Dollhouse - FOX Strikes Again

Dear FOX execs:

Put down the Sharpie and step away from the script, NOW. You are screwing with my Whedon, and I do NOT appreciate.

*sigh*

I finally got to see the Dollhouse premier on Hulu.com, and I don't think it's unfair or overreaching to call it a travesty. It misfired on all 8 cylinders, with wooden acting, bad dialogue, confusing subplots, gimmicky bits, and seeming red herrings galore. There was barely any Whedon present in a show Joss both wrote and directed, which I have to assume is because FOX execs could not just sit back and trust the Whedon, so they supplied the first cut of the pilot with copious and plentiful notes...probably a 4" D-ring binder's worth, if the end result is anything to go by. Every so often, I saw Joss' touch, but for the most part, it seemed a jumbled mishmash of jump cuts, flash, and painful, Intro to Acting acting and trite, melodramatically enigmatic dialogue. It's hard for me to believe the opening scene was pure Whedon, since Joss has the tightest grip on dialogue I've seen come out of tv-land, and that scene was excruciating in it's lack of connection, either character to character or characters to viewer. It angled for mysterious and hit "wow, that's really bad," instead. :(

Understand, I love Joss. I fell in love with BTVS roughly 60 seconds into the pilot. Angel's pilot was a tad raw, but it did not suck and still had enough Joss in it to keep me coming back every week until it found its stride and surpassed Buffy. I hated the Firefly pilot, but it turns out that was FOX's fault, and when I saw the real pilot, Serenity (parts 1&2), I fell in love with Firefly, as well. Dr. Horrible rocked it from the get-go. Which is why the premiere of Dollhouse was more than a little crushing. I'll keep watching, because I have faith in Joss, and I saw enough of him in it to know that if FOX allows him to do his thing, I'll love Dollhouse too. But it has to get better (a LOT better), or I don't know how long I'll last. And that means FOX needs to back the hell off and let Joss do what Joss does.

Here are my problems with the pilot:
Olivia Williams is just plain bad. You can drive whole fleets of trucks through her pauses, and there's nothing going on behind her eyes. I don't buy her for a second as the Badass Leader of Science's Answer to Wolfram & Hart. She had no connection whatsoever to her own character, let alone her character connecting to anyone else. When I saw the opening scene played as a clip on Craig Ferguson, I thought it must look so horrible because it was taken out of context, but no, that scene was dreadful, and mostly because Williams was so awful, though the dialogue wasn't good either.

Speaking of dialogue, it had very little of Whedon's touch to it. There were moments that screamed Joss, but so much of it was bland and rushed, I wondered how much was edited by FOX and whether or not the pilot started out as something longer that got whittled down. I also felt rather bludgeoned with the obvious - how many times do they think I need to be told Echo can't remember x-event? I get it - she has her memory tinkered with. I don't need to hear 5 times in the space of as many minutes that she can't remember what happened to her leg. I really got the feeling FOX kept sending the note to Joss that this or that wasn't clear and could he please emblazon it on a baseball bat and beat the audience to death with it. I have no other explanation for the obviousness of the entire first act (and a few other things throughout the episode).

I like Eliza Dushku, but that was not her best work. She doesn't play Stepford well at all, and she really needs to for the pilot, at least, to have worked. If she's going to keep having "I don't remember" moments, then the Stepford needs to be a LOT better.

The whole subplot with the FBI guy is heavy-handed. It really needs to be more subtle. More like Wolfram & Hart was handled on Angel. As it is now, I could not possibly care less about the idiotic FBI guy. I also don't care for the actor, and I definitely do NOT think he's hot, like everyone else in the known world seems to believe he is. Ew.

None of the characters mesh at all except for Echo and her handler. They do not connect. Whedon takes his time building character connections, and I get that, but still. All his other shows, the characters had reasons for sticking to each other when they collided. Dollhouse is missing that. Except for Echo & her handler, no one sticks. They all just bounce off of each other and continue on. It's aggravating. Whedon gets ensembles like nobody else, and this show does not feel like an ensemble. It's just a bunch of actors thrust together. I wouldn't be surprised to find out they all hate each other. It's disappointing.

I do not dig flashbacks in general. They're trite and tend to be confusing. I understand why that convention was used in the pilot, but I really hope it's not going to be a common occurrence. I don't give a damn what Mr. FBI was doing in his flashbacks, especially. So he beat somebody up. You told me that in the dialogue. I could not be less interested in seeing it.

The Whedon Audience Pact - wherein Joss brings the intelligent and trusts us to keep up - was violated, big time. I blame this entirely on FOX execs who clearly have the brain power of ducks and figure if they can't understand it, the audience won't be able to either. News flash: I am smarter than the average FOX exec. So is most of America. Or at least the demographic this show is aimed at. The idiots watching Dancing with the American Idol Survivor wouldn't get it, but they aren't watching either. Nor are they likely to, no matter how dumbed down it is. SciFi is not their cup of tea.

I disliked more, but that's all I can think of right offhand. And I blame it entirely on the idiots at FOX, since I've gotten pretty good at spotting unfettered Whedon, and that was not it. But I actually liked stuff too. To whit:

Dushku and Amy Acker are back in the Whedonverse, which is full of Big Bad, and that tends to serve up a giant plate of fun.

There were Joss moments, and they ruled. Echo's "I think I'm too old for you," was fantastic - well-written and perfectly delivered. And the bit in the lab where Lab Geek says the blue parts of Echo's brain scan show fear. Handler: "They're all blue." Geek: "You see where I'm going with this." Excellent. I can also see there are arc subplots in place and ready to play out in true Whedon fashion.

I like the concept of a girl wiped clean every day and where that might go when all hell breaks loose.

I like most of the casting, and Whedon has set up the conflict with Echo's character well: we know she didn't volunteer willingly for the program and that something is going to go awry with her programming. I'm betting that's going to be worth watching. I just hope everything else is too.