On why Dollhouse failed
So this is somewhat inspired by an essay Paul linked to, but:
I think that Dollhouse's real problem is that Whedon has attained such cult status that basically no one walks into the writers room and tells him he has a great idea that really needs some work-- and then actually gets him to work on those problems. I think reports of Fox's attempts to do so are fairly accurate, and in this case Fox was probably actually right. The issue was that fanboy support and Whedon's own experience with Fox probably made him resistant to such suggestions, maybe even rebellious against them.
Some serious conceptual problems with Dollhouse:
-Dollhouse is a show whose main characters switches personality every episode. This is a poor way to build rapport with the audience. It is possible to do soemthing like this in the right way: for example, in Burn Notice Michael Weston adapts cover personalities pretty much every episode, but the majority of the time when he's not on the job he's just Michael Weston. We also get voiceover from the character's core voice while he's on cover assignment, so that we know that Good Ol' Michael Weston (the character we actually like) is still Good Ol' Michael Weston.
-Eventually, the personality switching gets even more confusing, as it turns out more and more people have been brainwashed, and more characters we have gotten to know/possibly like are just more artificial constructions. We meet other Dolls, then it turns out that established characters are really just Dolls with the personalities of the people we thought they were (Dr. Saunders, we're looking at you!) Again, it's really hard to care about characters who the next episode might suddenly be someone entirely different really-- and the gimmick gets real old real fast.
-There are some serious problems with the Dollhouse being a 'private' venture in a psuedo-modern world. For one, this technology effectively allows you create your own personal Jason Bourne (really, you didn't think we'd catch the similarities, Joss?). Why isn't the technology siezed by the CIA and then covered up? What about, you know, other intelligence agencies in the world?
-Trying to convince the audience in the first season that the Dollhouse wasn't a creepy brainwashing depot, only to turn around and drive home that no, brainwashing is bad and immoral no matter how you cut it was just bad writing. I think Whedon underestimated the contemporary audience. At this point most media consumers are familiar with the strong idea that brainwashing is bad and evil, which is part of why the first season was so awkward with audiences because we were supposed to accept that brainwashing was somehow ok and kind of hip, or at least in some kind of gray area. (Yeah, no.)
-It was slow to develop. The show should have started off with the relatively easy to establish notion that the Dollhouse was bad and been more about our plucky heroes trying to take it down... instead it was about a slow dawning horror of a realization that the Dollhouse was bad, eventually leading to our heroes to try to take it down. Seriously, it shouldn't take nearly a season to establish that brainwashing = bad. Most of us have read 1984.
-Ultimately, this is a show about victims being traumatized. Watching victims being traumatized turns out not to be great entertainment. You could argue that the original Prisoner was a show about about a victim being traumatized, but the Prisoner was more a show about a victim resisting trauma with everything he could. Audiences like rooting for the victim, but Echo's slow development and passive resistance to the trauma induced on her is not the kind of fight that a general audience will key into.
-Also, this is a show primarily about female victimization, written primarily by a man. No matter how enlightened our contemporary era of fiction may be, this was always bound to be awkward at best. Oh, sure, there are male victims too, like Alpha and Victor, and female victimizers, like DeWitt. (Oooh, Gender Reversal, like that's not a gimmick!) At first we did have Dr. Saunders-- who then turns out to be a victim herself. Oh, and there's Ivy-- whom Topher (the real man scientist) sends to get the coffee. Really, the show needed more well-adjusted, strong female characters who don't turn out to be victims of abuse themselves. For example, Firefly had Zoe, Inara, and Kaylee. Dollhouse didn't have such characters to balance it out, instead we just get an endless parade of mind-control victims. Really, the saddest thing about Dollhouse is that Whedon seems to have lost his male feminist touch.
There were some things that could have saved the concept. The way I would have done it is as follows:
To maintain a main character with personality, Echo should have been an escapee of the Dollhouse from the start, using the technology from the outside (as opposed to the inside, as things eventually swung to i the show) to bring the Dollhouse down. She would then flip back and forth between her Main Character Persoality (TM), and whatever personality she adopted for the mission of the week to screw the Dollhouse's shit. That way Main Character Personality (TM) could have built rapport with the audience, and would have cheered her as the victim overcoming her trauma and the victimizers who worked it upon her.
Her starting team then could have been the people who rescued her (i.e. FBI Agent Paul Ballard), perhaps another former Doll (say, Victor or Sierra-- I'd say Sierra, and have her rescue Victor in the course of the first season by flipping the romantic interest from Victor having a crush on Sierra to Sierra having a crush on Victor), some government whiz technophile who operated the technology (probably still Topher), and the director of their operation, probably Ballard's boss (DeWitt could have made a great 'gray area' kind of boss). As the series progressed, the team would make friends with other agents they busted out of the Dollhouse, and other former agents trying to figure out what happened to them in that five-year hole in their life they signed away. Meta-plot wise, you'd figure out who was really behind the Dollhouse, which would probably turn out to be some sort of conspiracy of secret assassins, spies, etc.
From the synopsis of the plot so far, that was probably where the show was headed-- by next season (too slow). If Whedon had just started there, then he could have had an awesome, action-packed pilot in Echo's escape/rescue, and a much better way of explaining the Dollhouse than trying to cast it in the middle of all the brainwashed muddle-mush. He could have had less problems with the network in exploring the fetishistic aspects of the Dollhouse technology, because it would have been easier to cast those who used the Dollhouse for it's sexual fantasy aspects as bad guys and deviants.
Admittedly, this would have effectively been the metaplot to Firefly/Serenity, just substitute River Tam for Echo and her awesome brother for Paul Ballard, oh, and remove the western space opera. Which actually reveals some of the problems with Echo as a character. River Tam worked as a character because she was a secondary character, thus her quiet personality and child-like states were breaks from the heavy personality of the rest of the cast, whereas Echo was the main character, the one the audience is most supposed to empathize with. Another key difference between Echo and River Tam is that we meet River Tam after her victimization, as she tries to piece herself back together. With Echo, we are watching as she is in the process of being victimized, as trauma is repeatedly induced upon her. There's a big difference between watching River Tam have episodes and slowly overcome her trauma, and watching Echo repeatedly traumatized by some new machination of the Dollhouse. That difference being that one is uplifting, while the other is pretty damn depressing.
Someone undoubtedly pointed these things out to Whedon. And was probably promptly ignored, either because they were a Fox Producer or because they didn't have the stature to challenge the great Joss Whedon, kind of like no one was willing to clue Frank Miller into how far he'd gotten off the deep end. In other words, Dollhouse is Whedon's DK2; the question is whether or not Whedon will be able to pull his stuff together again, or just go on skipping by on his former glory.
I think that Dollhouse's real problem is that Whedon has attained such cult status that basically no one walks into the writers room and tells him he has a great idea that really needs some work-- and then actually gets him to work on those problems. I think reports of Fox's attempts to do so are fairly accurate, and in this case Fox was probably actually right. The issue was that fanboy support and Whedon's own experience with Fox probably made him resistant to such suggestions, maybe even rebellious against them.
Some serious conceptual problems with Dollhouse:
-Dollhouse is a show whose main characters switches personality every episode. This is a poor way to build rapport with the audience. It is possible to do soemthing like this in the right way: for example, in Burn Notice Michael Weston adapts cover personalities pretty much every episode, but the majority of the time when he's not on the job he's just Michael Weston. We also get voiceover from the character's core voice while he's on cover assignment, so that we know that Good Ol' Michael Weston (the character we actually like) is still Good Ol' Michael Weston.
-Eventually, the personality switching gets even more confusing, as it turns out more and more people have been brainwashed, and more characters we have gotten to know/possibly like are just more artificial constructions. We meet other Dolls, then it turns out that established characters are really just Dolls with the personalities of the people we thought they were (Dr. Saunders, we're looking at you!) Again, it's really hard to care about characters who the next episode might suddenly be someone entirely different really-- and the gimmick gets real old real fast.
-There are some serious problems with the Dollhouse being a 'private' venture in a psuedo-modern world. For one, this technology effectively allows you create your own personal Jason Bourne (really, you didn't think we'd catch the similarities, Joss?). Why isn't the technology siezed by the CIA and then covered up? What about, you know, other intelligence agencies in the world?
-Trying to convince the audience in the first season that the Dollhouse wasn't a creepy brainwashing depot, only to turn around and drive home that no, brainwashing is bad and immoral no matter how you cut it was just bad writing. I think Whedon underestimated the contemporary audience. At this point most media consumers are familiar with the strong idea that brainwashing is bad and evil, which is part of why the first season was so awkward with audiences because we were supposed to accept that brainwashing was somehow ok and kind of hip, or at least in some kind of gray area. (Yeah, no.)
-It was slow to develop. The show should have started off with the relatively easy to establish notion that the Dollhouse was bad and been more about our plucky heroes trying to take it down... instead it was about a slow dawning horror of a realization that the Dollhouse was bad, eventually leading to our heroes to try to take it down. Seriously, it shouldn't take nearly a season to establish that brainwashing = bad. Most of us have read 1984.
-Ultimately, this is a show about victims being traumatized. Watching victims being traumatized turns out not to be great entertainment. You could argue that the original Prisoner was a show about about a victim being traumatized, but the Prisoner was more a show about a victim resisting trauma with everything he could. Audiences like rooting for the victim, but Echo's slow development and passive resistance to the trauma induced on her is not the kind of fight that a general audience will key into.
-Also, this is a show primarily about female victimization, written primarily by a man. No matter how enlightened our contemporary era of fiction may be, this was always bound to be awkward at best. Oh, sure, there are male victims too, like Alpha and Victor, and female victimizers, like DeWitt. (Oooh, Gender Reversal, like that's not a gimmick!) At first we did have Dr. Saunders-- who then turns out to be a victim herself. Oh, and there's Ivy-- whom Topher (the real man scientist) sends to get the coffee. Really, the show needed more well-adjusted, strong female characters who don't turn out to be victims of abuse themselves. For example, Firefly had Zoe, Inara, and Kaylee. Dollhouse didn't have such characters to balance it out, instead we just get an endless parade of mind-control victims. Really, the saddest thing about Dollhouse is that Whedon seems to have lost his male feminist touch.
There were some things that could have saved the concept. The way I would have done it is as follows:
To maintain a main character with personality, Echo should have been an escapee of the Dollhouse from the start, using the technology from the outside (as opposed to the inside, as things eventually swung to i the show) to bring the Dollhouse down. She would then flip back and forth between her Main Character Persoality (TM), and whatever personality she adopted for the mission of the week to screw the Dollhouse's shit. That way Main Character Personality (TM) could have built rapport with the audience, and would have cheered her as the victim overcoming her trauma and the victimizers who worked it upon her.
Her starting team then could have been the people who rescued her (i.e. FBI Agent Paul Ballard), perhaps another former Doll (say, Victor or Sierra-- I'd say Sierra, and have her rescue Victor in the course of the first season by flipping the romantic interest from Victor having a crush on Sierra to Sierra having a crush on Victor), some government whiz technophile who operated the technology (probably still Topher), and the director of their operation, probably Ballard's boss (DeWitt could have made a great 'gray area' kind of boss). As the series progressed, the team would make friends with other agents they busted out of the Dollhouse, and other former agents trying to figure out what happened to them in that five-year hole in their life they signed away. Meta-plot wise, you'd figure out who was really behind the Dollhouse, which would probably turn out to be some sort of conspiracy of secret assassins, spies, etc.
From the synopsis of the plot so far, that was probably where the show was headed-- by next season (too slow). If Whedon had just started there, then he could have had an awesome, action-packed pilot in Echo's escape/rescue, and a much better way of explaining the Dollhouse than trying to cast it in the middle of all the brainwashed muddle-mush. He could have had less problems with the network in exploring the fetishistic aspects of the Dollhouse technology, because it would have been easier to cast those who used the Dollhouse for it's sexual fantasy aspects as bad guys and deviants.
Admittedly, this would have effectively been the metaplot to Firefly/Serenity, just substitute River Tam for Echo and her awesome brother for Paul Ballard, oh, and remove the western space opera. Which actually reveals some of the problems with Echo as a character. River Tam worked as a character because she was a secondary character, thus her quiet personality and child-like states were breaks from the heavy personality of the rest of the cast, whereas Echo was the main character, the one the audience is most supposed to empathize with. Another key difference between Echo and River Tam is that we meet River Tam after her victimization, as she tries to piece herself back together. With Echo, we are watching as she is in the process of being victimized, as trauma is repeatedly induced upon her. There's a big difference between watching River Tam have episodes and slowly overcome her trauma, and watching Echo repeatedly traumatized by some new machination of the Dollhouse. That difference being that one is uplifting, while the other is pretty damn depressing.
Someone undoubtedly pointed these things out to Whedon. And was probably promptly ignored, either because they were a Fox Producer or because they didn't have the stature to challenge the great Joss Whedon, kind of like no one was willing to clue Frank Miller into how far he'd gotten off the deep end. In other words, Dollhouse is Whedon's DK2; the question is whether or not Whedon will be able to pull his stuff together again, or just go on skipping by on his former glory.