He Saved the TV World. A Lot.

Let me just take this opportunity to heartily endorse the comments of Christopher Orr and every right-thinking citizen in this great land of ours by saying that remaking Buffy the Vampire without Joss Whedon is an idea so terrible that it might very well rip a Large Hadron Collider-style hole in the space-time continuum and kill us all, that's how bad it is. If there was a way to stand on line the night such a movie premiered and pay $11.00 that would be subtracted from the opening weekend box office gross, to punish the producers for their sins, I would do that. I'd buy negative tickets for my friends and relatives, too. (Come to think of it, shouldn't there be a Web site or something for this?)

I admit to no objectivity regarding Whedon, a pop culture genius of the highest order. It's not that he can do no wrong--indeed, his shows are infamous slow starters, generally taking a half-dozen episodes or so for the themes, characters, and plotting to cohere. Dollhouse was much the same this year--the pilot was boring, the next few episodes mediocre, but then came "Man on the Street" and whoosh, everything came together in the alchemy of pathos, humor, twisted genre convention and deep intellectual engagement that Whedon manages to achieve like few before him. 

Dollhouse is by most accounts the lowest-rated network television show ever to be renewed, and in that respect it will probably be remembered as something of milestone: the first post-broadcast network program, still alive because it was popular on iTunes, Hulu, Tivo, DVD pre-order and pretty much every platform other than being sent out through airwaves and along coaxial cable at an appointed hour.