Dollhouse

The man who brought us Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and this past summer’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is returning to the small screen.

Joss Whedon, who’s earned cult-like status for his TV series, films, comics and now Internet musicals, will roll out Dollhouse, another sci-fi drama about an illicit organization that provides mind-wiped "dolls" to carry out missions for the mega-rich. Plagued by re-shoots and a production shutdown last September, the heavily-anticipated Fox series was dealt another—potentially show-killing—blow last fall when it was moved from Monday to Friday nights, long-known in the industry as TV’s death slot.

The Emmy and Academy Award nominee spoke to Forbes about how television has changed for the worse, how he’s found success on the Web and how he’s made peace with his new series’ home.

Forbes: What’s been the biggest change to the medium since you launched Firefly in 2002?

Joss Whedon: The biggest change has been a diffusion of the storytelling, where everything is about the external forces and the ancillary markets. You’re meeting with the toy people before you’ve written the outline; it’s six acts instead of four—that was a horrible shock to me; you have DVD extras, which means you’re followed around by a camera the whole time, and they want different cuts and different aspect ratios; you have the Webisodes. Everything is serving 16 different masters, which doesn’t help the already nearly impossible job of trying to tell a bunch of really good stories.

How does all of that impact the way you tell a story?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t. This is a very tricky show to make and when they say, "You can do a Webisode"—some idea you can run for two minutes—we basically say, "That means that’s an idea we can’t run for 45 minutes later on." The show is not easy to break, so I tend to focus on the show, and in this particular case, it doesn’t lend itself to a comic book or Webisodes. I’m just a big stick in the mud—I stick myself in the mud and keep telling stories and try not to think too hard about whether we can get a tie-in with a car company.

This show is more cerebral—and perhaps more niche—than we’re used to seeing on the broadcast networks today. Is there room for shows like this?

Well, I don’t want to be accused of saying, "I’m so much smarter than Fox." The concept is tricky, but it’s not exactly hard to follow. It’s not like we’re shooting Proust. But whether or not it’s niche, depends on how many people respond to it. And I assume it probably will be because most of the things I do are, but it’s not like we set out and said, "Which people do we want to alienate."

The question of whether or not there’s a place for it has to do with the economics of the thing. If it’s the right niche, then yes, we’re good. If they’re the people who buy things, then there doesn’t have to be as many of them. If it is clearly doing something on DVD then they might want to make more to maximize that. My shows have always been slow growth and shows that people usually come to after, so that’s good because in the same way that the storytelling is diffused, the expectations are too, because monetization takes a lot of different forms and it’s no longer, especially not in this case, about opening weekend. So there’s definitely the chance that there’s a place for it, but it’s tricky—and if it weren’t tricky, it wouldn’t be on Fridays.

While both your fans and the press have expressed concern over your switch to Friday, you’ve been publicly supportive of the move. How come?

It’s no longer the graveyard that it used to be, simply because of things like Tivo and DVDs. People are just different about the way they watch TV and the way they come to TV. So it’s not your last chance anymore. It’s not that thing of if they don’t catch it the moment it airs, it’s over—that era is kind of over. Also, because it doesn’t have the onus of having to lead-in a hit show or follow-up on a hit show, they are ready to give it a little more breathing space, and that’s what it needs. It needs to be a little but under the radar, which is where I thrive.

With the success of Dr. Horrible, you’ve become something of a new-media maven. What advice can you offer your peers interested in making a career on the Web?

Well, I’m still trying to work out the career portion of that. We made a profit on Dr. Horrible, and that’s with zero advertising of any kind. So it’s not a bad place to start, but because of it I will become a thousandaire. We’re not dealing with the kind of numbers that support a Hollywood lifestyle. The kind of money I made on Dr. Horrible would not excite a studio and wouldn’t even excite most of my peers unless you look at it in terms of percentage.

So my advice would be to approach it in the way I’m approaching it, in a very modular fashion. Keep the expectations and the commitment small enough so that you can let the audience tell you after a small amount of time how interested they are. If you did seven episodes of something at, say, 15 minutes each, you have a movie, a DVD, if nothing else.

A lot of people were talking during the strike about how they’ll get $100 million, and they’ll make shows just like we do on TV. And I thought, "I don’t even want to make shows like we make on TV for TV: I want to make them faster, and that technology exists; I want to spend more time with the acting and less time with the spending." That’s the way the Internet has to work, and people have to have the wherewithal or the moxy to just dive in—but at the shallow end, because monetization is complicated, and there aren’t a lot of streams and they don’t run very deep.

Any plans for new Web-only ventures?

I absolutely intend to do more Web stuff, I just have to figure out what comes first and how I can structure it. Again, I want to keep experimenting with different models so that I can be throwing stuff up against the wall, trying, succeeding, failing, whatever it is, so the next guy has a better sense of what’s going to work for him.

If you could select only one medium in which to work, which would it be and why?

Well, right now it would be on the Internet because there is no restriction about what it is I make. You can do comic books, TV, movies, you’re not going to get giant budgets, but that’s never stopped me before. I made movies in my backyard when I was a kid, and I can do it when I’m a grown up.

What’s your favorite show to watch on TV right now?

Oh, well Battlestar [Galactica] is back, so there’s really no question about that.