Dollhouse

The best event of press tour was (next to) the last. Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku just spent an hour giving us a tour of the gi-normous sets for Fox’s "Dollhouse," the most anticipated show of the new season.

We still haven’t seen any of the show beyond a brief trailer. In part that’s because, as Whedon revealed on his blog yesterday, he’s shooting a new first episode and slotting the original pilot as #2. Some alarmist Whedon fans are already saying its "Firefly" all over again. Yeesh.

But for those of you already clued into "Dollhouse," Whedon and Dushku walked us through Adele’s office, the already infamous coed showers, the sleep room and the giant, two-story headquarters that’s so big that Whedon and co. refer to it as "the Staples Center." All of it, except the office, is supposed to be underground.

Dushku plays Echo, one of the "actives" who works for a "highly illegal" and secretive organization that wipes their personalities clean so they can be implanted with new ones for various "engagements," which could range from romantic fantasy to dangerous mission. Adele, played by Olivia Williams, runs the joint. The facility where the actives wait between missions - and where Echo slowly becomes aware of her predicament - is the "Dollhouse."

Every night the five current "actives" wander into the round sleep room and settle into below-floor bed chambers arrayed like spokes of a wheel, each with a plexiglass top that slides over and closes them in. A little too coffin-y for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" creator Whedon, who ordered some of the stone taken out and some nice soft cushions and fabric put in. But Dushku said that setling in for the night "was like really pleasant, like a kinda weird slumber party."

Everything on the sets is both highly modern and zen, with some Frank Lloyd Wright touches. The design scheme, as Whedon put it, is "spa, spa, spa," with a lot of dark wood, slate floors in the shower and part of the sleep room, and a pond with a bridge over it in the middle of the Staples Center. At the end of the tour, he and Dushku settled into directors chairs in the middle of the bridge and took questions for half an hour.

Whew. And after that we had to attend a cast read-through of the upcoming 250th episode of "King of the Hill. Which would have been hilarious any other day, but...

Not to sound too much of a fanboy, but the "Dollhouse" tour was a surprisingly intimate look at a show that won’t even premiere until January. Whedon, as usual, answered all questions, sometimes with a zinger but without any of the condescension that even the average sitcom hack can muster on press tour. Someone asked him about the minute attention devoted to every aspect of his projects these days, even the online-only writer’s-strike one-off "Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog," now an iTunes hit. Does he ever tire of the scrutiny?

"I am so sick of reporters and fans," Whedon deadpanned. Then he smiled and said, "We do kind of live in the fishbowl a bit...(but) those are high class problems to have."