Dollhouse

"Welcome back to the biggest surprise of my career: our season two," Joss Whedon told us as we arrived on the set of "Dollhouse," a year after a similar press tour set visit in which Whedon spent a lot of the time doing damage control about rumors of creative tensions between himself and Fox.

"Dollhouse" eventually debuted in Feburary to mixed reviews, and even there Whedon was out there in the press trying to manage expectations, suggesting that the show wasn’t going to really hit its stride until the sixth episode.

And "Dollhouse" did, in fact, get much better as it went along, but the ratings were weak, and other behind-the-scenes issues kept popping up. Because the original pilot was scrapped, Fox the studio commissioned an additional episode for the DVD, called "Epitaph One," but Fox the network (which had already paid for the original pilot) declined to air it.

"When they told me it wasn’t going to air," Whedon recalled on the set today, "I thought, ’Well, we’ve been canceled.’"

Instead, Fox — relying in part on data that showed the series’ audience rising dramatically in non-traditional viewing (time-shifting on DVRs, online streaming, downloads, etc.) — ordered a second season. Because of the renewal, and because the first season’s final episodes — along with "Epitaph One" — were so much stronger creatively than the first few, the critics encountered a happy and confident Whedon on our return to the spacious wood-adorned set.

"Before," Whedon said of season one, "it was an idea, and it was an idea that we had a lot of trouble defining, and America got to watch that. And now we feel like it is defined."

In the early episodes, Eliza Dushku’s Echo — a woman who had her personality temporarily removed so she could be imprinted with other personas and abilities to service a variety of wealthy clients — was a passive blank going on generic missions. In the new season, Whedon said, Echo will realize that, "As a person, she exists, and she has a mission. She has something she wants. This year, we’re going to see the results of everything she went through... We’re going to find her to be a great deal less passive and more directed in what she wants. And that’s going to make her life a good deal harder."

After the press conference, Whedon talked about how he and Fox both felt the show would be more accessible if they focused on standalone episodes built around Echo’s missions. But both he and the network realized after a while that those simply weren’t working, and that the audience was more invested in the ongoing stories of the characters in the Dollhouse.

"(Fox) saw that when we liked it (ongoing storylines), everybody liked it, so they liked it. So they stopped going, ’Let’s try this, let’s try that.’ They said, ’You do your thing, it’s not for everyone, but the people who love it, love it hard.’"

In addition, the second season will build on the story of "Epitaph One," which is primarily set in a post-apocalyptic future that was caused by the people responsible for the Dollhouse. The new season will occasionally revisit the future setting and its characters, and storylines will build towards developments we saw in brief "Epitaph One" flash-forward glimpses of the regular characters.

But because "Epitaph One" exists only on the "Dollhouse" season one DVD set, there’s the sticky question of Whedon having to make this season for two audiences: those who have seen "Epitaph One," and those who haven’t. (I wrote about the complications arising from this after it screened at Comic-Con.)

"I’m used to that," Whedon joked, alluding to "Serenity," the movie he made based on his low-rated Fox series "Firefly." "I did a whole movie that had that problem and only that problem."

Whedon insisted that the new season wil be made for both audiences. It will begin in that future setting, "But if you haven’t seen that, it will explain itself."

And he noted that every new season of one of his shows (or of any TV show) has to do a certain amount of hand-holding, whether for new viewers, for people who don’t watch every episode, or people who don’t obsess over every detail.

"We have so many regulars and relationships and so much mythology already," he said, that the season two premiere "has a lot of catching up for any viewer, whether or not ’Epitaph’ has aired. The fact of the matter is, the first episode of a season is going to contain a lot of, ’So this is Brooklyn. Six months have passed, my brother, and in that time, I have become king.’"

Whedon promised that the future characters wouldn’t be traveling through time to the present, and when asked if that horrible future was preventable, said, "I tend to think not."

If that’s the case, I asked after the session, then how will he deal with the fact that the series is building towards an unhappy ending?

"The question is," he said, "is there light in that darkness? Who is it truly unhappy for and who is going to be made stronger by it? I mean, I love a zombie apocalypse... but ultimately, the fate of these characters in their day-to-day lives will continue to matter, I think, to the audience. Even if society’s crumbling, it’s going to be, ’What’s happening in (the Dollhouse)? How are these people getting through that?’"

Because the show’s budget has been reduced (a condition of the renewal), there won’t be any money for web extras, even though Whedon realized the 2019 setting was the perfect set-up for a webisode series. But on the plus side for Whedon, if not necessarily for his rabid fans, Fox has also ended the Remote-Free TV gimmick that saw each episode running 50 minutes with limited commercial interruption.

"I’m just so grateful not to be 50 minutes long, because that turned out to be the thing that killed us," he said. "You get a cut that’s 10 minutes too long, you’re the happiest kid in the word, because you know you’re going to get a final cut that’s extremely streamlined, where everything works. We’d get a cut that’s 10 minutes too long and we’d have to air it as it was."

And, a year later and with all that creative turmoil behind him, Whedon wanted to be clear that Fox shouldn’t be considered the bad guy in any of the show’s early struggles.

"I work very hard on the relationship with the people who pay for my shows," he said. "I respect them, and I respect their agenda — which will not always be mine — and I respect their decision-making process."

Of his candor to the press about the show’s early struggles, he said, "I’m not going, ’Damn these suits! They’re so stupid!’ I got notes on this first episode from the studio and the network that made it much better... The day you stop having the ability to hear that, no matter how contentious your relationship is, you will start making your shows worse."