Ira Glass interviews Joss Whedon

At a charity screening of Dr. Horrible the other night in New York, two of my favorite dudes, Joss Whedon and This American Life host Ira Glass, sat down for a lengthy chat about Whedon's career. The Buffyfest blog has a fairly detailed recap, including a few Youtube clips where you can almost make out what they're saying over the laughter, shouts and muffled coughing of the audience. This is probably the clearest clip of the bunch.



At one point during the chat Whedon was surprisingly frank about some of the problems with Fox during the first season of Dollhouse.

[Dollhouse] became just a scoach too whore-y. Never had a better meeting, everything was great, then they [FOX] said "so they're kinda like prostitutes and that's not ok" Word came down that it wasn't ok. I wanted to make a show thats about feeling bad about feeling good or good about feeling bad. Fantasy is just that, fantasy. FOX wanted to back away from these implications. Every episode is ridiculously hard because the central core has been ripped out just enough, that we're constantly dancing around our own premise.

I'm amazed to say that I kind of side with Fox against Joss on this one. The more "whore-y" aspects of the show often felt just plain sleazy - and not fun-sleazy, either. Sleazy-sleazy, like we were expected to get off on the idea of Eliza Dushku as somebody's literally mindless, progammable love slave. Whedon's shows have been just acclaimed for their feminism, but Dollhouse's Echo was an airhead whose only function in life was to gratify the kinks of her clients, after which she was shut up in a box until next time. You don't have to be Gloria Steinem to be skeeved out by a premise like that, and the episodes where Echo was a jewel thief or something else a little less sexbot-ish were kind of a relief.

I'd assumed that the network had been pushing Whedon to tart Eliza Dushku up more, not the other way around. Ms. Dushku is a damn fine-looking woman, don't get me wrong... But it seemed like we spent about six minutes watching her dance in a minidress in the pilot, and by minute three I was starting to wonder if that's how we were going to spend the whole series. As the first season progressed, the show dealt more with the dark side of Echo's situation and became more interesting. Hopefully we'll see more of that when season two starts on Friday.


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