I’m guessing I’m not the only Whedonologist who reads this blog on a regular basis, so no doubt at least a handful of you are mourning the recent cancellation of Dollhouse. Alyssa Rosenberg echoes my own sentiments pretty closely:

I’m sorry Dollhouse is dead.  But I’m not sure its cancellation warrants the same outrage as the premature plug-pulling on Firefly, which was remarkable from its first episode.  I just hope this opens up some space for Whedon and company to move on to other strong–and perhaps stronger–projects.

I was pretty skeptical of the whole Dollhouse enterprise from the beginning, and even after episode six–which was supposed to be the big turnaround in terms of quality–I thought the show was plagued by an over reliance on flat TV thriller conventions and a weak lead performance that didn’t so much improve as (blessedly) fade into the background.*

My good friend Daniel attributes the show’s demise to its sprawling mythology and cast of characters. He’s got a point as far as ratings go, but I’ve always felt that one of the show’s conceptual weaknesses was that it spent a little too much time on personality-of-the-week filler and didn’t dive into the mythology quickly enough. That was probably FOX’s doing: it makes sense that they would want to cater more to the casual viewer than the fanboy.

And they’d probably want to avoid anything beyond the most cursory exploration of what’s obviously a pretty disturbing premise. Ta-Nehisi Coates understandably stayed away from the show because he was uncomfortable with the rape fantasy elements, but something tells me that he, and others with similar concerns, might have been a little more engaged if the show’s writers had been granted the free reign and intestinal fortitude to address those themes directly early on. A good, although perhaps unlikely, role model would have been Mad Men’s unflinching portrayal of how even sympathetic main characters sink into regular abusiveness and dehumanize the ever-present “other.”

But while that willingness to portray the darker side of ostensible protagonists may fly on AMC, HBO, or even SyFy (Battlestar Galactica famously had first-tier characters of its expansive cast torture and orchestrate suicide bombings, and Daniel rightfully points out that Dollhouse probably would have fared better there), FOX just isn’t the place for it.

It’s a shame, too, because it’s only in the most recent episode, “Belonging,” (which I’m willing to hazard only made it to broadcast intact because cancellation was already imminent and, well, fuck it) which we get to see just how creepy the whole concept can get. This episode was more up-front than any of its predecessors confronting the unavoidable “rape fantasy” element embedded in the show, and once that got highlighted over and above the more network-friendly Alias theatrics, we got treated to one of the more morally ambiguous and thought-provoking hours of television this year.

So while I’ll miss Dollhouse, I’m not going to miss it like Firefly. A better analogy might be the mid-to-late second season of Twin Peaks, after the Laura Palmer murder was solved. It might have been a relief to see both troubled productions get put out of their misery, but it’s still a frustrating tease to get reminded of all of that wasted potential once the end is already nigh. At its best, this was the most challenging, thoughtful work Whedon has ever done; it’s just a shame that we didn’t get to see its best very often.

*I don’t want to pile on Dushku too much; I doubt a show this weird could have gotten made at FOX without her industry clout, let alone lasted two whole seasons. But she was a mildly competent actress in a role that demanded nearly superhuman versatility, and the fact that she was in over her head was only accentuated by how much better some of the other actors playing dolls on the show pulled it off.