the second season wasnt BARELY promoted. all they did was run a couple 10-15 second TV spots for it and noone even knew the show as comming back, and when Eliza did promotion for the show, its ratings went up. . . but then FOX benched it and put it back on 2 weeks later, so the extra people who tuned in came back the next week and saw it wasnt on, and then didnt tune in the week after and the ratings went right back to where they were.

there were a lot of die hard “Dollhouse” fans out there, but lack of promotion and rumors of it being canceled, and FOX’s lame attempts to dispell those rumors were the downfall.

people may not agree with me, but thats how i feel and facts are facts.

In any event, the show was doomed almost from the start as a result. I found many of the episodes interesting, but as I’ve said many times before, the biggest fault was having Eliza be an Active rather than an EX-Active trying to bring down the Dollhouse. This made her a weak lead with no consistent personality the audience could get behind. And there was no other POV person – neither Ballard nor Boyd qualified. And everybody else were the antagonists. There’s no way to make that work.

Well, if Joss would email me, I’m working on his next project. The tagline: They’re the most powerful and dangerous supercriminals in the world – and they’re the Good Guys! Roles for Eliza, Summer, and other Whedon/Friedman favorites! Call me, Joss! Make me showrunner, I guarantee you five seasons!

Set in a small town, the ensemble comedy revolves around a disparate group of people who find a unique way to exercise their creativity by making episodes of their favorite show after its end.

I imagine this is based on Charles’ real-life experiences with the Whedon Grape-Kool-Aid Cult? Hey, Whedonuts, look on the bright side. “Dollhouse” may be dunzo on FOX, but now you can make your own episodes!

The mishandling of Firefly was hate mail worthy. The cancellation of Dollhouse is not.

And, since you mention it … let’s be honest, if the show really WAS overtly about “brainwashed sex slaves” then the ratings would likely be a lot higher than they’ve been. Or come to think of it, if handled well, it might actually be a much more interesting show. We should pitch it to someone!

Whedon, as far as I know, seems as close as you can get — since he likes to deal in ethics and metaphors more often than others. Abrams has much tighter, more consistent and more clever plots which makes it more complicated, but not really more deep. Anthology shows, such as Outer Limits and Twilight Zone, might have been more of your cup of tea — except, more often than not, I find them lacking in overall execution (both technical as well as storytelling) even if they have an interesting thought to provide. You mentioned Star Trek already, but I wonder about your thoughts on a show like Quantum Leap?

In general, I like television for stories that involve heavy character development or complex plot development or just idle entertainment. Complex themes are generally harder to interweave into something that airs 22x times a year as, often, the message is lost if stretched over multiple episodes and, if condensed into one, leaves nothing for the remainder of the season.

For example, DH had some nice ideas but bad execution (the conclusion to the whole backup singer episode isn’t really that bad in concept); an interesting consideration of moral dilemmas which might have been more palatable to general audiences if it was wrapped up in a single episode, although may have turned off some (see above for examples) when extended over several seasons; and some clever ideas (Epitath One), of which everyone rallied to have a continuation, but — in my opinion — would have probably devolved into a generic zombie storyline if we had a whole season of that.

Nonetheless, here’s to you finding a TV show that meets your tastes (and let us know when you do).

…okay, you sci-fi fans, brickbats – set to “tase, tribble, then annhilate”!

…but I do appreciate JBF, as he does have a wicked sense of humour, and doesn’t take himself that seriously – and I do wish Mr. Wheedon well on his next endeavour, and hope I want to watch it…

Nota bene – you’ll notice I said “on television” – try finding downloads of a radio program called “X Minus One” – there were some outstanding episodes produced

Bill and Robert, mere admins? They could have hired admins and never posted within the entries, as they own the site – thank them for their active participation, rather than what they could do – zap any post they wanted, as some admins on some sites I know do…

Dollhouse and Castle the only shows drawing such disparate reactions ever? See Firefly, Jericho, T:SCC, Chuck, Jay Leno, All In The Family, Laugh-In, Shields and Yarnell…

As far as I’ve been able to tell over the last few couple months, the site consists entirely of:

– Normal people saying they like the shows even if they get cancelled, and will enjoy them while they last even if they do

– The radid and insulting ‘hateful’ haters/trolls who insult and spew bile at the normal people every time with ridiculous rationalizations as to why the normal people should feel bad and ashamed for liking those shows

– The supposedly funny ‘sarcastic’ haters/trolls who post “funny” parodies of things that have never happened except in their own head and are just an outlet for mass amounts of passive-aggressive vitriol and hate

– The admins who prance around squeeing and clapping their virtual hands about how funny the sarcastic trolls are, and how they’re going to print their comments out and frame them in their office in a shameful display of pandering to the loudest denominator and a blatantly misled impression that endorsement of ‘sarcastic’ trolls does not count as grievously bad management of a website

… and that’s pretty much it. So, yeah, I can totally see this site going through some sort of identity crisis if those two shoes are canceled… I mean what WILL they talk/bitch/hate/passively-aggressively admin-endorse trolls about??? God knows.

Fox puts a show on a 9pm slot on a Friday and is surprised when it doesn’t have great ratings?! Really?!? Fault is on Fox for this one – poor advertising and poor decision making.

My friends and I have all agreed to stop watching anything on Fox from here on out.

http://io9.com/5405067/
very funny and on topic lolz

I’m not sure I can agree with the issue of publicity, because I remember a number of people actually getting up in arms about the original ad campaign Fox had going for the show. It was a combo Dollhouse/Sarah Connor Chronicles ad with a lot of stress on the “hottie” factor and some unfortunate insinuations that Dushku and Glau were kinda-sorta “Real Girl”-esque toys to play with. Several bloggers flipped out at the ads and Fox got a lot of ire-filled letters about that.

And even if Fox had come up with a good ad campaign and promoted the show relentlessly, I don’t think it would have helped much. Too many of the people I know — and these are people who until now practically worshipped the ground Joss walks on — hate the show. I’m talking about serious, virulent loathing, and it’s in large part because of the whole “yeah, we’re slaving these poor people out, but it’s okay, they signed contracts, and we’re sleazy but lovable!” characterization of the Dollhouse staff. This was something I was able to get past but a lot of people couldn’t. Viewer retention is, in some ways, a lot more critical than advertising for new viewers, and word-of-mouth seems to have hurt the show rather than helped it. No flashy ad is going to entice someone to watch something if all of their trusted friends have told them it sucks.

As a hobby I sometimes engage in online freeform RPGs on Livejournal, which has several communities where you can bring in characters from any fandom of your choosing to play. You can actually measure a show’s likely success or failure by whether or not any of its characters show up in these communities, how many versions of them are in play, and how many other players will play off of them, etc. I’m the only one I know of who ever attempted to bring in a Dollhouse character, and when I was considering having her join a more structured game, the owner of the game privately asked me not to bring her in because way too many of the other players (people I’d figured would be receptive to her because I knew they were “Whedonverse” fans) “had serious issues with the show” and “would be very uncomfortable with her around.”

I’m bringing all of that I-have-no-life TMI up simply because, IMO, one of the biggest problems that the show had, from the very beginning, was that a large chunk of the anticipated fanbase actually became some of the show’s strongest detractors. It’s not a matter of the writing being inconsistent, although that didn’t help. It’s a matter of the underlying premise — human trafficking and presenting the people engaged in it as sympathetic — was too upsetting for a lot of people. And while the show often handled the material very adroitly, it did make enough missteps to turn people off. Yes, that is a factor of inconsistent writing (which the show absolutely could not afford). But with a less delicate premise, a badly-done episode now and then wouldn’t have been so deadly.

There’s used coal on sale over at eBay for $4 on up

The thing is though that that’s in some ways beside the point. Fox didn’t mandate anything concerning the first episode, that was Whedon’s decision. He felt it didn’t work as the first episode, intended to make it the second, and then decided not to bother with it at all. So regardless of whether you love or hate the pilot, that’s Whedon’s fault, not the network’s.

I don’t blame the network at all for the quality of Dollhouse, I’ve not heard of any actual demands they made of the series (from wanting some standalone episodes to ensuring that at least an entity in the show, Rossum, was clearly right or wrong) that were unreasonable. The problem was with those involved in making Dollhouse, they just couldn’t figure out how to make standalones work, despite the fact that it’s inevitable that any open ended TV drama outside of soap operas requires the occasional standalone.

Insofar as Fox “deserves blame”, it’s the fact they originally gave up on the series from the beginning, so we saw very little promotion, and the show has been paired, from the start, with other shows Fox clearly either had already decided to cancel, or didn’t have any faith in either. But, you know, in the end Fox has to make decisions about who goes where, and if it hadn’t been Dollhouse, it would have been Fringe, or Lie to Me, or The Cleveland Show, or… so I’m not going to get upset at them for that, especially as, in the end, like T:SCC, the biggest problem with Dollhouse was with the people making the show, who were smart, talented, and brought a lot of great, original, ideas to the table, but who made some absolutely dire episodes that were enough to drive away viewers away from the really good ones.

Let’s hope they learn from this and whatever they do next is stronger as a result.

If you’ve ever seen the original pilot (not the redone one that Fox actually put on the air, but the original version available on the DVD box set) you’ll probably notice that Fox’s mandated changes to it actually made it a lot better. The aired version is superior to the original version — Lubov’s real identity was revealed far too soon in the original version, for example, instead of being drawn out over a few episodes.

This isn’t to say that the network was right all the time; just that Joss wasn’t either. But the overall problem, IMO, came down to the nature of the doll contracts.

When I first heard about the show, I was figuring that it was something a little more like the sequence in “The Matrix” where Neo or Trinity had the capacity to download specific skillsets into their minds for use in combat situations. A group of operatives who could go into deep cover by adopting the complete personalities of the people they were pretending to be? Awesome. The problem was that that wasn’t who the dolls were.

Discovering that, at the end of the day, none of them had any knowledge or awareness of who they were or what they had done — that completely negated the positive effects of whatever they’d achieved while they were imprinted. Having them depicted as hollowed-out and dehumanized — and even, periodically, preyed upon by their own handlers — was more than a lot of people could stomach. Yes, it was supposed to be a metaphor for the way the entertainment industry treats actors and musicians as commodities rather than people, but the metaphor broke down every time Echo or the other dolls were reset to their “tabula rasa” state. Or, if it didn’t break down for someone watching the show, it left them feeling so uncomfortably guilty about watching TV at all — participating in that process of dehumanization — that they probably tuned in somewhere else the next week.

The running plot about one of the Dolls becoming self-aware, and the whole corporation responsible for the Dollhouse being sinister and nefarious and in need of shutting down — those things actually sabotaged the show rather than helping it along. They encouraged the audience to want the Dolls to escape and their ordeals to end, rather than to want the “Actives” (as they were also called) to go on new and exciting adventures. That meant that in every episode, the viewers were being encouraged to root for the end of the show (or, at the very least, the end of its driving premise). It’s hard to keep your audience coming back for more when that’s the goal you’ve set for them!

I kept watching, but mostly because I was interested in the subplots. I wanted to know more about Sierra and Victor and why they became Dolls, and wanted to watch their romance develop and see how they might handle it once their memories of who they really were got restored. I wanted to watch Topher’s conscience and compassion toward the Dolls develop. I wanted to know more about his back-story with Whiskey/Dr. Saunders. I wanted the father-daughter relationship between Echo and Boyd to develop, and the mother-daughter relationship between Adele and Echo to be unraveled a little more. But the main plot wasn’t particularly interesting or appealing to me, and if I hadn’t started caring about those subplots, I’d probably have been out of there, too.

TL;DR — it could have had mainstream appeal, if the fundamental premise hadn’t been one that made so many people uneasy and uncomfortable. And there’s plenty of blame to go around for that. To me, the main culprit in why it failed is that it required much of its audience to feel too uncomfortable about what they were watching, and nobody who uses TV as escapism is going to put up with that for long.

Just don’t Watch it

As for Whedon himself, well this was not his finest hour. Like Tarantino, when he was good, you are only as good as your last good production. Dollhouse just wasn’t good enough and all the bizarre psycho-babble that came with it did not convince general viewers otherwise.

But @Dollhouse, well i think Whedon and the Whedon fans should be happe that they got what they got. Its obvious to me that fox just wanted whedon happy cause he is to develope a new show for them (and direct a Glee episode). So they gave Dollhouse a second year knowing that it will die.

The problem with it was from the begining that you did not have a likeably character. You see Elizas character was well a doll and you could not really relate to that. SO it died. Good so!

Fox had to Sci-Fi shows and desided to try something that worked in the past…a sci-fi night.(X-Files/Sliders/Millenium..all had successfull runs their).

TSCC/Dollhouse seemed like a good idea and this way promos could run durring Idle Tue, Idle Wed, and Bones Thur…Fox’s 3 best nights.

If Dollhouse would of been successfull in any way Fox would of done like CBS did w/ CSI moved it to another night.

Fox wanted stand alone episodes for the first 5,
(doesn’t seem like a bad idea)…They still had the Ballard slow moving investigation.

The show should of made it where we sympofised w/ Echo but they didn’t

Fox did make some mistakes, or judgement calls that didn’t work out very well, however. The show was promised a slot on a night other than Friday (I believe that it was Monday) and Fox changed that decision. Would the show have brought better ratings on Monday – Thursday? I believe that it would have. Though of course the demands and competition are higher on those days as well. Would the higher ratings have been high enough? We have no idea, but Fox had not had a Friday show successful enough to be renewed in many years and that points to an overall problem with their ability to bring viewers to that night. Fox did request/require some changes to the show’s premise and initial five episodes that did contribute to turning off some viewers. Fox’s did not seem to have a clear advertising strategy for the show and I believe that that resulted in commercials and promos that were not effective, or as effective as they should have been.

Overall, I believe that Fox is worthy of some of the “blame”, but certainly not all of it.

As for that other guy getting hatemail he says “still” that must refer to Firefly – can’t imagine there would be that much fuss over Dollhouse.

Now, if Jay took a page from Bob Hope, and taped a few USO tours to air during some Leno slots, I just might write in

There are only two shows that I ever wrote any kind of letter to FOX or any other network for that matter, to save. Firefly and Arrested Development.

…be sure to send Ben Silverman and Dawn Ostroff a stocking stuffer for Christmas