Dollhouse: Faith No More
I guess this is either the season of disappointment, or of me turning into a curmudgeon. First JK Rowling, now Joss Whedon...
So last Friday I watched the first Dollhouse episode, "Echo." Will I watch the next tomorrow? Probably not. As far as I can tell from the first, the basic premises of the series are:
(1) What if the Initiative from 4th-season Buffy wasn't a secret government project, but a secret criminal project?
(2) What if there was only one important character, played by Eliza Dushku?
(3) What if there weren't any vampires, so this Faith-based Initiative devoted its energy to reprogramming people's memories instead?
OK, maybe that doesn't sound so bad. And I did watch it all the way through, but in a "maybe it's just off to a slow start way. Sure, reprogramming memories is old news in SF, but not nearly so much so as vampires in horror. And the potential it offers is for a lot of clever actors to play a lot of different personalities.
But that's not what happens in "Echo." Only one Active (that's what the reprogrammable victims of the Dollhouse are called) gets to show any personality, and that's Ms. Dushku, who plays three personalities. Unfortunately, they're all the same, and all highly recognizable: The extremely competent and even more extremely vulnerable Bad Girl. The fact that she's also the producer doesn't bode well, I'm afraid; are the other characters going to have a chance to emerge as anything other than stock? Isn't a first episode supposed to give all the main supporting cast room to define themselves?
To make matters worse, much of the episode is taken up by a rather tedious kidnapping drama. And my suspension of belief kept wavering, over specifics (Echo's handling of the kidnap negotiations, the superfluous chinoiserie at the beginning), and the whole concept: It doesn't seem possible that the existence of a criminal project on the scale of the Dollhouse could be kept secret for more than about 15 minutes. And stereotypes abound: Hey, we know this guy is a gangster because he has a Russian accent. Oh, right, he's in the Borodin gang -- if he were in the Mafia, would he be part of the Vivaldi mob?
But none of this is what really bugged me. Here's the bad part: It wasn't funny. Not even quirky. Well, there was one mildly amusing bit of byplay about Edward James Olmos, but that was it. I went in expecting entertainment, and this was just... television.
So last Friday I watched the first Dollhouse episode, "Echo." Will I watch the next tomorrow? Probably not. As far as I can tell from the first, the basic premises of the series are:
(1) What if the Initiative from 4th-season Buffy wasn't a secret government project, but a secret criminal project?
(2) What if there was only one important character, played by Eliza Dushku?
(3) What if there weren't any vampires, so this Faith-based Initiative devoted its energy to reprogramming people's memories instead?
OK, maybe that doesn't sound so bad. And I did watch it all the way through, but in a "maybe it's just off to a slow start way. Sure, reprogramming memories is old news in SF, but not nearly so much so as vampires in horror. And the potential it offers is for a lot of clever actors to play a lot of different personalities.
But that's not what happens in "Echo." Only one Active (that's what the reprogrammable victims of the Dollhouse are called) gets to show any personality, and that's Ms. Dushku, who plays three personalities. Unfortunately, they're all the same, and all highly recognizable: The extremely competent and even more extremely vulnerable Bad Girl. The fact that she's also the producer doesn't bode well, I'm afraid; are the other characters going to have a chance to emerge as anything other than stock? Isn't a first episode supposed to give all the main supporting cast room to define themselves?
To make matters worse, much of the episode is taken up by a rather tedious kidnapping drama. And my suspension of belief kept wavering, over specifics (Echo's handling of the kidnap negotiations, the superfluous chinoiserie at the beginning), and the whole concept: It doesn't seem possible that the existence of a criminal project on the scale of the Dollhouse could be kept secret for more than about 15 minutes. And stereotypes abound: Hey, we know this guy is a gangster because he has a Russian accent. Oh, right, he's in the Borodin gang -- if he were in the Mafia, would he be part of the Vivaldi mob?
But none of this is what really bugged me. Here's the bad part: It wasn't funny. Not even quirky. Well, there was one mildly amusing bit of byplay about Edward James Olmos, but that was it. I went in expecting entertainment, and this was just... television.