Who are spoiled divas, with huge amounts of money, entourages, and so on. Nor do they care about TV and movie writers, who make gobs of money for total junk.

while the show as a metaphor may have appealed to both Whedon and Dushku, that is PRECISELY the problem. It’s inside Showbiz and shows their social and cultural isolation.

No one, and particularly in a recession, wants to see/hear spoiled actresses and writer-producers rail against the man when they are in fact, the man. Much less about “evil” corporations and such when they just want to keep their job, as corporations keel over.

Moreover, the ability of Whedon to extract a lot of money from a few hipster guys and lots feminist/bad boy obsessed women and young girls is at an end. THAT market, and the wealth that went with it, is just not there, with declining wages/incomes, drastically during the recession, and declining birth rates making each replacement cohort smaller, except for Mexican origin kids who don’t care about that stuff because they are watching well, Telenovelas in Spanish Language TV.

Dramatically, the show is crap. Series TV demands a strong, likeable lead character viewers care enough about, and who is consisent in action and behavior, to tune in week after week. Too many characters, too little characterization, too much pseudo-intellectualism, too much upper income Yuppie status mongering.

Far superior, is the Columbo revival “the Mentalist” or the Jessie Stone movies, or “Chuck,” or “Life” or even “NCIS.”

It’s the easiest thing in the world, and by now at least a 40 year old cliche. to “shock the bourgeoisie” and play the sneering hipster. It’s a LOT harder to play it straight, no chaser, and on the up and up. Delivering a traditional show, in a traditional manner, with no tricks, gimmicks, partially clad lead actress and other stuff. A long lingering shot of Tom Selleck’s weathered, experienced face and mature, macho manner, or Simon Baker’s cocky sureness masking boiling anger, or Damien Lewis’s wacked out Zen version of the Count of Monte Christo, requires real skill in writing and directing and acting.

Just watching the first minutes of Dollhouse now … I’m a late convert to Joss Whedon; nothing against Buffy, but I never felt the need to follow along. I got caught up by his run on Astonishing X-Men and by Firefly.

And what impressed me most about his work was the characters — the stories and premises are clever and he introduced some great ideas, but what brings me back are the way the characters interact. It’s all character development through dialog — I tuned in to just watch what they would do — and I think he’s got an amazing understanding of how we humans interact and how to make that interesting. Problem is, Dollhouse, by its very nature, doesn’t play to those strengths.

Though that line about “scowly babies”? Maybe we’re on to something … signing off now to watch.

The show Dollhouse reminds me of most is La Femme Nikita (evil-though-perhaps-necessary Section One uses and abuses an army of the damned to fight terrorism; heroine pretends to be many different people and struggles to retain her humanity amidst the horror; office politics are deadly). They even have a similar interior decor sensibility (glass walls, sterile spaces, large computer displays).

After the second episode I was a bit bummed out. I didn’t bother writing another synopsis… I was most bummed out to realize that the dollhouse as it works today is really just a whorehouse, in all the worst connotations of the word. The women have been rendered incapable of objecting to total enslavement… they seem to be rented out almost entirely as very expensive but cheerful escorts.

I still hope, but it’s dwindling fast.

(Eliza, on the other hand, is doing a much better job of acting than I would ever have given her credit for being able to pull off. Really first rate.)

that might assist your readers in assigning parallels.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2152