Dollhouse

"You’ll have a clean slate," the young woman is promised.

"You ever try to clean an actual slate?" she responds. "You always see what was on it before."

"Dollhouse," the new sci-fi series from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" creator Joss Whedon, has tried to clean its own slate several times, but it’s hard not to see faint traces of what was there before.

The show stars Eliza Dushku (Faith from "Buffy") as a woman who tries to get out of a jam by signing up to work for the Dollhouse, a shadowy organization that wipes away the personalities of its living dolls so they can be "imprinted" with whatever the latest client desires. Now known as Echo, she might be the world’s greatest date one week, or the world’s greatest safecracker the next. And in between each assignment, she’s a childlike blank, wandering around the Dollhouse without a care in the world.

The idea seems too complicated by half, and in many ways reminds me of "My Own Worst Enemy," the Christian Slater show that had a deservedly brief run on NBC this fall. That was a show that could never justify a premise that made no sense, nor was the execution strong enough to make it worth ignoring all the logic problems.

Just as "My Own Worst Enemy" wasn’t able to explain why it would be a good idea to give a spy a split personality, "Dollhouse" struggles to explain why the Dollhouse’s services would be in such high demand. It makes sense as a world-class, customizable escort service, but if you need a master thief, or a great hostage negotiator, wouldn’t you just hire someone who actually does that job for a living?

Whedon tries to get out in front of that criticism by introducing an FBI agent named Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett), whose obsession with finding the Dollhouse has made him a laughingstock among his colleagues.

A fellow agent asks why anyone would bother with a living doll in favor of an actual expert, arguing, "I’m paying a million dollars for that? I can get that. I have everything I want."

"If you have everything," Ballard insists, "you want something else. Something more extreme. Something more specific. Something perfect."

That speech isn’t convincing enough, especially not since three of the show’s first four episodes feature Echo’s missions going terribly wrong - and two of those disasters are the result of a flaw in the imprinting process. It’s almost like the show is going out of its way to be implausible.

Now, Whedon is a vastly better storyteller than anyone involved in "My Own Worst Enemy," so "Dollhouse" can be very engaging, even if the premise doesn’t make sense. Dushku isn’t as versatile as the role demands - many weeks, the only difference in Echo’s persona seems to be her wardrobe - but Whedon and his writers certainly are. This is essentially a "Quantum Leap"-style anthology, where Echo’s constant changes of identity puts the show into a different style - kidnapping thriller, horror movie, swinging heist flick - each week, and the writers are excellent at bending their talents to fit the latest genre. Next week’s episode is one of the better filmed riffs on the classic short story "The Most Dangerous Game," and the caper episode is packed with unexpected, engrossing twists.

But because Echo is constantly assuming new identities, and because her default personality is so deliberately uninteresting, it’s hard to find something to latch onto from episode to episode. Harry Lennix evinces some sympathy as Echo’s handler, an ex-cop who feels ashamed for being involved in such a morally bankrupt enterprise, but he’s not enough of a draw on his own.

Both Whedon and the executives at Fox seem aware of all the drawbacks of the premise. Whedon already had to throw out the show’s original pilot and start over with the episode that’s airing on Friday, and the order of the early episodes has been shuffled around quite a bit.

All the behind-the-scenes changes have Whedon fans paranoid that "Dollhouse" is going to be another "Firefly," the space cowboy series that Whedon and Fox clashed over in the fall of 2002. But "Firefly" was more self-assured from the start than "Dollhouse" is, and Whedon insists he and Fox are on the same page this time in trying to make the odd concept work.

"Because this show is a complicated show tonally, when things were shifting, I had to be very careful to look at the ground under my feet to be sure where I was," Whedon told me in a recent interview. "A show like ’Firefly,’ I knew exactly what I was doing. The problem was, nobody else did, except the people making it."

Every one of Whedon’s shows has had some type of growing pains. The original "Buffy" pilot also had to be reshot, "Angel" took nearly two seasons to find a consistent tone and vision, and "Firefly" aired so out of order that it was impossible for many viewers to make heads or tails of it.

Maybe "Dollhouse" eventually will finds its way to become another cult classic like previous Whedon series. But right now, it looks like a slate that keeps getting half-wiped as Whedon struggles to decide what to draw.

For my complete interview with Joss Whedon, click here.

"Dollhouse" (Friday at 9 p.m. on Channel 5) A young woman (Eliza Dushku) agrees to have her personality erased in a new science fiction series from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" creator Joss Whedon.