Dollhouse

Joss Whedon, creator of Fox’s upcoming midseason SF series Dollhouse, told SCI FI Wire that he’s OK returning to the TV network that canceled his beloved Firefly after mishandling it.

"These are different people," Whedon said in an interview in Santa Monica, Calif., on July 14, part of the Television Critics Association summer press tour. "They didn’t do to me what was done to Firefly."

Whedon’s last experience with the network was with Firefly, which debuted in the fall of 2002. Fox aired the show’s episodes out of Whedon’s original order and pre-empted them for sporting events before canceling the series after airing 11 of the 14 produced segments.

But management at the network has changed since then, and former NBC executive Kevin Reilly is now president of entertainment. "Joss was a gift," Reilly told reporters earlier in the day. "The only reason Joss wasn’t on my list is because I thought there was no way he was coming back."

But Whedon—who left TV to direct feature films (Serenity) and write comic books—came back to Fox with Dollhouse, a high-concept series starring Whedon’s former Buffy the Vampire Slayer co-star Eliza Dushku.

"The understanding that I reached was with myself," Whedon explained about his change of heart. "That I had to be realistic about what the network expected of me and about what the chances for the show would be. Like, I fell in love with Firefly in a very blind and adolescent way. And I tried to meet the network halfway. But at the same time, you know, it was agony. Everything was agony for me. ... And now I come at it with a little distance. Not artistic distance. But just, you know, the grown-up attitude of, you go through certain steps. You do your best. You work with them. And you pick the people you’re working with. You look for sanity and you look for intelligence. So far, I have found a great deal of both in the executives at Fox. If I had gone there and pitched to them, and they had not understood what I was telling them, I think I would have known."

Dollhouse is slated to debut in early 2009. Fox has ordered 13 episodes of the SF drama, about an organization whose members have different personalities implanted to go on secret missions, then have those personalities wiped clean. —Patrick Lee, News Editor