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Basic Facts:

Episodes: 14
Runtime: 42 min.
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Premiered: 2008

Format:

Series

Genres:

Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Created By:

Joss Whedon

Actors:

Amy Acker, Eliza Dushku, Fran Kranz, Harry Lennix, Olivia Williams, Tahmoh Penikett

Made In:

USA

Premiered at:

FOX

To the wide pub­lic, Joss Whe­don is known as a cre­ator of Buffy The Vam­pire Slayer and Angel, two shows I didn’t liked very much. But after that, he cre­ated Fire­fly, an excel­lent sci­ence fic­tion show fol­lowed by the movie Seren­ity, that made me curi­ous what he will do with this lat­est effort called Doll­house. This show is once again cre­ated for FOX, the same tele­vi­sion that can­celed Fire­fly in the first place. So, what is Dollhouse?

Show premise involves a secret orga­ni­za­tion that pro­grams agents to any skill set needed for par­tic­u­lar task using some sort of com­puter inter­face that erases per­son­al­ity and replaces it with some­thing else. And while idea looks very promis­ing, the end effect was not exactly great. Even dur­ing the film­ing of the early episodes, script has gone through many changes, and some episodes had to be rewrit­ten and re-​shot because they failed to deliver.

Char­ac­ters

Main char­ac­ter is Echo, played by Eliza Dushku, agent work­ing in the Doll­house. Here per­for­mance is mostly good, but in many instances she fails to deliver the true chameleon-​like trans­for­ma­tion of her char­ac­ter. My favorite char­ac­ter is definitly Boyd, Echo’s han­dler played by Harry Lennix. But, in the same time geek char­ac­ter Topher is just silly and I hated every time he appears on the screen. Per­son­al­ity trans­for­ma­tions are not done very well, and in my opin­ion, this is one of the biggest prob­lems of the show.

Writ­ing

While the con­cept is inter­est­ing, writ­ing on the other hand is not that good. Show bor­rows from other Whe­dons shows in terms of char­ac­ters stereo­types, plot ideas and most episodes fail to be inter­est­ing enough. I think that FOX had too much influ­ence on the show devel­op­ment, and that had dri­ven the writ­ing in direc­tion that left this show far behind the expectations.

Doll­house cast

There are some bright ele­ments like the FBI sub­plot, Alpha sub­plot. These actu­ally were the only rea­sons for me to watch the show to the end of sea­son. The end­ing is bet­ter then the most of the show, and that’s maybe a good sign of changes to sea­son 2.

Pro­duc­tion

Show def­i­nitely looks good, and expen­sive. I didn’t liked the music much, felt too generic for my taste. Most of the visual effects were good, and tech­ni­cal side of the show is also done very well. But, a lot of money invested, doesn’t mean that the final result will be great.

Con­clu­sion

Another aver­age show, that’s promised to improve in the next sea­son. You should give it a chance, and hope that the it will get bet­ter. If the FOX leaves Whe­don to work alone, with­out pres­sure, we might get even great sea­son 2.