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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: July 28, 2009
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Dollhouse, “Epitaph One” (Season 1, Episode 13). [Stream on Amazon Video.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: It was almost hard to believe that it was happening again. After all the agita that Joss Whedon went through with Firefly on the FOX network — airing episodes out of order, a Friday night death slot, pulling certain episodes from the schedule entirely — he somehow ended up in the exact same situation at the exact same network with Dollhouse. The idea of Joss Whedon as a beleagured creator in a universe of unfeeling, meddling suits is one that tends to be a bit overblown, and is probably a good bit of personal mythmaking on his part. If the Age of Ultron press tour taught us anything, it’s that Whedon is not shy about telling anyone who will listen when he feels chafed by the bosses. And yet … he got seven seasons of Buffy and five seasons of Angel. Firefly was a bust, and that bust was certainly not helped by FOX’s tinkering, sure. But he’s not some Job figure for genre film/TV.
Still, it’s uncanny that after all that business with FOX and Firefly, Whedon ended up in the exact same situation with Dollhouse. It was a predicament that was at least partially of Whedon’s doing. There was a really fantastic TV show in Dollhouse, but Joss had a hell of a time digging it out. The initial premise of Dollhouse, a semi-futuristic vision where humans could be imprinted with other consciousnesses, turning them into ever-malleable living dolls. The first handful of episodes, being a TV series, played with the concept as a kind of Charlie’s Angels, with star Eliza Dushku entering scenarios as a scientist, a fighter, a hostage negotiator. But the darkness at the edge of the concept — who are these people who have been hollowed out and imprinted upon? is this not just fancied up prostitution? — was too prominent to ignore, making these earliest chapters seem both callous and idiotic. Whedon, of course, was playing the long game, but by the time the series started being about what it was actually about — the attempts to take down the Dollhouse and the corporate parent that controlled it — the show’s cult audience had vastly shrunk.
As for “Epitaph One,” it was a contract dispute with FOX — the network ordered 12 episodes to air, but 13 were needed for a DVD release — that led to the episode never airing on television at all. Which is too bad, because it was not only one of the strongest in the series, it was the most intriguing advertisment for the show’s second season. A flash forward into a future where the Rossum corporation’s imprinting tech has gone worldwide and essentially caused Armageddon, the episode mostly functions as a one-off, with a central storyline involving characters we’ve never seen before (including Felicia Day, who by this point had become big in Whedon-land after Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog), peppered with flashbacks and flash-forwards involving the characters we already knew. The greatest thing about Dollhouse was that its most intriguing characters ended up being not its straight-up heroes but rather the morally corrupted Adele (Olivia Williams) and Topher (Fran Kranz), as well as the tragic Whiskey (Amy Acker), whose stories were darker and more ambiguous, and all of whom only came into prominence once Dollhouse became confident to tumble down the rabbit hole of its own mythology. This ultimately meant that the show’s appeal was narrowed down to, like 60 people. But however small the audience was, it really ended up working, and “Epitaph One” was one of its most shining moments.
(We can discuss how season 2 squandered all of this potential and ONCE AGAIN tried to deliver stand-alone adventures rather than just keeping up the serialized momentum, but that’s an article for another day.)
