I’ve prepared a three-part series on Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, and will be posting it over the next week or so. In anticipation for this, I thought I would start off with an introduction.
Dollhouse, for better or worse, gets a bad rap. For Whedonites it is the prime example of how stupid Whedon was for trusting Fox after their horrible treatment of Firefly.
For others, it was a show that never really took off. What kind of show was it? Was it sci-fi? Was it drama? Was it existential? It just didn’t seem to fit anywhere.
Overall, most people seem to see Dollhouse as the weakest of the the shows in the Whedonverse. But does weakest necessarily give us cause to write it off? Weakest in the Whedonverse still means pretty decent compared to most television shows out there right now.
Now, granted, I have seen Dollhouse on DVD, and not on television, so I’ve been able to see the episodes in order and have seen the story arcs build. (Have you noticed that stories with character/plot development and specific arcs are better watched on DVD? Take Alias as another example. It was really hard to follow on network tv, particularly if you ended up missing an episode). Having watched it several times now, I am struck by how smart the show is. It wrestles with some huge issues, and the overall theme seems to be “what does it mean to be human?” The characters are messy. The world is messy. The dollhouse is definitely messy.
And maybe that’s why Dollhouse failed on television. It didn’t fit a formula. It was all about living in the mess.
Over the next week or so we will explore the following topics:
Dollhouse: Everybody is broken
Dollhouse: What makes us human?
Dollhouse: Finally a happily ever after?!
In the meantime, how would you rank the various offerings in the Whedonverse? What is the best? What is the worst?
My ranking:
1. Firefly
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
3. Angel (seasons 1 and 5)
4. Dollhouse
5. Angel (seasons 2-4)
6. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog
7. Serenity
1) Firefly
2) Serenity (even if I’d rather pretend that Wash didn’t die)
3) Dr. Horrible
4) Buffy
5) Dollhouse
(that’s all I’ve seen, and I ought to say, I haven’t seen all the seasons of Buffy yet. but these are not in complete order of when I watched them, though almost – I saw Dr. Horrible first (“hey this is something interesting free) then Firefly (“ok now that I saw Dr. Horrible and it was good, I notice that hey, this is done by the same guy as did Firefly which a remarkable number of my friends keep referring too, so I ought to watch that”), Serenity, a season of Buffy, Dollhouse, and now continuing at a slow rate through Buffy (because I became a Doctor Who fan in the meantime… which ranks up there right under Firefly if we were doing a multifandom tv show ranking)
I am intrigued by Doctor Who. I remember watching it as a kid and being freaked out. People tell me that if I were to get started watching Doctor Who, I should start with the Christopher Eccleston season.
absolutely – I almost started with the second “series” of the new ones, because I knew David Tennant, but I am very glad that I took a friends word and watched the first “series” of the new ones first. (I haven’t actually made it back to any of the older ones) Christopher Eccleston is my favorite Doctor, but I have to say David Tennant and Matt Smith are fantastic as well. (I do think its also possible to go ahead and start with the current series when it starts this month – I actually ended up watching last season pretty much concurrant with a couple of older seasons, and while watching previous stuff helps in some cases and makes it better, its not impossible to watch out of order either (which I’ve been known to do on some of the David Tennant seasons if the reruns were on BBC America in a marathon or something)
I can’t really wait for this series. Amazing!