Dollhouse

Vigils may already have started for Joss Whedon’s "Dollhouse" series following the announcement that it will occupy Fox’s Friday night slot-of-death, but the show is not out for the count. Not by a long shot.

And according to Whedon, he is to blame for any failures of the series.

"The fact of the matter is that I’ve made some rookie mistakes – actually worse than rookie mistakes – about what I was doing with the show, especially considering that I’ve worked with Fox before," he told SFX. "Looking back I go, ‘Oh, of course they would have wanted this and I don’t know why I thought they’d let me do that.’ The hard part has been to find the show somewhere in between my intentions and their expectations; to still find the show that I wanted to make. We did that and now things are running smoothly, but whew, doggy."

Despite the story changes and slight re-tooling of the show, Whedon promises a solid adventure series that borrows from all genres as Echo (Eliza Dushku) slowly comes to terms with her own Humanity at the hands of an almost hostile agency determined to keep her nothing but a doll. And if he has his way, there will be a serialized element alongside the adventure-of-the-week formula.

"I don’t enjoy a show that only gets you to watch the next one; where they’re trying to come up with something more outlandish every five minutes. I’ve always believed in a show where every episode contains something that’s resolved and the mythology surrounding that becomes what the audience is interested in regardless. Its legitimate for [the network] to say, ‘start out in this fashion where people can come on board anytime and then let the characters who inhabit the world take over the narrative gradually.’ By Season 5 of ‘Buffy,’ you have a lot of backstory you need to know, but compared to Season 1 it’s much more fulfilling and mature. But you need people to get there."

When the series launches next year, there are high hopes – shared by both Whedon and his many fans – that the show will become a success. But according to Whedon, the success of a series isn’t measured in the numbers it brings in on a weekly basis … it’s the show’s fans that count.

"I’ve had a similar thing happen on every single one of my shows, to a greater or lesser extent," Whedon said. "And in every case, the show that came out of it found an audience – even if it took being cancelled to do it. I’m aiming for the stars with this one – a show that runs for more than a year."

"Dollhouse" premieres Feb. 13 on Fox.