Dollhouse
Having now seen the whole season, I think my fundamental issue with this show is that given the setting, the questions I'm interested in are fundamentally ethical and the questions the show's interested in are fundamentally about identity.
I don't mean that I think the show is unaware of the ethical issues the setup raises; obviously it is aware. We aren't meant to be all "yay, Dollhouse! This is a totally ethical setup you have going here, and I support it!" (Though I am somewhat perturbed by the attempts to get me to sympathize with Topher. Really, show?) But the ethical questions aren't at the center of the show. If they were, we would know more, for instance, about how the Dolls were recruited. As it is, we know just enough to give the whole thing that vaguely slimy feeling that makes the show "dark."
Granted, I'm not sure you could make an ongoing series that focused on the ethics of the situation, but then again the PTB were not required to make the setting quite so much of a rapefest, either. They could have allowed the original person to consent to each engagement; they could have posited some sort of a problem that led, in an unpredictable manner, to the blankness of the Dolls... but they didn't, and by doing so they made all of the Dollhouse personnel (along, quite frankly, with at least some of the original personalities of the Dolls, though we don't know quite how many) complicit in a setup that's so obviously and viscerally unethical that I spent a lot of brain cycles during episodes looking at them and thinking "what are you doing here? You don't seem like a sociopath, and yet!"
Anyway. The murky ethics are being used to add flavor to the show, they aren't the meat of the matter. Which is fine, but I suspect I'll be deleting the season pass before next season starts.
One other thing I've thought about the show is that if it were a fannish production, people would be a lot less cranky about it. Because Your Kink Is Okay! Granted, the power of a show on FOX and a piece of fanfic are wildly different, but I suspect that if someone had written a story with the same setting and Sam and Dean as Dolls, they would've gotten plenty of "OMG so deliciously dark" feedback.
(Note: That is not a criticism of darkfic! I'm just saying that Dollhouse itself reminds me of darkfic.)
I had a whole post about TSCC, too--or rather, I had 2/3 of a post, and then I decided it was dumb and deleted it. The short version is:
1) I'm sad it got cancelled, but hey, at least it never got the chance to go wildly off the rails and make me hate it;
2) I really appreciated that the PTB worked to keep Sarah central to the show, because they'd set themselves a difficult road with that;
3) This is how you do a show about motherhood without the fannish circles I run in groaning in disgust virtually as one, and I think that aspect of it was totally awesome.
And then I tried to think of other shows in which there were Mommy Issues instead of the omnipresent Daddy Issues and all I could come up with was Alias, which I never watched but which must, from the decriptions, have given Sydney Mommy Issues. Any others people can think of?
I don't mean that I think the show is unaware of the ethical issues the setup raises; obviously it is aware. We aren't meant to be all "yay, Dollhouse! This is a totally ethical setup you have going here, and I support it!" (Though I am somewhat perturbed by the attempts to get me to sympathize with Topher. Really, show?) But the ethical questions aren't at the center of the show. If they were, we would know more, for instance, about how the Dolls were recruited. As it is, we know just enough to give the whole thing that vaguely slimy feeling that makes the show "dark."
Granted, I'm not sure you could make an ongoing series that focused on the ethics of the situation, but then again the PTB were not required to make the setting quite so much of a rapefest, either. They could have allowed the original person to consent to each engagement; they could have posited some sort of a problem that led, in an unpredictable manner, to the blankness of the Dolls... but they didn't, and by doing so they made all of the Dollhouse personnel (along, quite frankly, with at least some of the original personalities of the Dolls, though we don't know quite how many) complicit in a setup that's so obviously and viscerally unethical that I spent a lot of brain cycles during episodes looking at them and thinking "what are you doing here? You don't seem like a sociopath, and yet!"
Anyway. The murky ethics are being used to add flavor to the show, they aren't the meat of the matter. Which is fine, but I suspect I'll be deleting the season pass before next season starts.
One other thing I've thought about the show is that if it were a fannish production, people would be a lot less cranky about it. Because Your Kink Is Okay! Granted, the power of a show on FOX and a piece of fanfic are wildly different, but I suspect that if someone had written a story with the same setting and Sam and Dean as Dolls, they would've gotten plenty of "OMG so deliciously dark" feedback.
(Note: That is not a criticism of darkfic! I'm just saying that Dollhouse itself reminds me of darkfic.)
I had a whole post about TSCC, too--or rather, I had 2/3 of a post, and then I decided it was dumb and deleted it. The short version is:
1) I'm sad it got cancelled, but hey, at least it never got the chance to go wildly off the rails and make me hate it;
2) I really appreciated that the PTB worked to keep Sarah central to the show, because they'd set themselves a difficult road with that;
3) This is how you do a show about motherhood without the fannish circles I run in groaning in disgust virtually as one, and I think that aspect of it was totally awesome.
And then I tried to think of other shows in which there were Mommy Issues instead of the omnipresent Daddy Issues and all I could come up with was Alias, which I never watched but which must, from the decriptions, have given Sydney Mommy Issues. Any others people can think of?