Bringing Down The House

Cue the hysterical whinging from Joss Whedon fans, as it seems that Dollhouse will not return after its current 13 episode season. This shouldn't really be surprising, as the ratings for the show have been pretty brutal, and the show continues to not make a whole lot of sense. Back in the spring, I compared the show to Chris Carter's failed series Harsh Realm, and I still think the parallels are there as far as the overall impenetrability of the story arc and the near-religious devotion of fans to the shows' respective creators.

More to the point, though, the idea of creating a show whose main character has almost no character of her own seemed doomed from the start, when you think about it. While Eliza Dushku's Echo has been slowly developing self-awareness of her situation, she still offers nothing for viewers to hold on to. It's one thing to have moral ambiguity due to questionable choices in morally ambiguous situations, but to have no consistent morality because it's been deprogrammed from your entire personality makes it tough to care about Echo and the other dolls for any reason other than she's hot. Appreciating the acting range of having to be in all of these different situations isn't really a substitute for caring.

As I've been watching, I've been hoping for a change in focus akin to when The Simpsons stopped really being about Bart and started being about Homer. While the dolls themselves can't be compelling characters on their own because of their nature, the people running the Dollhouse are a different kettle of fish altogether. The more the show became about Adele DeWitt, Boyd and Topher -- and there were/are hints that things may move more in this direction before the series wraps -- perhaps it would offer more for viewers to hang their hat on.

At the end of the day, I still would have preferred FOX had saved Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles last season instead, but for all we know, it would have suffered the same fate. Now I just have to hope the FOX execs keep their dirty hands off of Fringe.