Whedonites are itching to get their weekly installment of Joss Whedon's irreverent humor in fantasy television. Dollhouse will be a bittersweet treat for them, an outrageous sci-fi premise, but an earnest tone without the self-referential one-liners.
Whedon Builds His Dollhouse
"There is a lot of fun and a lot of humor in it," Whedon said. "What it doesn't have is the sort of inherent silliness that both Buffy and Firefly had and even Angel. We could just take one step back. Part of the fun was deconstructing the genre we were in. This has to be a little bit more grounded in order for it to play, or it would become sort of campy. With vampires and spaceships and horses, we had more leeway to be a little less realistic in how we plotted things. Humor has found its way into the show all over the place because we have really funny actors and these situations do become absurd. Besides, we'd get really bored if we didn't."
Dollhouse is about a company who implants their actives with a personally specifically suited to their clients' needs, then wipes them clean when they're done. The complicated show has already gone through extensive fine tuning, including a reshot pilot.
"I think this show definitely went through a tougher process, tough in a different way than the other shows. Probably most similar to Angel in the sense of what we had in our minds about what Angel was ultimately was different than what the network did. Our version was a little darker. In this instance, it wasn't so much a question of reworking what the show was as it was a question of reworking how we got into it. There were definitely some differences of opinion about what was going on, what we were going to stress in the show. Mostly it was about how we bring the audience in."
So what was wrong with the first version? "The mandate was very much once they'd seen the pilot, and they made some noise about this before, the mandate was: Give us not just the world of the show but the structure of the show. The original pilot explained everything that happened but came at it very sideways. They said, 'Let the audience see an engagement so that they understand that every week she's going to go to a different place and be a different person.' That part was simple enough but there was some real questioning about what exactly we wanted to get at in terms of humanity and what they do and why people hire them. There's a sexual aspect to it that makes some people nervous. We're out to make people uncomfortable but maybe not so much our bosses."
Don't worry, he knows what he's doing. He's a pro. "Well, it's always an ongoing process to an extent but we had all the elements, the characters, none of which were changed really. The premise, the concept, the way we were able to explore what makes us human, all of that's in there and as the season progresses, it ends up going exactly where I hoped it would go at the beginning, before all this happened. I do feel like we got back to our vision in a way that really works for the network. The last few episodes that we've just completed shooting have gotten all of us extraordinarily excited."
Add to Heffee!
