Joss Whedon: The Biography (60 page)

Joss performed “Heart (Broken),” a song about having to do DVD commentary as a writer and producer (something he’d done many times by this point, over a total of thirteen DVD sets for
Buffy, Angel
, and
Firefly
). “I always want to get behind or inside everything I’m doing,” Joss said. “I want to dig underneath it and say, what’s the point of this, of this medium, of this experience? Why did you sit down with me for an hour? Why did you do it? Why did I do it? Why did I write this?”

Homer’s Odyssey was swell.

A bunch of guys that went through hell.

He told the tale, but didn’t tell

The audience why.

He didn’t say, here’s what it means.

And here’s a few deleted scenes.

Charybdis tested well with teens….

But now we pick, pick, pick, pick, pick it apart.

Open it up to find the tick, tick, tick of a heart.

Over the next year, the critical accolades and awards continued to roll in.
Dr. Horrible
ranked number fifteen in
Time
magazine’s list of the top fifty inventions of 2008. It took home the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, beating out the smash hit
Lost
and Hugo favorites
Doctor Who
and
Battlestar Galactica
. In September 2009,
Dr. Horrible
scored Joss his first Emmy win, for Outstanding Special Class—Short-Format Live-Action Entertainment Programs.

As the writers’ strike ended and
Dr. Horrible
went into postproduction, Joss also went back to work on his upcoming series for Eliza Dushku. Although Fox had already committed to seven episodes of
Dollhouse
, network executives still wanted to see a pilot. So Joss began writing the introductory episode “Echo,” fleshing out his noirish tale of the mysterious lab where “dolls,” or Actives, having been stripped of their original memories and personalities, are temporarily implanted with new personal backgrounds and skills, to be hired out for particular jobs—most often committing crimes or fulfilling customers’ sexual fantasies. As the series begins, Dushku’s character, the Active codenamed Echo, starts to recover pieces of her native personality, forcing her to deal with the questions of who she really is and what her identity means to herself and the world around her. Meanwhile, the FBI has gotten wind of the Dollhouse’s very illegal operations and is investigating the facility and its owner, the Rossum Corporation.

Next, Joss assembled the supporting cast. The writer with the passionate fan following became a fanboy himself when Tahmoh Penikett of
Battlestar Galactica
was cast as Paul Ballard, the FBI agent making trouble for the Dollhouse. Joss was a very vocal fan of the Sci Fi Channel remake and had done his best not to be “too embarrassing” when chatting up series creator Ron Moore on the WGA picket lines. “Joss and I found common ground with
Battlestar
,” Penikett says. “Initially, that was the main thing that really brought us together. We would talk and talk about the show, talk about specific episodes—telling stories about the actors and the episodes. He had the opportunity to meet a lot of them, and if the show went on, you would have had seen a lot of
Battlestar
actors on
Dollhouse.
”

In the role of Adelle, the ruthless and cold head of the Dollhouse, Joss cast British actress Olivia Williams. Like Anthony Stewart Head, Williams was impressed by Joss’s ability to write for an English accent. Lesser attempts can often result in “painfully convoluted sentences and ridiculous circumlocution,” she says. “In order to make sense of badly executed English baddie-speak it is necessary to put a rod up your arse, and nobody likes to work in those conditions.” The best British villains, on the other hand, “have a kind of cool and succinct way of speaking” that Joss completely nailed.

Fran Kranz was cast as Topher, the snarky and morally challenged programmer who is in charge of implanting the dolls’ temporary personalities.
Angel
’s Amy Acker returned to the Whedonverse as Dr. Saunders, who tends to the physical health of the dolls, while Harry Lennix assumed the role of Boyd, Echo’s newbie handler, who looks after her when she goes on missions. Young actors Dichen Lachman, Enver Gjokaj, and Miracle Laurie would play Echo’s fellow Actives Sierra, Victor, and November.

With a premise that centered on attractive young people being programmed to serve a corporation’s paying customers, Joss anticipated some uneasy public reactions: “Did human trafficking just get pretty?” He knew that the concept was very edgy, even dangerous—one hair out of place and it could be untenable. He went so far as to pitch
Dollhouse
to the staff members of Equality Now in New York. “Some of them said, ‘I get it, that’s cool, that’s something to explore,’ and some of them were like, ‘You better be very careful!’” Joss says. “And then that rug kind of got pulled out from under us.”

Even though the series had been greenlit without a pilot, and Fox had recently upped their order from seven episodes to thirteen, once Joss filmed “Echo” and presented it to Fox, the network requested some changes. “The Network and I had different ideas about what the tone of the show would be,” Joss wrote on Whedonesque. “They bought something somewhat different than what I was selling them, which is not that uncommon in this business. Their desires were not surprising: up the stakes, make the episodes more stand-alone, stop talking about relationships and cut to the chase.”

It was feeling like
Firefly
all over again, when the network demanded a more action-oriented premiere episode to replace Joss’s dark and moody pilot. But whereas Fox made a good call on the
Firefly
premiere, it missed the mark on reworking “Echo.” As originally written and shot, the pilot provides a cohesive introduction to the concept of the Dollhouse and the FBI’s investigation of it. It succeeds in making the Actives seem empowered and in control as they carry out their programmed assignments, something that is often lacking in the finished episodes. Subsequent episodes would also lose the pilot’s noirish commentary on sex trafficking, which was lightened up at Fox’s request.

After several rounds of rewriting and editing, this time it was Joss who decided to scrap the pilot script and write a new premiere episode, “Ghost.” The new story begins with a strung-out young woman—Echo’s former self—agreeing to join the Dollhouse. It then quickly segues into Echo out on a job: a whirlwind date filled with such chemistry that anyone would believe that she and her gentleman friend are a real couple. When that’s over, she’s programmed to be a hostage negotiator to save a little girl from kidnappers.

Much of the nuance and humor of “Echo” is missing here, and several plot points, like the return of Echo’s memories and the Dollhouse’s awareness of Ballard’s investigation, are removed or stripped way down. Ballard, the confident and competent FBI agent who had met and ended up in a gun-battle standoff with Echo in his apartment in the original pilot, is a now a wild-card loner obsessively pursuing a conspiracy theory about an evil corporation. The character was one of several that had to be significantly rewritten to accommodate the network-mandated changes—which meant that Tahmoh Penikett and a few of his costars needed to relearn their places in the series as well.

Penikett was reassured by something that his mentor and
Battlestar Galactica
costar Edward James Olmos had said: “It takes a long time to find the music of a show, the music of a character.” His
Dollhouse
costar Harry Lennix told him something similar, that “every show has its own music and its own tone. It takes you a while to figure that out, but once you do, you really get the rhythm of your character and what’s going on.” The problem was that
Dollhouse
had found its music in the pilot, but like an old vinyl record, it had been scratched and warped by all of the changes that Fox requested. Joss would have to find a new tone, a new rhythm—and that would take time.

“A good deal of
Dollhouse
had to do with sex. Sexuality and perversion and our sexual and relationship needs and how they define us and what’s different about us, what’s similar,” Joss explains. “[Fox said] ‘This show’s great! The sex is not so good. We can’t have that. It seems like prostitution. So don’t do that.’ So in the premise, we had to sort of gloss over it or joke about it, and it became kind of offensive.”

Fox approved “Ghost” to kick off the series, but on September 10, 2008, after four scripts had been completed, Fox shut down production. The network wanted tweaks to the fourth episode, and the two-week shooting break would give Joss and his writing staff time to get ahead on scripts. Joss was getting deep into producing duties for
The Cabin in the Woods
, so he’d brought back some major Mutant Enemy players to help him with
Dollhouse
. Tim Minear and David Solomon returned as executive producers; Jane Espenson and Steve DeKnight also came in to pen scripts. And Joss made this project another family affair with the addition of writers Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen.

Dollhouse
was initially announced as a midseason series that would be paired with Fox’s hit series
24
on Monday nights. But in November, Fox announced that it had been moved to Friday night, along with former Monday-night series
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
, which had suffered from a ratings drop in its second season. Joss’s fans, many of whom were still mourning
Firefly
’s demise, were greatly concerned that the move to the Friday-night death slot again showed a lack of support from Fox. When
Dollhouse
premiered on Friday, February 13, 2009, it pulled in 4.72 million Nielsen viewers, comparable to
Firefly
’s bow. In the seven years in between premieres, DVRs had become more commonplace and live viewing numbers had taken a hit, so
Dollhouse
’s ratings, while not stellar, weren’t considered as much of a disappointment as
Firefly
’s had been.
Dollhouse
was also the night’s second-most-viewed series in the important eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old demographic and did particularly well with male viewers.

Excitement was high for Joss’s return to television after five years, but the reviews were mixed. At a time when so much on TV was generic, this was anything but. But that uniqueness shook up what fans had come to expect from the Whedonverse. Despite Fox’s adjustments,
Dollhouse
was
distinctly darker than Joss’s other series. And maybe because of those adjustments, it became possibly the hardest of his series to connect with as a viewer. Even in the darkest episodes of
Buffy
, viewers felt incredibly attached to the characters and their struggles.
Dollhouse
, on the other hand, was filled with characters who were either unlikeable or deliberately undefined. It was difficult to care about a main character whose personality was going to change dramatically from week to week depending on her assignment.

Joss could see all too clearly that the changes to the show had diluted his original premise of an objectified woman breaking free of her programming. This, in turn, was making it more and more difficult to find the “Echo of it” in each episode. “
Dollhouse
was the one time I looked around and said, ‘I don’t know what show I’m making.’ It had sort of been eaten away from the center,” he said. “It was the only time I felt like, ‘Am I steering this ship? Our ship? Are we the iceberg?’”

Reviews improved as the season went on and the series, like
Angel
before it, shifted its focus from the main character and her mission of the week to become a larger ensemble piece grounded in the characters and their complex relationships. Alan Tudyk made several appearances as Alpha, a psychotic former Active who’s obsessed with Echo.

While shooting an episode, Tudyk noticed a change in Joss since their
Firefly
days. During rehearsal, the actor improvised a line at the end of a scene. Tudyk was shocked when he was told to keep it in the final scene. “I said, ‘Whoa, no way! Are you serious? I cannot believe I’m getting my own line in a Joss Whedon thing.’ Joss was there, and he goes, ‘Really? Oh. I’ve relaxed,’” Tudyk said. “And he meant it like he was surprised to hear me say that.” Joss may have been more open to the occasional ad-lib, but his own words remained of paramount importance to him—something costar Olivia Williams has said she realized in her earliest conversations with him. Tahmoh Penikett agrees, saying, “There’s no mediation for the way he’s written—he’s such a specific writer. For some shows, an actor can change this word or do this a little differently. You can’t do that with Joss’s material. You have to deliver it the way it’s written. Which, he has every right [to demand], because there’s specific timing that has to be honored or else it won’t work. It’ll flop.”