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Most people who write for TV are not famous. How good of a TV writer must Joss Whedon be, that he is famous for it? The answer is, very good. Whedon - who is also a director-producer-creator person - is the man behind, among other brilliant things, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (which if you don't know what that is, it's very important that you find out immediately). (Read about Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog...
Writer-producer Joss Whedon has played with the conventions of monster stories (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel), space sagas (Firefly) and comic books (Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog). Now, with Dollhouse (Fox, Fridays, 9 p.m. E.T.), he tries dystopian sci-fi. Echo is not a slave, technically; she goes to the Dollhouse after having run into unspecified trouble as an idealistic college grad named Caroline. The deal: if she becomes an active, the company makes her problem go away--along with all her memories. The threads running through this ambitious serial: Who was she? And what...
...Whedon evidently thinks these are valid questions. He addresses them, not always persuasively, through FBI agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett of Battlestar Galactica), who's determined to sniff out the Dollhouse. His bosses are skeptical that it even exists, let alone why anyone would patronize it. "If you have everything," Ballard explains, "you want something else. Something more extreme, something more specific. Something perfect...
Echo has a different assignment each episode--the three sent for review are a hostage case, a wilderness adventure and a heist caper--which makes Dollhouse a kind of drama-school exercise for Whedon and Dushku. The genre-hopping Whedon is up to the task; his hostage-negotiation story would make a crisp pilot for a CBS procedural. And he unsettlingly conveys the actives' experience of living a constantly interrupted dream. ("Did I fall asleep?" they ask after each treatment.) But Dushku, memorable as the bad-girl Faith in Buffy, isn't much of a chameleon. She's passably callow...
...problem, because Whedon has set a challenging goal. Whereas his past series had ready-made good-vs.-evil setups, Dollhouse is morally nebulous. Sometimes we're rooting for Ballard to bust the Dollhouse, sometimes we're rooting for Echo's handlers and protectors in the organization that pimps her out. (Harry Lennix is sympathetic as her conflicted bodyguard, and Fran Kranz amusingly skeevy as the in-house tech geek.) Pulling this off means getting the audience to connect with a lead who is not, in the usual sense, a person, which may be more than Echo--or Dushku--can manage...