Buffy Anne Summers, aka

Over the last several years, Joss Whedon has been responsible for some of the most interesting television ever. Cutting edge and adventurous, taking risks unlike anyone else you’ll find working in commercial TV, Joss has had a pretty good run. I would contend that Buffy the Vampire Slayer not only popularized the long story arc now found in many other shows, but convinced network executives that the empowered female hero was a real force for entertainment with which to be reckoned.

Joss’s latest, Dollhouse, is constructed around the premise of people voluntarily agreeing to become, well . . . essentially slaves. (Joss himself has commented that the concept is — at least to some degree — a metaphor for prostitution.) In short, these persons — the "Actives" — allow themselves to be imprinted with a personality appropriate to a "job," usually for one of the Dollhouse’s wealthy clients. Such "jobs" can be virtually anything you can think of, from prey to predator to lover, and from spy to physician to street thug.

If you didn’t catch the first season of the show, much of the fault may belong with the Fox executives who squeezed Dollhouse into their Friday night lineup. Friday night — as we were all supposed to have learned in school — is that night of the week when everyone who is healthy and can afford a life is often out living it. Shown any other night of the week, it likely would have attracted a more robust audience.

Though almost always willing to give Joss my attention, the second half of the first season, in particular, stirred me from my usual boob-tube complacency; and it didn’t hurt matters any that, in the season’s finale, Alan Tudyk executed an exemplary performance as the mysterious Alpha.

In short, though the early episodes dragged a bit, the latter half of the season kept surprising me, not always — but enough.

Though it’s no Buffy, the show does have potential.

But of course, even as he did with Buffy, Joss has his detractors.

Some are critical of the prostitution, both implicit and explicit, in which the "dolls" are frequently engaged, and others have asked, Where are the empowered women that were so characteristic of Buffy and Firefly?

Not surprisingly, I believe the critics may be "missing the boat." Like Buffy, Dollhouse appears poised to explore some critical themes, i.e., questions of authenticity that too often dwell unexplored and unquestioned at the heart of darkness of our consumerist, media-drenched society.

To what extent Dollhouse will or won’t address the concerns of his critics may depend on whether they will insist on Joss’s creative endeavors being substantially about empowering women, or whether they will allow that his legitimate work can include venturing into the realm of exploring what it may and may not mean — in our post-postmodernist world — to be an authentic human being.

What can I say? It’s Joss. Recommended.