What Remains Of Dollhouse

Eliza Dushku and Amy Acker in Season 2 of Dollhouse.

I spent this morning with my brother on some personal business and had a bit of breakfast. We had a short argument about Dollhouse. He hated it from the get go, hated the premise (which I told him he had gotten completely wrong, but he's entitled to his opinion), hated the scripts. This didn't surprise me entirely. My brother and I, both science fiction and fantasy geeks, have very different sets of standards. For instance he loved Babylon 5. I myself could not stand that show. The over all storyline was interesting, and philosophically dense, but the writing and acting per episode was so atrociously bad that it rendered the show, for me, entirely unwatchable. So I laughed as he tried to break down Dollhouse as an excuse for an actress to be vapid.

By the way, he concedes the point on writing and acting but is able to go past that for the philosophy. Maybe it's because I am an actor and sometimes writer that I just can't do that.

But Dollhouse, I pointed out to him, was about the exact opposite of being vapid. At the core of the show was the societal pressure to be vapid against the strength of the human spirit (Echo) and Love (Sierra and Victor). This is not THE core of the show, but is certainly a large part of it.

It's been months since the end of Dollhouse, which I've written about here before. I still miss the show though even more, I miss the show's unreached potential. The potential that FOX TV never allowed and indeed undermined.

But this week, the DVD and Blu Ray set of the series' second and final season released. With that release comes an official video of the original song "Remains" which was written as the coda for Season One's unaired episode "Epitaph One".

This episode was written as a contractual obligation to FOX TV and was thrown together by the show's writers and filmed simultaneously with the actual "season finale" of the series.

Epitaph One was meant to give the audience a glimpse into what the show might have been since by then, Joss Whedon had not expected to be renewed for a second season. So they fulfilled the contract and had something for the DVD release as an extra for fans. And what an extra it is.

Here is the final clip of the episode, featuring the song "Remains" written by the show's Mo Tauncheron and Jed Whedon who became the head writers for Dollhouse during the second season. Here we see the basic thrust of Joss Whedon's philosophy of what happens when they keep trying "to make people better" (from Serenity).
Here is the same song, but with it's official video release. This goes back to other core themes of Dollhouse by revisiting the concepts of vapidity and how easily we can disregard our fellow human beings. It revisits the inherent loneliness of human beings and the ways we try to fulfill that loneliness even as we regard eachother with disposability.

My brother still hates the show and doesn't miss it. But he doesn't like Fringe either and he liked Titanic. I love him, but damn that's just crazy talk.

These videos make the sting of missing this show and regular doses of Eliza Dushku easier to tolerate.

Now if Amazon would hurry up and deliver my Season 2 DVDs.

The Long Thursday Journey: Part 1. On The Fringe.

3:30am: I'm awake. I'm supposed to wake up to an alarm in another half hour, but my body, despite being on sleep aids has decided I need an extra half hour to get ready for the day. After a moment I decide my body is right. I have to shave my head and face and be very very thorough about so the extra time takes the sense of being rushed off the table. I am suddenly aware that I am waking up at the time I usually go to sleep. This is weird and it hits me just how long this day is going to be.

I get up, shower and do the shave thing. I'm excited. Today constitutes what is my first paying acting gig in many years, and even though its not a full on production, just a promo stunt, it feels really good.

5:00am. I am out the door in my new Jos.A. Bank suit and my charcoal grey longcoat. I haven't dressed this well in years and I am suddenly very aware that the neighborhood I live in isn't that great and its 5am and I am looking damned upscale. I walk cautiously and even cross the street when I see a couple of teenagers coming up the block toward me. Jeez. When did I become THIS guy?

5:15am: The A train arrives, running local. This is fine as it will take me right to the F. So far so good. I have to be at the hotel at 6am sharp to have my eyebrows covered. I'm excited and amazed to be upright. I listen to Dan Savage's podcast to stay awake. Nothing like listening to people's sexual issues and Savage's awesome if sometimes snarky advice before sunrise.

5:55am: I arrive at Stay..a new hotel on 47th street. I'm right near where I used to go to High School. It's the first of many moments of walking by significant areas of my past. The day is going to have an element of weirdness I hadn't anticipated.

6:20: I am in a small hotel room with 10 other guys with shaved heads in suits and two make up artists. I've had to get my own coffee as there is none provided. That irks me a little as coffee and pastries at gigs this early is pretty much SOP, but since I'm getting a free suit out of the deal, I get over it really fast and get my own coffee.

My eyebrows get spirit gummed, waxed and covered. I'm really looking like an Observer now. My inner actor is excited and dancing with my inner fan boy. The only thing better would be actually playing an Observer in an actual episode of Fringe. But this is damned fun.

7:00am: We are split into two groups of 5. One group is to go to the Today Show, the other, Fox & Friends. I am really hoping for the Today Show as those three morons on Fox & Friends really bug me. I am of course chosen to go to Fox. But I'm getting a free suit and $250 so I get over it.

7:15am to 8:40am: I am standing outside the Newscorp Building in Rockefeller Center doing the Observer thing. (Silent, watching, creepy) The show is broadcast and I am forced to remain stoic while Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson (her credentials according to their website is that she is the first classical violinist to be crowned Miss America.) and Brian Kilmeade kiss Rudy Giuliani's ass while he lies up and down and up and down. As I listen though I am relieved to realize that this scumbag won't be running for Governor of New York, which I think he has a shot at winning, but is instead running for President again, which will help him succeed in travelling from being America's Mayor to being America's least liked scumbag. Later Brian Kilmeade says “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but certainly all terrorists are Muslims” I nearly vomit. But I remain stoic and scare the hell out of passersby. Despite the 3 Blind Idiots in the background I am having fun...and at about 8:30 the show goes to break filming me and 3 of the other Observers on the street.

The first time I am on television since my episode of Law & Order 15 years ago and its on Fox & Friends. I'd be unhappy, but I'm on television and I'm getting $250 for the day and a free Jos.A.Bank wool and cashmere suit. I get over it real fast.

9:00am: Grand Central Station. Here the fun really kicks in as people are milling about and stopping and staring. Some of the other guys end up having pictures taken with passersby. I am just stared at, I love it.

10:00am: Times Square. We are in the area that has been closed off to traffic. I'm sitting at one of the chairs with a circular table. This is a major relief. My shoes are very bad shoes and I have been on my feet since 6:30 this morning and I have an artificial hip. I'm actually in a great deal of agony. It makes being stoic a bit easier.

The sitting helps a lot though I am still achy.

School children come by. They are about 9 years old or thereabouts and very excited by what they see.

“Hey that bald man moved” “so what stupid, they're not statues” “can I have a picture Mrs. Jones, with them?” “What are they doing” “It's a TV show, I think my mom watches it.”

They are adorable.

A pretty girl of about 20 is staring around with 2 friends of hers. She gets one of the folks who hand out Tabasco sauce and say “Watch Fringe on Fox tonight at 9” to take a picture. The girl sits in the chair next to mine and her friends stands behind her. I am “observing” facing away from her. I hear her say “Dude, don't look over at me, ok?”

Now to me, that just means, “Please look right at me” so I slowly turn my head and give her a wondering, quizzical stare. She jumps. “DUDE” and her friends laugh. I turn back and look across the street, she settles in and has the picture taken. The Tabasco girl is laughing and so are the pretty girl's friends. The walk off and I hear her say to her friends “I want to crack one of them up”. This almost cracks me up.

More tourists come by, more pictures are taken.

In the walks between sites we are working, I have passed by 10 different places where I've once worked and also where I am currently working. And of course, where I went to High School. Later today I will be attending the memorial Jerry Eskow. There seems to be a real symmetry to the day and I am glad that this is a day that I am working as an actor. Jerry would be pleased I think

11:30am: I am finally eating breakfast at Andrew's Coffee Shop and stopping to get vitamins at The Vitamin Shoppe. I wolf down the eggs and bacon and coffee...ahhhhhhhh. Then head over to Macy's for the second half of the event.

11:50am: Herald Square, lots of passersby. We are basically all together in another part where traffic is no longer allowed. But it is part of a crosswalk so there are plenty of people to creep out. And creep out we do. I stand at the edge and stare into the windows of passing buses which are slowed by traffic. I gaze at every passenger I can. Inside I am grinning at the reactions even though on the outside I show nothing more than an otherworldly curiosity. My back and hip and feet are aching again. So much walking. So much fun.

Twice I am asked what is going on by passersby. I silently direct them to one of the Tabasco people. Some are fans already and shout OH YEAH. Others say weird.

We are being filmed for the promo. Some genius walks up to the cameraman who is gazing intently into his viewfinder to set up a shot.

GENIUS: Excuse me, are you filming something?

CAMERAMAN: Calmly and nicely tells him what's going on.

INNERJOHN: No, moron, he's fucking the camera right here in the middle of Herald Square.

Really, I am exercising delicious self restraint today. $250 and a free suit. Did I mention its a $600 suit?

1:00pm: Union Square. The last site. We are all pretty exhausted actually but still having fun. There are benches and a couple of us sit and do our creepy resty thing. But there are few passersby in this part of the Square.

It starts to rain, so we go down into a subway entrance and scatter among the stairs and turnstiles. This affords a fantastic opportunity to stand at the gate and observe commuters who are unnerved by what is happening.

At a certain point a very drunk woman comes down the stairs...talking out loud about some craziness. I watch her out of the corner of my eye because she might be trouble. She's that drunk.

She pauses for a moment before the turnstile and looks around, stumbling a bit as she sees 10 men of varying ages, all baldheaded, all very well dressed. She shakes her head “Oh no no no. I need to get right the fuck home now. I can NOT deal with this. No no no sir” We are all desperately trying not to crack up.

1:50pm: A cameraman from the local Fox News station comes down to shoot us for awhile. He seems to be having a great time with it all and it turns out he's a Fringe fan. He says this should be on the news tonight, but a friend on Facebook tells me the next day that she saw me that morning. It creeped her out. I get very pleased.

I pass by so many places I used to work today, its like my past is sort of surrounding me. I decide its a way of saying goodbye to all those old non acting jobs while I am acting. I like it.

2:10pm: We are done. I am exhausted, but I have a memorial and then work later. So I grab more coffee, some spicy cinnamon gum and head to the office where I work to use the Men's Room to take off the wax and gum from my eyebrows. And get some rest. My body is really aching pretty badly.

I'm not even half done with the day yet.

To be continued...

If you are on facebook, you can check out what we did here. Scroll down for Sightings: New York and you can find me.

Sent to the Attic (without any supper)

So, as I suspected it would, Fox canceled Dollhouse this past week. So, as a result, I will be canceling Fox from my viewing activities.

Whining Fanboy you say? Over reacting? Well, maybe. But losing Dollhouse is really the final among many straws.

Dollhouse was not a perfect show. It took a few episodes to find its voice. Get its leggings. But this is true for every other Joss Whedon show, with the possible exception of Firefly, which I will get to in a minute.

Here's what Fox has/has not done, that has me deciding to tell them to go fuck themselves.

1-They put Dollhouse in exactly the same time slot where they put Firefly a few years ago. Friday nights...WHEN NO ONE IS WATCHING TV!

2-They barely promoted the show themselves. This year alone on Twitter we counted hundreds of official Fox tweets for Glee, a show that was already a hit, and about 20 for Dollhouse which was strugging ON FRIDAYS.

3-They then blamed poor ratings.

4-They promoted upcoming episodes coming in November, but only as coming soons, very rarely on other time-slots, then within days they pulled the show OFF November for sweeps, thus playing a sort of game with fans. They assured us that this was a way to keep the show safe and help their numbers (the replacement, re runs of House, garnered a tiny tiny teeny weency improvement for that slot. Why? BECAUSE NO ONE WATCHES TV ON FRIDAY NIGHTS for network broadcast numbers to be worth anything.

5-Then after a week they cancel the show, demonstrating that EVERYthing they said previously was flat out, in your face, bald faced bullshit.

They treated Dollhouse marginally better than they treated Firefly, which is to say that they treated it like less stinky shit, holding it 3 feet away from their noses instead of 4. And they spoke to fans in condescending and again, lieing tones.

What they should have done, if they really wanted the show to hit, if they really wanted to give it its best opportunity like they said they did, was keep Fringe on Tuesdays (I'll get to that in a minute too) and have Dollhouse follow, giving the show a significant and popular lead in. If Dollhouse failed to garner an audience then, the network would have had a legitimate case on its hands and would actually be able to honestly say they tried.

I've written about this before. Gone are the days that network executives gave shows time to find their audience. Time for their audience to find them. No more. Everything has to be Lost now. Everything has to be Desperate Housewives (I just vomited a little into my mouth). Everything has to be Glee.

BTW, I have nothing against Glee, it doesn't interest me, but it sounds like a good show IN A GOOD TIME SLOT.

Firefly was probably Whedon's greatest creation for television. It was mature, featured the strongest cast that's ever been on one of his shows and it had a great premise. Sales of its DVDs continue to sell brilliantly. Fox claimed to learn a lesson from that. Their actions proved that to be bullshit. They did absolutely nothing for this show.

The pulled this same kind of half hearted nonsense on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles too. I wasn't a fan of the show for a number of reasons. But it clearly had a loyal base and its ratings on say FX (which Fox owns) or SyFy (Which Fox doesn't, and God I hate writing "SyFy", so fucking stupid)would have made it a smash. Given that Dollhouse's ratings were even better, that same action would have been even more successful

And finally.

I love Fringe too. It's on Fox so my giving up on Fox means I am giving up on Fringe (yes there are ways to watch it under the radar, I'm not going to advocate that). But they are doing it to Fringe too.

It was a hit on Tuesdays last year. It started slow and built really well. So what did Fox do? They moved it to Thursdays...OPPOSITE CSI AND GRAY'S ANATOMY. Two huge ratings giants. What the fuck did they think was going to happen?!!!

And now they are saying that they are unsure of the ratings and we will see about renewal.

And then of course there's Arrested Development. A brilliant show that yes, they stuck with but never did a single thing to improve its ratings. They played the martyr with it and also fucked with its fans.

Well guess what? FUCK YOU FOX. FUCK YOUR DISDAIN FOR GENRE TELEVISION and FUCK YOU FOR TELLING ME FUCK YOU. The Simpsons is boring now and you have nothing on that interests me. Much as I like Seth MacFarlane I have yet to get a single good laugh out of Family Guy (I know, I know....I just don't think its that good). I'll watch the remaining 7 episodes and then I'm done with you. Oh, and if I haven't said it enough already, FUCK YOU.

(Monday update) I forgot to mention that I think web shows are the future anyway. Like Dr. Horrible or The Guild. I don't think it's a bad idea to begin making clear to networks, both broadcast and cable that they are moving into irrelevancy as far as we are concerned.

I encourage you to join me in my boycott if you've had enough.

Why I might stop watching Keith Olbermann.

I hate the News.

Not the news itself, the News. The personality driven, gameshow host, ha ha I got you, I only listen to what I wanna hear, I'm too lazy to do anything but quote what was told to me as opposed to doing my job, oh look who got his dick wet where he shouldn't have...Afghanistan? Huh? News.

I'm sick of this shit.

And as much as I love Keith Olbermann I'd be a hypocrite not to acknowledge that he is a part of it. Rachel too.

Here comes Grumpy Old Man. When I was a kid, there used to be documentaries on TV. Mainstream 3 broadcast network TV on serious issues. Now we have entire series devoted to being in prison. We used to have Special Reports, now we get Special Comments.

I love special comments. I love that Keith Olbermann almost single-handedly changed and continues to change the political news landscape to one where we Liberals get to fluster and puff too.

But here's the thing. What we need, what we really need, is not going over every day who said what to whom, who's writing a book, who is lieing and who is telling the truth, but comprehensive analysis of the issues.

We know Fox will never do that. MSNBC has decided to become the more liberal side of that argument with the exception of Joe Scarborough in the morning. I don't know what the fuck CNN has become. That network hasn't been worth shit since they gave that idiot Wolf Blitzer his own show.

Yesterday I caught that snide smug bitch Campbell Brown being indignant that David Letterman hadn't realized how his current staff would suffer from constant press calls due to the recent revelation of his affairs. She was actually laughing at him for having the audacity to prioritize his career, his colleagues and his family over it not occurring to him that his staff would be inundated with insinuating phone calls from a press too lazy to cover, oh say, the actual questions of what a Public Option is, or the history of Afghanistan and its wars. CNN has Anderson Cooper and Christiane Amenpour. Everyone else isn't worth a bad fuck in an alleyway let alone having a news show.

MSNBC barely has a news show anymore...It's all news interviews but no actual coverage. FOX...well, FOX is just a rag paper to promote the agenda of an aged, depraved and greedy man from Australia and the known liar Roger Ailes.

Only The News Hour with Jim Lehrer is news coverage that actually deserves the moniker. They pick one or two of the days stories and devote the entire time to those stories including a real analysis. Then once a week they have Mark Shields and David Brooks discuss and somewhat debate, in a reasonable tone the week's events.

We need indepth documentaries on the various healthcare systems around the world. Not this he said she said crap. We need a history of the nations we are at war with to understand how they got to where they are and what has worked and what hasn't.

We need to stop the finger-pointing journalism. We don't need Keith to tell us that Sean Hannity is a douchebag, much as I LOVE “Worst Person In The World”. For most thinking people, its a given.

We're never going to get it though. Once Ted Turner sold CNN to Time Warner and NBC decided to run something with Microsoft and Fox decided to abandon covering the news altogether, it was all over.

At this point, we only have ourselves to blame that we have ignorant people who can't spell marching on Washington and declaring Glenn Beck a hero, because we are all we've got.

We can watch our people on the “news” networks for comfort. That's fine. But we can't stop there because clearly no one is going to use those forums to educate us beyond who is good and who is bad.

If MSNBC or CNN ever decide they really want to be taken seriously, they will stop playing Fox's game and start covering the news and offering indepth coverage and analysis of real issues.

Until then, I think I might just stick to Dollhouse and Fringe. Ironically Fox shows. Though if Fox keeps fucking Dollhouse up the ass the way it has been I may give up on Fringe too.