brand new menu!
But don’t feel too bad, my fellow struggling, slow donkey friends, because the winter season of television is upon us, and it’s about 50 trillion times more exciting than the fall television season was.
Why do they hold out on us like this? Network executives should make it official and shift all the best shows to January, and then I can spend September and October writing rambling essays about napping and fat donkeys and really good cheese instead of making elaborate charts detailing all of the crappy shows none of us want to watch anyway, because they suck ass. (After a long-but-not-long-enough vacation, the mind is drawn to vulgarity — and things that are filled with custard.)
A bunch of new shows are about to flicker onto your TV screens in the coming weeks, shows that are so fresh and delectable, they might as well be filled with custard. My top three favorites so far? I’m so glad you asked.
1) Fox’s "Lie to Me" (Premieres 9 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 21) Starring Tim Roth as a "deception detection" specialist, this show is like a mix between CBS’s "The Mentalist" and Fox’s "House": There are lots of creepy, "How did he know that?" expert moments, just as cheesy and delicious as they are in Simon Baker’s hands, but with an edge. Unlike blue-eyed Baker, who’s soft and pretty and truly belongs among the filtered lenses and ample-breasted ghost-soothers of CBS, Roth is sort of beady-eyed and unlikable — you know, how you’d imagine a Fox executive might look, if you were barreling toward him in your car at night. Something tells us that Roth’s character, Cal Lightman, has seen more than his fair share of big, fat lies and the lying liars who tell them. But Lightman doesn’t wallow like Hugh Laurie’s Dr. Gregory House does. No way, he’s more chipper than that. Plus, he has a sexy sidekick (Kelli Williams from "The Practice") and some sexy underlings who flirt with him and each other — you know, anything to keep the whole picture funny but edgy, upbeat but heavy. Think "Bones." Think "Fringe." This is the signature flavor of Fox: salty, greasy goodness in every bite, and no one can eat just one. This network knows how to get us hooked. Which leads us to my second favorite new, exciting show of the winter season ...
2) Fox’s "Dollhouse" (Premieres 9 p.m. Friday, Feb. 13) Yes, we’ve all been waiting for Joss Whedon’s new sci-fi drama, about a bunch of hot people who have their memories erased so that they can act as anonymous agents for a high-end firm that provides fantasy dates, secret missions of various kinds, hostage negotiations ... It’s not entirely clear what goes down at the Dollhouse or who runs it or how they got started or whether they’re good or evil, and that, my dear, is the custard filling in this big, sugary doughnut of a drama. If you take off the rose-colored, Joss Whedon-loving glasses, of course, you’ll notice that the first episode of "Dollhouse" is a little bit dorky and uneven at times. But Eliza Dushku fills that "Buffy"-esque dazed-but-sharp babe quotient nicely, and I guarantee that after the first episode, you’ll want to see more, more, more, more, as soon as you can. Personally, I can’t wait for this show to kick into high gear. Weird, witty, smart, suspenseful, intense? This is what we spent the fall TV season hungering for. That, and something that might actually make us laugh, which brings us to my favorite of them all ...
3) Showtime’s "The United States of Tara" (10 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 18) Yes, it’s a good old-fashioned multiple-personality dramedy starring Toni Collette and John Corbett, written by indie wunderkind/stripper scribe, Diablo Cody, she of the whimsically made-up name and the funky hairdos and the gloriously quirky personal style, the likes of which Hollywood shuns (at first), then clings to like a big, milky, life-giving breast. As bored as we all are with Cody’s plucky rise to greatness, this woman does have a fiercely original voice and is far from a flash in the Sundance-welded pan. "The United States of Tara" takes a nearly ridiculous premise (Mom with debilitating personality disorder tries to live a normal life off her mind-numbing meds, forcing her family to interact with three incredibly demanding "alternate" personalities) and spins it into comedic gold. Of course, the whole thing might be cringe-inducingly awful without Toni Collette, who is just outrageously, breathtakingly good at playing four different characters wrapped into one. On top of that, the teenage daughter has great comic timing (how rare is that?), the teenage son is also wickedly funny, Rosemarie DeWitt is — well, she’s Rosemarie DeWitt, she’s the greatest (Go see "Rachel Getting Married" if you haven’t yet). John Corbett (as Tara’s husband) is low-key and bland as always, only in this setting, he’s the perfect foil for Tara’s three-ring circus. I’ll write more about this one next week, but in the meantime, program your DVR. You can’t miss it.
Ah, three promising new shows. Can you believe it? It’s enough to wake you from that post-holiday stupor once and for all.
Welcome back-tica, Galactica!
But those three are just the tip of the iceberg, what with so many returning favorites flying at us in a matter of days: "24" (8 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 11, on Fox), "Damages" (10 p.m. Wednesdays on FX), "Friday Night Lights" (9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16, on NBC),"Battlestar Galactica" (10 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16, on Sci Fi), "Big Love" (9 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 18, on HBO) and "Flight of the Conchords" (10 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 18, on HBO). How will we juggle them all?
After waiting a year and a half, the new season of "24" would excite me even if Jack Bauer sat down and ate a ham sandwich for the first hour, then called a few old friends on his cellphone while window shopping for pocket-size explosives and torture devices during the second. Instead, Jack is pulled into the usual web of terrorist manipulations and high-level conspiracies. The first four hours of the "24" premiere offer the usual Mister Toad’s Wild Ride of absurd, spectacular and goofy twists and turns, of course. Just suspend your disbelief from the start (a prerequisite when watching this show) because this season’s big conceit — from the players involved to the nature of Jack’s involvement — is more fantastical than ever. But that’s what we want from "24" — pure, unfettered, neocon fantasy, softened by the addition of a female president who, unlike most presidents to date outside of "The West Wing’s" Jed Bartlet, actually seems a little unnerved by reports of genocide in small African nations.
Onward: I can already strongly recommend "Friday Night Lights," of course, having watched most of the season on DirecTV this past fall. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s definitely worthwhile, a far cry from the melodramatic and repetitive second season.
Meanwhile, the second season of FX’s "Damages" looks even better than the first. (Wrote about it here last week.) And the final 10 episodes of SciFi’s "Battlestar Galactica" are almost guaranteed to range from intense to mind-blowing — the Galacticans have landed on Earth and it’s a crusty, blackened mess with not a single water park or Australian-themed steakhouse left standing. What fresh hell awaits our intrepid, booze-swilling colonists?
Finally, "Big Love," which bored me to tears in its second season, really gains momentum during its third season, with a bunch of unfamiliar new challenges facing Bill and his three wives. It’s always a little tough to get back into this show. "Who are these bad people with their dozens of children and their bad hair, and why should I care?" I find myself wondering. But by the third episode, the new season reaches critical mass, plotwise and emotionally.
Oh, the places we’ll go! At long last, after a dreary, draining fall, there are so many good shows to write about, I can barely tackle them all. But for now, it’s back to bed with a box of custard-filled doughnuts and the first two episodes of A&E’s "The Beast." Who says the holiday spirit can’t live on inside every one of us?
from Time.com
My TiVo may be on life support, but the DVD player still works, and midseason TV is starting to come in fast and furious. Among the screeners I’ve received is a little show by some guy who did something about vampires once. You don’t want to hear anything about it yet, do you? I didn’t think so. Ignore me as I write more after the jump.
OK, a little preface. I’ve watched the Dollhouse episode (given the history of remakes on this show, I don’t know whether I can properly call it the "pilot") once, casually, without taking notes. I reserve the right to change my mind after I’ve watched it and marinated on it more. And I wasn’t crazy about Firefly when it first debuted, in retrospect one of the worse calls of my career.
It was both better and worse than I expected, in different ways. One of my concerns about it was that—given Joss Whedon’s talent for making absorbing serials—the case-of-the-week nature of the show would make it harder to grow attached to. (I’m assuming that anyone who cares at this point knows the premise already, but in case I’m wrong: Eliza Dushku plays Echo, an "Active," which is a person who has agreed to let a secretive organization erase his or her original memories and personality and implant new ones in them for "assignments" involving rich clients.)
Yes, this is certainly Joss Whedon trying to do What People Think Works on Broadcast TV Today—the legendary serial-procedural hybrid. But the first episode—in which Echo is imprinted with a kidnapping-negotiator’s personality to secure the return of a rich man’s abducted daughter—is well enough written to be absorbing. Writing a crime hour doesn’t seem like Whedon’s thing, but the episode is tight, suspenseful, with intriguing psychological twists and flashes of Whedonesque humor.
And the more serial elements of the show seem promising, at least. At the same time, an investigator (Tahmoh Penikett, BSG’s Helo) is looking into the rumored existence of the illegal "Dollhouse" where the Actives are housed. A scene with a skeptical colleague addresses head-on a basic implausibility of the premise: why the hell does a billionaire need to turn to some kind of bizarre sci-fi brianwashing whorehouse to get the perfect date, or the perfect crime investigator, or the perfect whatever, when they can perfectly easily go out and hire one who hasn’t had their personality wiped? His response: when you have everything, you want something more—more exotic, more perfect, more specific. Not so persuasive on the surface, but if the show is well enough done, hopefully we won’t care.
Now the minus. Dollhouse as conceived (a heroine plays a different "person" every week) is less a series concept than an actress’ showcase, a sort of extreme version of an Alias undercover premise. (In fact, the reports of how the show was conceived have said that Dushku essentially broached the idea as a showcase.) And the actress being showcased is Eliza Dushku. Now, I have nothing against Dushku. I thought she was fine on Buffy. But she’s not exactly Toni Collette (who’s playing a multiple-personality case on Showtime’s The United States of Tara, which I have not seen). Watching her inhabit her imprinted "personality"—a tough negotiator with secret vulnerabilities—I did not see her becoming another person. I thought: Oh, look! There’s Eliza Dushku with glasses and her hair in a bun!
If it weren’t for Whedon’s pedigree, I’m not sure I’d be dying to see a second episode. But for me, the main draw now is not seeing Dushku become a different person every week, but getting to see Joss Whedon become a different writer every week.
from Macleans.ca
One reason I’m looking forward to the premiere of Dollhouse, in spite of all the gloomy stories about its production and time slot (and therefore its potential for lasting much longer than Firefly) is that Joss Whedon is the king of a particular type of TV that I love, and that hasn’t been seen much on television lately: the show that is funny and serious at the same time.
Many if not most hour-long dramas have their comic moments, but they are usually bisected into “serious” scenes and “comedy” scenes. Each scene has its own overall tone and mood, and apart from a joke as a treacle-cutter near the end of a serious scene, or an earnest dramatic surprise at the end of a funny scene, you will not see much overlap between the two types of scenes. Even on a show like Mad Men, where the moments of humour are more unexpected and unpredictably placed, the writers won’t usually risk destroying the serious mood of a scene with a joke. What made Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer so unusual was that in its first few seasons it almost did away with the division between drama and comedy, with scenes constantly bouncing back and forth between funny and serious, goofy comedy lines occurring in the middle of very serious scenes. (The movie also had this weird mix of styles, which is why it’s an underrated movie.) The definitive Joss Whedon speech is from a Buffy episode in the second season where Buffy confronts a friend who betrayed her:
I am trying to save you. You are playing in some serious traffic here, do you understand that? You’re going to die, and the only hope you have of surviving this is to get out of this pit right now, and my God, could you have a dorkier outfit?
Buffy eventually lost this wonderfully bizarre mix of styles, particularly after Whedon turned over some of the showrunning duties to Marti Noxon; in the last two or three seasons, most of the episodes were much more clearly divided into scenes with specific, unvarying functions (either a scene that’s supposed to be funny or a scene that’s supposed to be serious, rarely both). You can get a clue to this in the seventh season episode “Conversations With Dead People,” with four plots written by four different writers; only Whedon’s scenes, with Buffy talking to an ex-schoolmate who’s now a vampire, are funny and serious simultaneously, rather than just being one or the other.
Another show that was deservedly famous for a mix of tones and styles was The Sopranos. While that show would not usually inject corny jokes into a serious scene, it would often present us with two ways to read a scene; we’d ask ourselves, is this supposed to be serious or just silly, and we’d realize that it was both. Take the famous scene in the pilot, when Tony Soprano succumbs to his first “panic attack” near the pool while an opera aria is playing. On the DVD commentary, the eternally-sycophantic Peter Bogdanovich says that the scene has an “epic feel.” David Chase corrects him, saying it’s “epic silliness” — and those two words are as good a summary of The Sopranos as I’ve ever heard.
Of course, when we talk about this technique, we’re talking about Irony (not to be confused with Richie Rich’s maid). The two shows I’ve mentioned, Buffy and Sopranos, both had ludicrous premises and were aware of the fact; a lot of the comedy comes from the awareness — the writers’ awareness, and our own — that we’re being asked to get seriously involved in a show about a Valley Girl who fights monsters, or a mob boss getting in touch with his feelings. These shows knew they could sometimes be implausible and ridiculous, and they also knew that there was emotional truth and realism in these ridiculous, implausible stories; we could laugh at a scene and see ourselves in it at the very same moment. You don’t have to do it that way — J.J. Abrams has shown that you can be very successful by taking a ridiculous premise with complete seriousness and making us take it seriously — but it’s a very satisfying, rich mix, if one that’s very hard to achieve.
I don’t see a lot of shows that have that elusive quality — of being serious and ironic all at once — now that Sopranos and Veronica Mars are gone. That other Mars, Life On Mars, has some of it, but even that show seems pretty clear about where the serious leaves off and the funny begins. One reason I was kind of sad to see Boston Legal go, even though it’s a complete mess, is that its messiness came from its attempt to be really silly and really serious at the same time (the problem is that the stuff David E. Kelley thinks is serious is often sillier than the intentionally silly stuff). I’m sure we’ll get others, though, even if Dollhouse doesn’t pan out. These shows are tough to do, but they’re irresistible when they work.
A look at the promise and science of the new Joss Whedon series, premiering in February...
Joss Whedon’s imminent new series concerns operatives so secret that even they don’t know what they’re up to. In the illegal federal operation known as the ’Dollhouse’, agents are imprinted with cognitive and muscle-memories adapted to their latest mission, and conclude their assignments by being wiped of any recollection of them. The series centres on Echo (Eliza Dushku), a ’doll’ or ’active’ who begins to attain self-awareness, and (presumably) to learn from her experiences in some way that the mind-wiping process should technically render impossible.
Fiction about amnesia and disassociation strikes a predictably popular chord with the youth demographic unsure about its own identity or place in the world, but the fascination transcends demographics: the notion of rearranging, erasing or artificially augmenting our own memories is the stuff of both fantasy and nightmare, from Neo’s suddenly ’knowing’ Kung-Fu after a dose of Tank’s skill-stacks in The Matrix, to the instinctive horror of forgetting crucial experiences, as with the numerous victims of the ’neural neutraliser’ in the Men In Black movies.
Altering memories via technology remains in the realm of science-fiction; neuroscience is still obtaining early theories from phenomena that it barely understands. Baffling synergies emerge from the hard facts, such as the damaged brain’s capacity to restore cognitive memory from areas of the brain which are not associated with it.
In order to develop the science-fictional tools needed to manipulate memory, science needs to individuate the relationship between cells and memory. The day that the current mystical veil on memory is lifted and thoughts finally become classified as ’tissue’ will be a politically problematic one at best. At worst it will be an ideological and ethical earthquake.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that this moment of revelation is coming up: the research of psychoneuroimmunologist Dr. Paul Pearsall provides a strong indication that memory is meat - unless, of course, one wishes to interpret his findings in a supernatural or spiritual sense.
Certainly Pearsall’s various studied case-histories of transplant patients provide creepy moments to match the plot set-ups of schlock horror such as The Eye (2007), or the Michael Caine film The Hand (1981); a gay woman in her late twenties receives the heart of a nineteen year-old heterosexual vegetarian girl and gives up meat...and women; an 18 year-old boy writes a poem about ’giving his heart’ to ’Danny’, and the young woman (called ’Danielle’) who receives his heart in a transplant is able to finish the lyrics before they are completely read out to her the first time; a middle-aged white man receives the heart of a young black man, and inherits his donor’s love of classical music. The donors were anonymous in these cases, these facts assembled instead by research. The stories are numerous, and if true either bespeak proof of a supernatural world...or evidence that our very memories can be cut out of us with a scalpel, and are therefore ultimately subject to science, as in Dollhouse.
This is not to say that your ’mojo’ can be removed in the style of an Austin Powers movie, any more than your DNA can be ’removed’ with a mouth-swab. Even putting aside the notion of genetic memory, there’s a lot of evidence that nature, ever a pessimist, stores memories in more than one place in the brain, and Dr. Pearsall’s transplant anecdotes - which concern the transfer of hearts rather than brains - posit the possibility that memories may be ’backed up’ in the most basic proteins of our bodies.
One theory of cellular memory suggests that the neuropeptides thought unique to the brain may in fact permeate all the cells of our bodies, and most particularly the heart, which has such a high quantity of peptides as to present a particularly fruitful area for study. If there should turn out to be a ’special’ relationship between the two organs, we’re all going to feel pretty silly for abandoning that romantic conceit as children...
In terms of SF tech, nothing qualifies more as a predecessor to Dollhouse than Gerry Anderson’s final ’Supermarionation’ series Joe 90. Here the young adopted son of a brilliant scientist receives implants of brain patterns from highly specialised personnel in order to undertake special-agent missions for one of Anderson’s typically global peace-keeping forces, the World Intelligence Network. The ’Big Rat’ (Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer) was the very psychedelic spinning machine that not only made the transference process visual but provided a golden excuse to re-run stock shots each episode. Joe himself kept a continuous memory, unlike the ’dolls’ in Whedon’s series, and never seemed to have any unwarranted side effects, such as an urge to ogle centrefolds or start smoking (God knows, everyone else did in Gerry Anderson shows). On the other hand Joe needed some nasty-looking souped-up NHS specs in order to stay in touch with the implanted abilities.
I suspect that Whedon’s ’dolls’ will have rather more emotional points-of-vulnerability, with a more ambiguous treatment of the source brain-patterns that our heroes will receive in the show; the difficulty in sifting practical abilities from emotional impressions and non-essential memories when sourcing implantable material is bound to emerge. In yet another real-life transplant case, a young girl who had never experienced any emotional problems led police to the killers of the donor of her new heart, after being plagued by nightmares about being murdered. To what extent, then, will the living templates of Dollhouse adopt more than just the skillset of their donor minds...?
The character without memory is instantly sympathetic, as they can hide so little from us, and we have seen the narrative dynamic before in Angelheart, Total Recall, Memento, Resident Evil, Dark City, Regarding Henry and many others - and in many cases, the ultimate truth at the end of amnesia was an ugly one. Will Echo find out that she was once Faith?
Though he only went through the process once, Peter Weller in Robocop (1987) is another Dollhouse analogue, and the emotional dynamic of Paul Verhoeven’s film centred on Murphy’s struggle to re-invent himself with the tatters of his old personality, much as cynical megacorp OCP had reinvented his body with cybernetic technology. Robocop’s reply when asked his name by the head of OCP at the movie’s end is one of the big cheer moments of the dehumanising, yuppified 1980s ("Murphy!"), and Eliza Dushku’s search for ’integration’ is surely set to be the emotional heart of Dollhouse. If we’re lucky, there’ll also be a ton of good one-liners on the journey there.
’Integration’ describes the elusive stage in the treatment of multiple-personality disorder where the patient combines the various traits of their ’cast of characters’ into one cohesive and continuous personality, an ascension out of the darkness and confusion of insanity into the life-challenges that the patient had been fleeing before. In terms of the general culture of Whedon’s target audience, the ’hook’ in Dollhouse is surely the struggle to be accepted (and presumably appreciated) for who one really is; people have the right to reinvent themselves, but doing so on an ad hoc and daily basis is chaos and self-negation.
But that’s a mission-statement aimed at broader demographics than those which likely interest Joss Whedon. I can’t help but feel that there’s a reason the show is called Dollhouse and not Toy House. I’m not convinced by the inclusion of the male ’doll’ Victor (Enver Gjokaj); outnumbered by his two female colleagues (Dushku and ’Sierra’, played by Dichen Lachman), this sounds like the Token Guy, Dollhouse’s own ogleable Angel, there to provide balance and backdrop to another Whedon exploration into the female psyche, the fascination - if not obsession - that threads his career. Guys will tune in for Dushku as they did for both her and Sarah-Michelle Gellar in Buffy, but Dollhouse is x-chromosome all down the line, from the evidence of the set-up.
Hey, sounds good to me.
Dollhouse premieres February 13, 2009 on Fox.
from Fanpop.com
We’ve all spent months being told why we should worry about Dollhouse, but here are some good reasons we shouldn’t.
1. Joss’ respect for his fans.
Joss has always been very candid with his fans. He tells us things other writers/producers wouldn’t. When he says he thinks the show has a shot and is on the right track, history indicates he has earned the benefit of the doubt.
2. Joss’ respect for his work.
One source of the fan-freak outs is the knowledge that Fox has been making some ’suggestions’ to Joss about things like the tone of the series. I believe in the level of care Joss puts into his work. Do you really think he would make a change that would ruin the show?
3. Fox’s bad reputation.
As much as we all like to call them stupid (they have cancelled some amazing shows) Fox is run by business people. And having the rep as the network that cancels shows after 1 season is very bad for business. I know of many people who have made it clear that if this show isn’t treated fairly they will never watch Fox again. And I’m pretty sure they know it too. Joss has said they have realised that sci-fi doesn’t usually grab an immediate audience. Essentially telling a show’s creator that they understand the show wont be a huge success for a while is a big swing in attitude for them.
4. Reviews of the pilot.
Reviews have been ok. Seemingly an even mix of compliments and doubts. The thing is, as much as I love everything Joss writes, pilots aren’t his strong point. Do you know anyone whose favourite episodes of Buffy are the first few? or the first few of Angel? when he has this kind of story to tell the first episode is never his best. I’ve also found that I never appreciate the first episode of a Joss show till I’ve seen the next few. Once you know more about the characters, once it’s not all explaining the mythology of the show, his pilots start to shine. So having complimentary reviews about what will probably be the worst episode he writes is a fantastic sign. (I say ’worst’ in comparison to what he’ll write after that. It will, of course, still rock.)
5. Terminator: Sarah Connor chronicles.
Not only is that show a sign of Fox’s less trigger happy attitude (Hey, a sci-fi that made it to a 2nd season) but I really feel there will be some Dollhouse/T:SCC fan solidarity. Not only are they fans of a show that’s in the sci-fi genre featuring a lot of strong female characters (so they are all clearly potential Joss fans) but they know what it’s like to be the Fox show everyone thinks is next for the chop. Though people feared the friday slot, I actually think this pairing is going to reel in fans we may not have otherwise had.
6. Because we’re freaking people the heck out!
seriously, would you want to give a chance to a show that all the fans were preparing eulogies for before it even started?
Finally, the most important reason to me. Because this is great. After all this time we have another Joss show. Are you really going to enjoy watching it if all the time you’re watching you’re subconsciously waiting for it to get axed? We’re about to have shiny new Joss work! This isn’t a time for a case of the angries, this is a time for a Numfar style dance of joy!
from Tvsquad.com
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding Joss Whedon’s new television brainchild, particularly since it became slated for Friday nights (it premieres on Feb. 13 at 9 PM ET). It’s difficult to judge a Joss Whedon show by a single episode since the creator relies so much on serialized storytelling, so let’s start with the facts.
Joss Whedon is a versatile writer and has no difficulty in producing shows that nobody expects. For example, Firefly was nothing like Buffy. Similarly, Dollhouse is very different than Whedon’s previous television ventures. This could be why Fox relegated it to Fridays. Perhaps they fear change.
Eliza Dushku plays Echo, who is a (seemingly unwilling) participant at a location in Los Angeles code-named "The Dollhouse" (Joss has learned a lesson since his Buffy and Angel days and never names a program after a character on it). The Dollhouse is an illegal facility, but it survives and thrives because the people behind it and the people that use its services are too powerful to be touched by the law.
Each participant is called a Doll or an Active. The Actives can be programmed with different personalities which fulfill specific needs for The Dollhouse’s clients. Those needs could be personal or professional. The first episode is a psychological thriller and not a gun-fest or fight-fest like his previous works. The pilot teaches the viewer about the life of Echo. We get a sense of who she is, and who she isn’t. In this instance, she is programmed with the personality of a hostage negotiator after a wealthy man’s daughter is kidnapped.
Apparently, the process in becoming an Active is painful, as we witness a woman being initiated into the program during the course of the episode. It certainly brings into question whether the Actives are there voluntarily. During the episode, Echo begins to break her programming which undoubtedly foreshadows upcoming stories.
We also learn what Dollhouse is and the main players behind it. We meet Adelle DeWitt (played by Olivia Williams), who runs the place; Topher Brink (Fran Kranz), an amoral nerd who runs the software that keeps the Actives programmed; and Boyd Langton (Henry Lennix, whom I recognized from the Matrix sequels), a former law-enforcement officer who now works for The Dollhouse as Echo’s "handler" (a position that entails both supervision to prevent deviation from her programming and bodyguarding her). Whedon-alum Amy Acker also makes an appearance on the show as a facility doctor with a scarred face.
Sub-plots abound within the show. Tahmoh Penikett (Helo from Battlestar Galactica) plays an FBI agent obsessed with finding The Dollhouse. He seems to have an unhealthy infatuation with Echo. Future episodes will probably explain why.
The show has a strong cast and Eliza Dushku is terrific in her role. The Dollhouse set reminds me a bit of the Wolfram and Hart offices from Angel.
The episode was okay as a stand-alone, but not great. As mentioned, I don’t think anybody should judge a Joss Whedon production by the first episode. Whedon weaves an intricate web and it usually takes a few episodes to get involved. I’m looking forward to the journey.
from Salon.com
Time to program your DVRs! From new shows like "Dollhouse" and "The United States of Tara" to countless returning favorites, an embarrassment of mid-season riches is upon us!
It takes about a week to adjust to being on vacation. At first, the mind can’t relax. It makes lists. It gets fussy over dinner, or obsesses over college savings plans. By the middle of the second week, the mind finally loosens up. That’s when you find yourself flipping through catalogs for hours, or picking lint off your sweater in a semi-hypnotic state, until you forget who you are, where you are and what you were doing.
In this cruel modern world, just as the stress of your work life finally subsides, just as you start to feel happy and numb like an overfed donkey, it’s time to get back to work. I need four weeks of vacation time, minimum! I want to wander aimlessly, nibbling on clover, in a daze. Instead, just as I get the laundry done and sit down to read a book, my holiday break is over.
And it takes about two weeks to adjust to being back at work. I tried to explain this to my husband yesterday: The mind doesn’t want to do a job. The mind wants to go to the mall and gaze at the intricate, almost balletic movements of the hot-dog-rolling machine at Orange Julius. The mind wants to take a nap. The mind wants a doughnut.
My husband had to run. He had stuff to do. The mind felt jilted. But the mind thought that some stale gingerbread cookies might take the mind’s mind off how jilted it felt.
Brand new menu!
But don’t feel too bad, my fellow struggling, slow donkey friends, because the winter season of television is upon us, and it’s about 50 trillion times more exciting than the fall television season was.
Why do they hold out on us like this? Network executives should make it official and shift all the best shows to January, and then I can spend September and October writing rambling essays about napping and fat donkeys and really good cheese instead of making elaborate charts detailing all of the crappy shows none of us want to watch anyway, because they suck ass. (After a long-but-not-long-enough vacation, the mind is drawn to vulgarity — and things that are filled with custard.)
A bunch of new shows are about to flicker onto your TV screens in the coming weeks, shows that are so fresh and delectable, they might as well be filled with custard. My top three favorites so far? I’m so glad you asked.
1) Fox’s "Lie to Me" (Premieres 9 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 21) Starring Tim Roth as a "deception detection" specialist, this show is like a mix between CBS’s "The Mentalist" and Fox’s "House": There are lots of creepy, "How did he know that?" expert moments, just as cheesy and delicious as they are in Simon Baker’s hands, but with an edge. Unlike blue-eyed Baker, who’s soft and pretty and truly belongs among the filtered lenses and ample-breasted ghost-soothers of CBS, Roth is sort of beady-eyed and unlikable — you know, how you’d imagine a Fox executive might look, if you were barreling toward him in your car at night. Something tells us that Roth’s character, Cal Lightman, has seen more than his fair share of big, fat lies and the lying liars who tell them. But Lightman doesn’t wallow like Hugh Laurie’s Dr. Gregory House does. No way, he’s more chipper than that. Plus, he has a sexy sidekick (Kelli Williams from "The Practice") and some sexy underlings who flirt with him and each other — you know, anything to keep the whole picture funny but edgy, upbeat but heavy. Think "Bones." Think "Fringe." This is the signature flavor of Fox: salty, greasy goodness in every bite, and no one can eat just one. This network knows how to get us hooked. Which leads us to my second favorite new, exciting show of the winter season ...
2) Fox’s "Dollhouse" (Premieres 9 p.m. Friday, Feb. 13) Yes, we’ve all been waiting for Joss Whedon’s new sci-fi drama, about a bunch of hot people who have their memories erased so that they can act as anonymous agents for a high-end firm that provides fantasy dates, secret missions of various kinds, hostage negotiations ... It’s not entirely clear what goes down at the Dollhouse or who runs it or how they got started or whether they’re good or evil, and that, my dear, is the custard filling in this big, sugary doughnut of a drama. If you take off the rose-colored, Joss Whedon-loving glasses, of course, you’ll notice that the first episode of "Dollhouse" is a little bit dorky and uneven at times. But Eliza Dushku fills that "Buffy"-esque dazed-but-sharp babe quotient nicely, and I guarantee that after the first episode, you’ll want to see more, more, more, more, as soon as you can. Personally, I can’t wait for this show to kick into high gear. Weird, witty, smart, suspenseful, intense? This is what we spent the fall TV season hungering for. That, and something that might actually make us laugh, which brings us to my favorite of them all ...
3) Showtime’s "The United States of Tara" (10 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 18) Yes, it’s a good old-fashioned multiple-personality dramedy starring Toni Collette and John Corbett, written by indie wunderkind/stripper scribe, Diablo Cody, she of the whimsically made-up name and the funky hairdos and the gloriously quirky personal style, the likes of which Hollywood shuns (at first), then clings to like a big, milky, life-giving breast. As bored as we all are with Cody’s plucky rise to greatness, this woman does have a fiercely original voice and is far from a flash in the Sundance-welded pan. "The United States of Tara" takes a nearly ridiculous premise (Mom with debilitating personality disorder tries to live a normal life off her mind-numbing meds, forcing her family to interact with three incredibly demanding "alternate" personalities) and spins it into comedic gold. Of course, the whole thing might be cringe-inducingly awful without Toni Collette, who is just outrageously, breathtakingly good at playing four different characters wrapped into one. On top of that, the teenage daughter has great comic timing (how rare is that?), the teenage son is also wickedly funny, Rosemarie DeWitt is — well, she’s Rosemarie DeWitt, she’s the greatest (Go see "Rachel Getting Married" if you haven’t yet). John Corbett (as Tara’s husband) is low-key and bland as always, only in this setting, he’s the perfect foil for Tara’s three-ring circus. I’ll write more about this one next week, but in the meantime, program your DVR. You can’t miss it.
Ah, three promising new shows. Can you believe it? It’s enough to wake you from that post-holiday stupor once and for all.
Welcome back-tica, Galactica!
But those three are just the tip of the iceberg, what with so many returning favorites flying at us in a matter of days: "24" (8 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 11, on Fox), "Damages" (10 p.m. Wednesdays on FX), "Friday Night Lights" (9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16, on NBC),"Battlestar Galactica" (10 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16, on Sci Fi), "Big Love" (9 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 18, on HBO) and "Flight of the Conchords" (10 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 18, on HBO). How will we juggle them all?
After waiting a year and a half, the new season of "24" would excite me even if Jack Bauer sat down and ate a ham sandwich for the first hour, then called a few old friends on his cellphone while window shopping for pocket-size explosives and torture devices during the second. Instead, Jack is pulled into the usual web of terrorist manipulations and high-level conspiracies. The first four hours of the "24" premiere offer the usual Mister Toad’s Wild Ride of absurd, spectacular and goofy twists and turns, of course. Just suspend your disbelief from the start (a prerequisite when watching this show) because this season’s big conceit — from the players involved to the nature of Jack’s involvement — is more fantastical than ever. But that’s what we want from "24" — pure, unfettered, neocon fantasy, softened by the addition of a female president who, unlike most presidents to date outside of "The West Wing’s" Jed Bartlet, actually seems a little unnerved by reports of genocide in small African nations.
Onward: I can already strongly recommend "Friday Night Lights," of course, having watched most of the season on DirecTV this past fall. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s definitely worthwhile, a far cry from the melodramatic and repetitive second season.
Meanwhile, the second season of FX’s "Damages" looks even better than the first. (Wrote about it here last week.) And the final 10 episodes of SciFi’s "Battlestar Galactica" are almost guaranteed to range from intense to mind-blowing — the Galacticans have landed on Earth and it’s a crusty, blackened mess with not a single water park or Australian-themed steakhouse left standing. What fresh hell awaits our intrepid, booze-swilling colonists?
Finally, "Big Love," which bored me to tears in its second season, really gains momentum during its third season, with a bunch of unfamiliar new challenges facing Bill and his three wives. It’s always a little tough to get back into this show. "Who are these bad people with their dozens of children and their bad hair, and why should I care?" I find myself wondering. But by the third episode, the new season reaches critical mass, plotwise and emotionally.
Oh, the places we’ll go! At long last, after a dreary, draining fall, there are so many good shows to write about, I can barely tackle them all. But for now, it’s back to bed with a box of custard-filled doughnuts and the first two episodes of A&E’s "The Beast." Who says the holiday spirit can’t live on inside every one of us?
from Time.com
My TiVo may be on life support, but the DVD player still works, and midseason TV is starting to come in fast and furious. Among the screeners I’ve received is a little show by some guy who did something about vampires once. You don’t want to hear anything about it yet, do you? I didn’t think so. Ignore me as I write more after the jump.
OK, a little preface. I’ve watched the Dollhouse episode (given the history of remakes on this show, I don’t know whether I can properly call it the "pilot") once, casually, without taking notes. I reserve the right to change my mind after I’ve watched it and marinated on it more. And I wasn’t crazy about Firefly when it first debuted, in retrospect one of the worse calls of my career.
It was both better and worse than I expected, in different ways. One of my concerns about it was that—given Joss Whedon’s talent for making absorbing serials—the case-of-the-week nature of the show would make it harder to grow attached to. (I’m assuming that anyone who cares at this point knows the premise already, but in case I’m wrong: Eliza Dushku plays Echo, an "Active," which is a person who has agreed to let a secretive organization erase his or her original memories and personality and implant new ones in them for "assignments" involving rich clients.)
Yes, this is certainly Joss Whedon trying to do What People Think Works on Broadcast TV Today—the legendary serial-procedural hybrid. But the first episode—in which Echo is imprinted with a kidnapping-negotiator’s personality to secure the return of a rich man’s abducted daughter—is well enough written to be absorbing. Writing a crime hour doesn’t seem like Whedon’s thing, but the episode is tight, suspenseful, with intriguing psychological twists and flashes of Whedonesque humor.
And the more serial elements of the show seem promising, at least. At the same time, an investigator (Tahmoh Penikett, BSG’s Helo) is looking into the rumored existence of the illegal "Dollhouse" where the Actives are housed. A scene with a skeptical colleague addresses head-on a basic implausibility of the premise: why the hell does a billionaire need to turn to some kind of bizarre sci-fi brianwashing whorehouse to get the perfect date, or the perfect crime investigator, or the perfect whatever, when they can perfectly easily go out and hire one who hasn’t had their personality wiped? His response: when you have everything, you want something more—more exotic, more perfect, more specific. Not so persuasive on the surface, but if the show is well enough done, hopefully we won’t care.
Now the minus. Dollhouse as conceived (a heroine plays a different "person" every week) is less a series concept than an actress’ showcase, a sort of extreme version of an Alias undercover premise. (In fact, the reports of how the show was conceived have said that Dushku essentially broached the idea as a showcase.) And the actress being showcased is Eliza Dushku. Now, I have nothing against Dushku. I thought she was fine on Buffy. But she’s not exactly Toni Collette (who’s playing a multiple-personality case on Showtime’s The United States of Tara, which I have not seen). Watching her inhabit her imprinted "personality"—a tough negotiator with secret vulnerabilities—I did not see her becoming another person. I thought: Oh, look! There’s Eliza Dushku with glasses and her hair in a bun!
If it weren’t for Whedon’s pedigree, I’m not sure I’d be dying to see a second episode. But for me, the main draw now is not seeing Dushku become a different person every week, but getting to see Joss Whedon become a different writer every week.
from Macleans.ca
One reason I’m looking forward to the premiere of Dollhouse, in spite of all the gloomy stories about its production and time slot (and therefore its potential for lasting much longer than Firefly) is that Joss Whedon is the king of a particular type of TV that I love, and that hasn’t been seen much on television lately: the show that is funny and serious at the same time.
Many if not most hour-long dramas have their comic moments, but they are usually bisected into “serious” scenes and “comedy” scenes. Each scene has its own overall tone and mood, and apart from a joke as a treacle-cutter near the end of a serious scene, or an earnest dramatic surprise at the end of a funny scene, you will not see much overlap between the two types of scenes. Even on a show like Mad Men, where the moments of humour are more unexpected and unpredictably placed, the writers won’t usually risk destroying the serious mood of a scene with a joke. What made Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer so unusual was that in its first few seasons it almost did away with the division between drama and comedy, with scenes constantly bouncing back and forth between funny and serious, goofy comedy lines occurring in the middle of very serious scenes. (The movie also had this weird mix of styles, which is why it’s an underrated movie.) The definitive Joss Whedon speech is from a Buffy episode in the second season where Buffy confronts a friend who betrayed her:
I am trying to save you. You are playing in some serious traffic here, do you understand that? You’re going to die, and the only hope you have of surviving this is to get out of this pit right now, and my God, could you have a dorkier outfit?
Buffy eventually lost this wonderfully bizarre mix of styles, particularly after Whedon turned over some of the showrunning duties to Marti Noxon; in the last two or three seasons, most of the episodes were much more clearly divided into scenes with specific, unvarying functions (either a scene that’s supposed to be funny or a scene that’s supposed to be serious, rarely both). You can get a clue to this in the seventh season episode “Conversations With Dead People,” with four plots written by four different writers; only Whedon’s scenes, with Buffy talking to an ex-schoolmate who’s now a vampire, are funny and serious simultaneously, rather than just being one or the other.
Another show that was deservedly famous for a mix of tones and styles was The Sopranos. While that show would not usually inject corny jokes into a serious scene, it would often present us with two ways to read a scene; we’d ask ourselves, is this supposed to be serious or just silly, and we’d realize that it was both. Take the famous scene in the pilot, when Tony Soprano succumbs to his first “panic attack” near the pool while an opera aria is playing. On the DVD commentary, the eternally-sycophantic Peter Bogdanovich says that the scene has an “epic feel.” David Chase corrects him, saying it’s “epic silliness” — and those two words are as good a summary of The Sopranos as I’ve ever heard.
Of course, when we talk about this technique, we’re talking about Irony (not to be confused with Richie Rich’s maid). The two shows I’ve mentioned, Buffy and Sopranos, both had ludicrous premises and were aware of the fact; a lot of the comedy comes from the awareness — the writers’ awareness, and our own — that we’re being asked to get seriously involved in a show about a Valley Girl who fights monsters, or a mob boss getting in touch with his feelings. These shows knew they could sometimes be implausible and ridiculous, and they also knew that there was emotional truth and realism in these ridiculous, implausible stories; we could laugh at a scene and see ourselves in it at the very same moment. You don’t have to do it that way — J.J. Abrams has shown that you can be very successful by taking a ridiculous premise with complete seriousness and making us take it seriously — but it’s a very satisfying, rich mix, if one that’s very hard to achieve.
I don’t see a lot of shows that have that elusive quality — of being serious and ironic all at once — now that Sopranos and Veronica Mars are gone. That other Mars, Life On Mars, has some of it, but even that show seems pretty clear about where the serious leaves off and the funny begins. One reason I was kind of sad to see Boston Legal go, even though it’s a complete mess, is that its messiness came from its attempt to be really silly and really serious at the same time (the problem is that the stuff David E. Kelley thinks is serious is often sillier than the intentionally silly stuff). I’m sure we’ll get others, though, even if Dollhouse doesn’t pan out. These shows are tough to do, but they’re irresistible when they work.