Dollhouse

Season one (and possibly only) of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse is now over, and I have to say, damn!

By which I mean the good kind of damn, because the show turned out much better than I expected (I was underwhelmed by the premise), but also the bad kind of damn, because it is almost certainly cancelled, although there's been no official announcement as far as I know.

In some ways, it's tempting to blame Whedon's strategy for rolling out this show. In reaction to what happened to Firefly (where Fox showed the episodes out of order in an attempt to hook the audience early with more action-packed episodes), Whedon structured season one of Dollhouse with several self-contained storylines up front, attempting to run a series of "mini-pilots" that could stand alone no matter what order they were shown in. And it's true that early ratings weren't very good and critical reaction to those standalone episodes was mixed.

But when the series really started to hit its stride and bring together the separate threads of those first few episodes, the ratings continued to drop steadily. So whatever hooked me in and got me geeking out over a show I thought was fairly ho-hum at first apparently did not have the same effect on the vast majority of the audience out there.

It's too bad, because the show hinted at a lot of possibilities that I'd like to see them explore. And the characters revealed unsuspected depths in the final few episodes that cry out to be developed further.