Dollhouse exploring human boundaries

dollhouse poster, originally uploaded by Mathew Mitchell.

The Dollhouse is a mid-season television show that began around March 2009. I'll confess, I started watching simply because it was created by Joss Whedon. As is typical for Whedon, the spring episodes were all about setting and creating context. As the show begins a second season it's starting to stretch and explore key themes in a very interesting and visually stunning manner.

What I've found just as interesting as the Dollhouse show, is the kind of enthusiasm it's generated amongst people who don't like watching most of the fare on the tube. This has come out in a variety of ways, but just in the past week there have been two especially noteworthy discussions of Dollhouse.

First has been a blog post written by Kevin Burke working at Geek Buffet. His October 10th post is titled: Is Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse the Most Intellectually Engaging Series on American Television? This is a great first place to learn about the show and why some are seeing it as a new trailblazer. As Kevin writes:

Television rots your brain, or rather, it softens it for Alec Baldwin to slurp like a slushie drink, or so he said in an advertisement during the 2009 Super Bowl. This popular image of television and other forms of visual programming as stultifying rather than edifying is being proven incorrect by the increasingly intelligent content produced for these media. While popular series from Dancing with the Stars to Two and a Half Men may offer little to no intellectual engagement at the same time as these series are finding massive audiences, so too are smart shows from Dexter to Deadwood, from The Sopranos to The Wire finding audiences despite their darker subject matter. While many people will escape the despair of economic gloom in Survivor or some variety of mischievous Housewives, we in the know take solace in the broadcast of intelligent, intriguing long-form fiction which, when done properly, challenges us to think about the human condition in ways that we might not have considered previously. Art has come to the boob tube, if only more of us would pay attention, literati especially.

Just a few days ago a new website appeared titled Dollhouse: Why I Watch. Apparently the Dollhouse needs a bigger audience to survive and one person with mad-crazy web-skills has created this promo site. It's stunning. Really. Stunning. The Why I Watch website is a great example of how to communicate using a blend of visuals, music, and well selected text. My jaw is still on the ground after viewing the site. I only wish I had 10% of the same skills as the person who developed the site. More to the point, Why I Watch effectively tells the story of many different people and why they view the Dollhouse. Check out the sections titled Why I Watch and Why Others Watch.

These days it seems the very best in television has no real rivals in the movies. It used to be that movies contained the best in this visual storytelling form, but the tables seem to have turned, especially as new storytellers learn to take advantage of the novelistic storytelling opportunities television offers.