Why Cancelling Dollhouse Might Not Have Been Such a Bad Thing

Don’t get me wrong, I’m almost as happy Dollhouse got picked up for another season as are the acolytes of Joss Whedonism. It had some real downers (I’m not sure I could really accept the “blind girl with camera eyes infiltrating a cult for ATF and FBI” plotline), but I think all but the querulous viewers will agree the show showed significant improvement in the second half. I think the ideas of personality and ethics it explores are fascinating, especially when extrapolated (see Morgan’s Altered Carbon for one potential conclusion).

All that being said, I have to ask myself if it wouldn’t have been better for the show to have been cancelled after the first season. Even if the compromises the show’s  producers were forced to make have no effect in either direction on the quality of the show, enjoying a second season of the show is only a short-term benefit. I think that continuing to see promising shows killed in their infancy by studio executives is the kind of pressure that is ultimately going to improve visual entertainment.

For years, Big Content has been applying heavy stabilizing selection to their “products,” routinely choosing something that has been proven to be successful over the risky (ten seasons of Scrubs?). One could argue that this is what makes the best business sense; executives are only doing their jobs by making choices that will maximize profits for the company and its shareholders. It’s a valid position to have, but it focuses only on content as a business rather than content as creative expression. The exigency of today is that the tried-and-true business model is rapidly eroding; the age of raking in millions from a single album or television show episode is coming to a close.

What we need from television in the coming years is not more of the familiar, but actual innovation—much like music has seen from independent artists. This is often where the skeptic will point out that innovation often doesn’t capture the hearts of reviewers or pull in ratings, and once again, they are correct. Innovation is naturally risky: many ideas fail or remain niche before something emerges with the power to “go mainstream,” catching on to the point where they can be moneymaking. But this is why it’s time to see the truly creative types leave the studios and start exploring without executive pressure. While independents lose the security of a corporate “parent,” they gain both the liberty to realize their ideas and the ability to keep income local instead of paying out to middlemen.

An impressive example of this in action is Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible, distributed online and directly to DVD. Perhaps not so remarkably, the project made enough money to pay the actors and cover the bills. While I doubt anybody involved got extraordinarily wealthy, they were able to create something unique and reap the rewards of its success. Although it seems like a niche market in the short-term, the so-called “mainstream” is always far behind the trend. Ten years ago the geeks were trying to explain now-common concepts like email and instant messaging to their mainstream friends. Imagine if we had only listened to the people who said these these things weren’t worth supporting because they weren’t profitable!

I’m looking forward to watching another season of Dollhouse. However, I’m even more excited about moving toward a time when the fate of a show like Dollhouse rests not in a corporate boardroom but where it belongs: in the hands of the people who bring it to life.