Dollhouse/Spike Spinoff Crossover Cancelled

My confidential source at Fox reveals that there are no longer any plans to film a holiday special in which Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s lovable but rakish anti-villain Spike shows up at the Dollhouse to teach Echo a lesson in taking the reins on one’s destiny.

Apparently, the original plan was for Spike to provide a key piece of insight to Echo, who would have recently escaped the dollhouse, but be unsure what to do next. At that point in the series, the newly self-aware Caroline/Echo will be asking herself a lot of questions, like “Who am I, really?” “Am I good or evil?” and “What is my purpose in life?”

Spike has already had to wrestle with all those questions and come out the other side a healthy being, so he was seen as the perfect catalyst to guide Echo through the changes. His appearance would also have been an experiment in viewer ratings: if he scored well, then Fox was to go ahead and fund the first season of the long-anticipated “Spike: The Hard Way.”

Apparently, though, Joss Whedon, creator of both franchises, decided that the appearance of the beloved platinum-haired vampire would be too much of a deus-ex-machina.

“Echo needs to get where she’s going on her own merits,” Whedon will say in a yet-to-be-released statement. “And Dollhouse, as a show, needs to do the same. “

Joss Whedon And The Art Of The Perfect Detail

Fans of both the TV show Dollhouse and the operating system BeOS have excitedly pointed out that the two are connected. The fictional institution where hot young people have their memories replaced according to clients’ wishes apparently has its technical infrastructure controlled by a real OS created by a software company that closed its doors in 2001.

BeOs and Dollhouse have something else in common. They are both known for a cult following that simultaneously sings their praises and predicts their doom. Hardcore fans of BeOS refuse to let the dream die, continuing it as an open-source project even now, just as Whedon’s followers largely refuse to accept that his previous projects, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly, ever came to an end. (In the case of Buffy, which lasted for seven seasons, fans’ refusal to let the franchise die was eventually acknowledged by the release of “Season Eight,” which exists only as a series of comic books.)

The best way to get an appreciation of how BeOS occupies a similar cultural space is to read sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson’s famous essay, In The Beginning Was The Command Line. The essay itself is part computer industry chronicle, part personal history, and part plea for the reader/user to look beyond the shiny appeal of artfully rendered buttons and pull-down menus, and to embrace the raw power of talking to the computer directly.

Stephenson, writing two years before the end of BeOS as an officially supported product, quotes an entry from the BeOS public bug-tracking system, submitted by a user with the best interests of the company at heart:

The BeOS needs a megalomaniacal egomaniac sitting on its throne to give it a human character which everyone loves to hate. Without this, the BeOS will languish in the impersonifiable realm of OSs that people can never quite get a handle on. You can judge the success of an OS not by the quality of its features, but by how infamous and disliked the leaders behind them are.

Whedon, as one creator of glorious flame-out cult hits to another, has given BeOS what it always needed.

image from a series called “Before The Fall Of Missima” by brownin329

Fox, Fringe, The Doll House, And The Nature Of TV Advertising

Fox recently announced that they will be showing fewer commercials than usual during two of their upcoming dramas. Said Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori: “We’re going to have less commercials, less promotional time and less reason for viewers to use the remote. We’re going to have more character, more content, more value.”

What’s not clear is whether this shift in policy merely means fewer commercials, or fewer commercial breaks. There’s a huge difference. One way simply means more content per hour. The other way means a major paradigm shift in the way that television is written.

The plots of TV shows, both dramas and comedies, are structured according to acts, just as plays are. It’s easy to tell where one act ends and another begins: at the commercial break. Commercials are used instead of, say, curtains closing in front of a stage.

Each show has a formula for what happens in each of the acts (in the case of drama, there are usually four acts per episode). If you start to pay attention to your favorite show in terms of these acts, you’ll see the structure emerge pretty quickly. In the first act, the villain of the week often emerges. In the second act, the heroes go about fighting the villain, and fail. In the third act, Read the rest of this entry »