Dollhouse

A good day for unconventional television: ’Dollhouse’ renewed

If you want to gripe about mean networks yanking terrific shows with low ratings, don’t direct your griping at Fox.

Dollhouse_sc-48_9937 The network, in a surprise move, renewed "Dollhouse," the show that didn’t get great overnight ratings but did very well when DVR use, iTunes and Internet viewing were added to the overall picture. For stories on the renewal, go here and here.

TV fans and critics have long beat up the networks for canceling low-rated shows without sufficiently taking other factors, such as audience passion, DVD sales and other revenue streams into account. It’s becoming clear, as James Hibberd points out, that those other forms of viewership count more than ever.

Could the tyranny of the Nielsen overnight ratings be over? If a network like Fox, which is not known for its sentiment and softness, renews a show like "Dollhouse," the paradigm has surely shifted.

Fox didn’t renew "Dollhouse" because the show’s fans would have been sad about the Joss Whedon show’s untimely death. Fox doesn’t care about how viewers feel (you saw "Moment of Truth," right?). No, Fox renewed "Dollhouse" because it thinks it can make money off the project — enough to keep the enterprise profitable.

Fans have always been passionate about their favorite shows, but now they have far more ways to show it. Viewer passion translates to increased viewing in all these different arenas, which ultimately translates into more money in the pockets of the media companies.

The lesson the networks should learn from this new paradigm: Take chances.

The campaign to renew "Dollhouse" probably wouldn’t have caught fire had Whedon never been allowed to make the weird, unsettling, unexpectedly moving and complex show that he ultimately came up with in the second half of "Dollhouse’s" season. When shows are given time to develop, when they’re allowed to be different, when they’re allowed to be ambitious and strange and challenging — all that can lead to the kind of fan passion that we’re talking about here.

Let’s hope the campaign to renew "Chuck," another well-crafted show that’s not easily summarized in a four-word sentence, succeeds as well. Things look good for that NBC show; the word from various media outlets is that the spy dramedy will come back for a third season of 13 episodes.

It sure can be fun, at times, to beat up on NBC for various things, but in all fairness, with its commitment to keep "Friday Night Lights" alive by any means necessary, the network has been at the forefront of this trend — the push to keep brilliant, creative shows alive by finding many different ways to make money off them (or co-finance them, in the case of "FNL," which NBC shares with DirecTV).

If "Chuck" and "Dollhouse" both come back, it will be a very heartening trend. Every week, the dolls in Whedon’s show have a new worldview downloaded into their brains. It looks as though TV executives’ brains may be similarly pliable, as one reader suggested. Fox may have done terrible things to "Firefly," but consider the very different outcome for "Dollhouse."

I’ve begun to allow myself to think about a Friday night viewing lineup that could consist of both those shows, and I’ve grown lightheaded. So I’ll sign off for now, but not before adding this:

In other renewal news, ABC is bringing back "Castle" and "Scrubs." Zach Braff and Sarah Chalke will come back for multiple episodes of the show’s ninth season, and Donald Faison, John C. McGinley and Neil Flynn will all be back full-time, according to this story. UPDATE: Michael Ausiello reports that "Better Off Ted" has been renewed also.