Dollhouse

Ah, the early ’90s: that Eden. I was so innocent then, I barely knew which demographic I was. And I certainly didn’t know that just by doing what came naturally—staying in on Friday nights and watching The X-Files—I was changing the world. I had no inkling that we, my nerdy ilk and I, were actually saving dozens of unborn science fiction shows from the Sarlacc maw of the Friday Night Death Slot. Surely you’ve heard of the Death Slot. It’s a circle of programming hell traditionally reserved for the weak, the sick, the family- oriented—and the sci-fi-derived. It ate M.A.N.T.I.S., Sliders, and The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Yes, the Slot especially likes the taste of dorkmeat.

No one ever put this in a memo, of course, but they didn’t have to. It’s a prima facie presumption among network executives: On Friday nights, only the chronically unbangable will be plopped before their sets. So we’ll give these lurks what they want: Genre dross we don’t believe in and won’t pay to promote, regardless. Let them eat aliens!

And we did. Then something paranormal happened: Borne on a dorkling tide of eyeballs, The X-Files was lifted from the Slot and deposited safely on Sunday-evening shores. Soon, openly nerdy shows like Lost, Fringe, and Heroes were jockeying for time slots typically reserved for cop/doctor/lawyer skeins—shows about people so doable they don’t need spaceships or time travel. Meanwhile, time travel was actually invented in the form of the DVR, which promised to free us from the twin tyrannies of Time and Slot with the click of a Season Pass. Nerds could now bar-hop while their TiVo proxies autodorked at home. The End?

Sadly, no. Turns out the DVR was a Faustian bargain. Yes, it would watch our shows for us, and we would "hit clubs," "go on dates," and do other things we’d read about in books not written by Piers Anthony. But even though DVRs are now found in an estimated 30 percent of TV-watching US households, the devices might actually have a ghettoizing effect. Friday shows are still born sick, in the eyes of network execs, and it may be that DVDs, DVRs, and Hulu are only the pallbearers.

Take Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which bit the Friday dust despite rating among the most TiVo’d shows of the night. (Perspective check: Lipstick Jungle also made that short list.) And consider the curious case of Joss Whedon, whose late Firefly remains the FNDS poster child. Whedon’s newest series, the Manchurian courtesan suspense-thriller Dollhouse, gets major DVRage—reportedly a factor in its hairbreadth renewal this season. Yet it’s still slotted shoulder-to-shoulder with such dead-shows-walking as Medium. The message: A trickle of passive DVR fan-love nets you, at best, another season in hell.

And so our mission is clear, oh sleeping dweeb legions: We can’t expect the assimilation of sci-fi into the TV mainstream to continue apace. We must stay home Friday nights and save Dollhouse, even if we don’t like it that much. If Dollhouse dies, let it die on Tuesday—not in an unmarked Friday grave alongside lepers like Ghost Whisperer. By Gwar, let’s spend Fridays together again, this one last season, just as we did in those halcyon Clinton-era days. Let’s huddle together to celebrate the weird, the wonderful, and the off-kilter, on a night when others are busy mindlessly procreating. We must do what our devices cannot: organize. Take pride. Seize the ratings low ground. Because our DVRs clearly aren’t living in a post-dork world. Neither should we.