Saturday, August 29, 2009

Welcome to the Dollhouse

10:21 PM / Television / Comments6 Comments

Television

Looks like Tim Minear has joined the staff of Dollhouse full time for its upcoming second season, after holding down a part-time consulting role on Season 1 (for which he wrote two episodes, including the broadcast season finale). This can only be good news: I've long been of the opinion that, of all the writers to be involved with Mutant Enemy's various productions, he was one of the best, perhaps second only to Joss Whedon. (He started on Angel before transferring to the short-lived Firefly as joint showrunner with Whedon, after which he left to lead the ill-fated but oh-so-funny Wonderfalls.) Oh, and actors Summer Glau and Alexis Denisof are coming along for the ride too, joining other former Mutant Enemy alums Eliza Dushku and Amy Acker. It's going to be a great big reunion, and I for one am looking forward to it.

I'm still slowly working my way through Season 1 on BD, by the way, and will hopefully reach the end before Season 2 begins on September 25. (I'm pretty busy at the moment, working on the PhD - next chapter due in about a month's time - and some other things that I'm not currently at liberty to discuss publicly.) I have a few opinions about it, but will refrain from posting them until I've seen it through to the end. Oh, and please keep nagging at me to post my thoughts on Firefly, which I finished a number of weeks ago but haven't had the time to do a write-up for yet.

Oh, okay. One word about Firefly: terrific.

 
6 Comments

1. Kram Sacul said:

How would you compare Firefly the tv show to Serenity?

(Posted on Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 3:20 PM)

2. Author Profile Page Michael said:

They're very different beasts. Serenity obviously moves at a much faster pace and tells a more self-contained story. In that sense, it feels more satisfying. However, Firefly has more room to breathe, if you know what I mean. You get to know the characters better, and it doesn't feel quite so much like it's rushing along at full speed, trying to make it to the end of the story before time runs out. I like both a great deal. If I was trying to introduce a new view to the universe, I suspect I'd start with Serenity rather than Firefly - I did feel that the series took a while to find its feet and I wasn't too taken by either the pilot or the first broadcast episode. Serenity, however, was my first introduction to the franchise, so I suspect my opinion of it may colour it slightly.

(Posted on Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 3:53 PM)

3. Kram Sacul said:

I guess I'll have to sit thru the rest series one of these days then. I thought the movie was decent but IMO the characters had very little to do with it for me.

(Posted on Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 5:25 PM)

4. Erik said:

Didn't Minear write that so-so "cult" episode which Joss included among the ones he disliked from Season 1? ;) I suspect that, as with most of Whedon's shows, S2 will be a major step up. The cast and crew seems to think so, even though they *may* be biased...

- - -

"They'll be cutting the budget in half, but Whedon seemed unfazed. In fact, he admitted that he liked the idea of running the outfit "without the flash, because then all you have to fall back on is quality" and sees it as an opportunity to get back to the great writing that made his prior shows so successful."

"Whedon wrapped his top-secret horror film The Cabin in the Woods on May 29 and hit the Dollhouse writers' room on June 1. "I just wanted to die of tiredness," he tells EW.com. "About two hours after starting to talk to the writers about story, I was back with such a vengeance, and so energized and so pumped because we really understand the show now. We understand what works, and what didn't work so well or what we weren't so thrilled about. We don't have the onus of trying to be a big hit sitting on our shoulders. We can just be ourselves. And so the stories we're breaking are pure, and exciting, and everybody's on-board in the room, and it's never flowed better."

What does that mean for Season 2? "I'm really proud of the second half of season 1, and we're just expanding on that in a huge way: Finding out the different things that Eliza [Dushku] can be, at the same time as extending our mythology," Whedon says. "Really, just every meeting is like, 'What's the most fun we can have with this actor?' about the whole cast. All I can say -- 'cause I'm gonna be Mr. Un-Spoiler -- is that we're having a crazy amount of fun, and usually, that tends to translate onto the screen."

"Welcome back to the biggest surprise of my career, our season two."

FOX's renewal of "Dollhouse" for a second season did indeed qualify as one of the bigger shocks of the spring. Whedon is unsurprisingly psyched to be back, and he says he and his fellow writers have "more excitement and enthusiasm about the show than we did by a country mile last year, because we are in it now."

(Posted on Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 7:04 PM)

5. Author Profile Page Michael said:

I actually quite liked the "cult" episode... It seems as if every Joss Whedon show has to have its token "religious loony colony" episode, so I guess they were just getting Dollhouse's one out of the way as early as possible. :D

I'm very curious to see what the slashed budget means in practice for the show. Whedon has talked about Season 2 having a very different look to Season 1. Personally I'm hoping for something more along the lines of Firefly's "happy accident" style rather than the mushy DV look of Epitaph One. Translation: I hope they're still shooting on film.

(Posted on Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 7:26 PM)

6. Erik said:

Well, true, but he was quite hard on himself for that episode. So, for those who find that he plays the blame game on others too much...

"Whedon spoke candidly about his problems with the first few episodes of Dollhouse. He admitted that he has made episodes that have nothing to say, for which he is ashamed. He singled out the fifth episode, "True Believer", as one that fails to explore the motivations for why people join cults and how these reasons connect with why people end up in the Dollhouse. Ultimately, he said, though there's nothing wrong with making television that is merely diverting, it's not something he's interested in doing."

I believe the words "darker," "racier" and "more real world" have been bandied about for the S2 look. But I'm sorry to say, part of the budget cut meant that film had to go bye-bye, it'll be fully shot on HD. Let's face it, most TV shows are these days, including several "big budget" ones.

Glad to hear you liked FIREFLY, btw.

(Posted on Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 8:04 PM)

 
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