I'll admit to having grown cold on Dollhouse the last few months, but this interview with Joss on NPR fills me with a lot of confidence: he's obviously thought things through.
Jacki Lyden asks Whedon to explain how a show starring a young female character who has no free will isn't the ultimate misogynistic male fantasy.Potential!
"I won't necessarily say that it isn't that," Whedon says. "The fact of the matter is that, in the wrong hands, it is a completely misogynist thing, except it's happening to men as well — but what we're trying to do is take someone's identity away in order to discuss the concept of her identity."
Whedon says the first group he pitched the show to — after Dushku and Fox — was the board of Equality Now.
"I knew that would be the toughest room I would ever sit in," Whedon says. "What I basically told them was I was examining the idea of fantasy, and some of the stuff that would happen would be good, and some of the stuff that would happen would be kind of awful, and that the whole point was going to be to blur those lines, to take what we want from each other sexually, how much power we want to have over each other."
However, the situation is far from perfect.
Whedon says the Fox network wasn't particularly comfortable with these themes either. The original pilot episode of the series, which included discussion of the actives performing more altruistic deeds, was scrapped in favor of one that amped up the action and conspiracy.Damnit, Fox, why do you hate us so much?
Whedon says Fox also asked him to turn down the volume on some of the sexual themes.
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