So, like many a vacationer in the Whedonverse, I’ve been anticipating DOLLHOUSE with something approaching fervor. Also, like many a fellow Browncoat, I’ve quaked and shuddered and tut-tutted and sweated concern over the machinations at Fox, which has seemed determined to repeat its mistakes on FIREFLY, and reschedule, and recut and reorder the series into oblivion.

And like many a true-believer, I’ve watched the first few episodes, desperately wanting, willing, wishing – Like Alfred P. Doolittle before me – to love it.

And I’ve been sad and confused at the truth that not only are the first couple of episodes not any good, but (and here is what hopefully lifts this post out of fan-speak and into something that deserves to be on a writer and producer’s professional blog), they just haven’t been very Whedonesq.

Which is weird. Cause the one thing Joss has – in every medium, in every word, in every intonation of every syllable of his dialogue – it’s a voice. A highly specific, pop-culture saturated, rhythmically conscious, sardonic but never cynical; sentiment full, but never sentimental; always funny, always hyper-self-aware, voice – that speaks of a group of people not simply bound together by circumstance, but who have chosen to love each other.

And that voice was startling absent from the first two episodes of Dollhouse – despite the dialogue being said by a bunch of his usual actors; despite the preoccupations and themes being familiar (but also darker and more complex), the voice has been missing, and so has the love.

And that has been puzzling me and making me sad, and reluctantly agreeing with the mass of critical opinion that has been quick to write the show off. And then today, watching episode 3, or more specifically in the final 2 minutes of episode 3, the voice was back – bringing with it the love. And with the sigh of relief that one breaths when one realizes that an old friend who you haven’t seen for a really long time, hasn’t been changed by time but is still the old lug you remember and loved, I knew that it was going to be OK.

I also knew what had gone wrong. It was that the Network, in its anxiety to hook new viewers with the opening episodes had been pushing Josh to throw his characters into action too soon. Because they think that Joss, because he tells stories that are set in sci-fi, fantasy, horror worlds writes horror, or sci-fi or fantasy stories.

He doesn’t. In pure story terms, the writing tradition he is closest to is the serialized family epic novel: Dickens, Tolstoy, Alcott.  Where a group of highly complex, non-stock, highly individualistic characters you come to know deeply, and who are bound together by ties of family and time, grow and change slowly as they strive against themselves and each other, even as they do against circumstance.

And that’s a tradition that just plain doesn’t work if you throw those characters into action adventures BEFORE you know who they are.  And that’s what went wrong, and he let them do it to him. And he shouldn’t have.

This isn’t just a tale of the big bad studio bullying the individual writer, though. As a producer working with writers and always wanting our films to find the biggest audience possible, I am often the voice urging writers to think about what their audience needs, and what the market forces are, and the importance of clear hocks and audience engagement.  But the constant challenge is to do so, to phrase those challenges and push the writers in ways that work with – not against – the grain of their talent.  With the intrinsic DNA of the stories they want to tell.

When the producer or the exec fails to honour that rule, it becomes the writers duty to defend it to the death. Guillermo del Toro (no stranger to Studio Interference) has a brilliant way of putting this – he says you have to listen when they are telling you about the syntax of HOW to tell your story, but never, never let them tell you WHAT your story is or should be.

It feels to me that for 2.8 episodes, scarred by what had come before, both Joss and Fox got it wrong. They told him what his story needed to be, when all they should have been advising him on was how they needed it told; and he – playing a long game, feeling that he had to please now in order to get the full series commissioned, gave in. It’s completely understanable and explicable outcome. It just happens not to have served the story.

I am with bated breath in the hope that by Ep 4, we’ll be squarely back in the story Joss needs – with someone as good as him, its never just a want – to tell; and which we all need – with fans like his its never just a want either – to hear.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 02:43 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.