Dollhouse might get cancelled?

Amy Acker in Dollhouse

Doll­house fin­ished its first sea­son with pretty poor rat­ings, with Fox de­cid­ing the only rea­son to keep it on air is DVD sales of Joss Whe­don's shows are al­ways high. Fox did de­cide to trim some fat, though, choos­ing to can­cel the more ex­pen­sive Ter­mi­na­tor: The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles in­stead. The sec­ond sea­son pre­miered a few weeks ago to even worse rat­ings, at the bot­tom of the charts with the sec­ond episode even being beat by re­runs.

Ap­par­ently there is now real talk of can­celling Doll­house mid-sea­son. I can't say I'm sur­prised. Peo­ple have blamed the Fri­day night death slot, while oth­ers blame los­ing Ter­mi­na­tor: TSCC as a lead in.

My­self, I just don't think it's a good show. I'm a huge fan of Joss' other shows— Buffy, Angel, and Fire­fly were all frakkin' fan­tas­tic, along with all of the comics. Doll­house just doesn't cut it, though. I re­ally can see the po­ten­tial for an in­ter­est­ing story, but it has thus far been tak­ing the ir­ri­tat­ing Lost ap­proach of only spend­ing 5 min­utes of every episode to ad­vance the over­all story. This might work in Lost, but with Doll­house in­tro­duc­ing new char­ac­ters (though played by the same peo­ple) every week it be­comes very hard to in­vest in.

Most fans agree that the DVD-only bud­get episode "Epi­taph One" is the best in the whole last sea­son, and that doesn't do much of any help if it was only on DVD. I had hope that sea­son 2 would quickly ad­vance the sto­ry­line into some­thing more like "Epi­taph One", but so far we've just had more wasted mon­ster-of-the-week time. Ter­mi­na­tor: TSCC was an in­cred­i­ble show, I think much bet­ter than Doll­house, and it re­ally sad­dens me to know it died for this. Un­for­tu­nately due to the way TV is filmed so far ahead of when it airs, there's not much quick ad­just­ing that can be done to save it ei­ther.

Should Doll­house be saved? I think Joss would even­tu­ally be able to pick up the pieces to make it in­ter­est­ing, but I can't help won­der if it would be best to just cut it now and let him move on to some­thing new. Prefer­ably with more Amy Acker hint hint.

Posted on October 04, 2009 in Dollhouse, Joss Whedon