Quote from: Rincewind1;501423You could've just said it sucks, you know.

I wanted to be clear on the matter.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;501425I wanted to be clear on the matter.

Well, I liked the metaphor. Though it actually suggested for me that it may be good - there was a load of emotional "it's going to rape your mind", and I usually consider movies that are so grim that they do that, to be good.

Never seen Dollhouse. Premise just seemed too creepy for me.

Quote from: Rincewind1;501433Well, I liked the metaphor. Though it actually suggested for me that it may be good - there was a load of emotional "it's going to rape your mind", and I usually consider movies that are so grim that they do that, to be good.

It's not that it's "going to rape your mind".  It's that it sort of made me lose faith in everything for the few minutes I was watching it.  I was literally watching a manchild with a TV show whose minute-to-minute budget was more than my wife and I have to get by on on a monthly basis, and he was using that TV show to get back at Mean Girls.  Fuck Joss Whedon, and fuck people who hold up Joss Whedon as some kind of radical feminist champion because he has STRONG WYMYN CHARACTERS.  He doesn't; he has creepy-assed issues with women - no, check that, he has really horrible creepy-assed issues with women and watching him trot them out show to show to put on display, then nod and wink at the camera and grin through that chinstrap nonbeard and pantomime a freethrow like he just nailed a 3-pointer for all of us to see makes me want to vomit.

Every shitty shitty movie he's made he's run off and hidden behind THE STUDIO DIDN'T UNDERSTAND MY VISION BAAAAAAAAAAW! and I'm sick and goddamn tired of it because part of being a grownup is at least taking responsibility for your actions every once in a while.  

Still, I think the most resounding critique of his oeuvre came from his legion of fans that he imagines he has: Serenity didn't force Fox to renew Firefly for even a partial season, it didn't jump up and wallop the summer box office for 2005, hell it didn't even make it's own incredibly modest budget back.

Community got three seasons (and has better sci-fi writing).  Jericho got a short 2nd season.  Fans of Chuck helped keep it on a 4th and 5th season despite abysmal ratings.  Whedon lives inside a Reality Distortion Field that makes the one Steve Jobs lived in and the one Kevin Smith lives in look like soap bubbles by comparison, and when you add on his Creepy Issues with Women it's just all the more pathetic.

Quote from: Rincewind1;501423You could've just said it sucks, you know.

Dollhouse is that show where the main character gets a new memory/personality every episode, right?

It starts out like that, yes. I avoided teh show when it was first on because the premise seemed a bit like an excuse for some sort of ultimate prostitute fantasy. I thought that Whedon had entered his Frank Herbert "dirty old man" phase.But I watched it at the behest of a GF last year, and that show is perhaps the biggest mindf*ck ever made for western audiences after The Prisoner. It seriously plays with and destroys all one's expectations and by the time you're through the first season you're watching an entirely different show, and that happens repeatedly until the final story arc. It's Whedon's masterpiece. A deconstruction of gender roles, social constructs, identity and finally, individuality, that's worthy of Phillip K. Dick.

So, to answer your question, it's not actually about a character whose personality is rewritten, it's about the birth and childhood of a personality that is constructed from a number of different personalities and comes to reject the person who originally, well, inhabited the brain as it were. And then the zombie apocalypse happens.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;501440Still, I think the most resounding critique of his oeuvre came from his legion of fans that he imagines he has: Serenity didn't force Fox to renew Firefly for even a partial season, it didn't jump up and wallop the summer box office for 2005, hell it didn't even make it's own incredibly modest budget back.

Some people like Firefly some don't, I get that. I also get that the overenthusiastic Firefly fans might have caused something of a backlash against the show among felllow nerds. But judging the quality of a show, or any creative endeavor, simply by it commercial success is madness unless you really argue the virtues of the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers or boy bands in general.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;501422Dollhouse is the abyss staring back in to you.  Dollhouse is the last imperceptible sound of the last quarks in the universe decaying.  Dollhouse is a 2AM wrong number phone-call from NORAD trying to reach the President to inform him that 2400 Russian warheads are being tracked inbound to target. Dollhouse is what J-Horror films try to imply.  Dollhouse is the vision of Gehenna laid over the world for a fraction of a second while your eyes are shut when you blink.  Dollhouse is finding out H.P. Lovecraft was actually writing real articles couched in pulp stories, and it isn't cool or hip or funny because Elder Things did create you, and giant Polyps are loose.  Dollhouse is The Stand that ends on page 30 with a 100% infection rate.  Dollhouse is finding out that your parents are over the Moral Panic of D&D in the 80s because they've come out as LaVeyan Satanists - and the Devil is real.  Dollhouse is finding out that there is no Santa Claus, but there is Krampus and he's coming after your kids.  Dollhouse is a Joss Whedon show about Magic Girlsrobot whores that heclients can turn on and off at will and Whedonthe company that makes them can erase their memories because they laughed at him in highschoolfor discretion's sake.

...Which sounds cool! Pity that it is terminally boring too...

Quote from: TristramEvans;501448It seriously plays with and destroys all one's expectations and by the time you're through the first season you're watching an entirely different show, and that happens repeatedly until the final story arc.

Which is one of the problems I have with Whedon's shows. My friends go fan-rabid over them; I check them out of curiosity; the show sucks hard; I confront my friends about it (since I only watch shows on DVD it always means lost money), and the answer invariably is "Of course you have to endure the first ELEVEN SEASONS, but then you will see how good it gets!!!"

Which brings me to my main doubt: how comes that shows like "Six Feet Under", "Battlestar Galactica", "The Sopranos", "The Big Bang Theory", "The Wire", and even (believe it or not) "Xena" manage to be good from Season 1, Episode 1, Scene 1?

I understand the "slow burning" story structure, where something starts out as banal and derivative, and actually uses these "flaws" to pull the rug even harder from under the viewer when the good stuff hits. I even admit that I love to start with banal situation when I write, so to better hide the plot stunts when they come.

But this works in a more compact form of storytelling, like a movie, a graphic novel or maybe a novel. A weekly show simply needs to grab you from the beginning and give you a reason to watch it week after week. It is the nature of the medium. If you cannot adapt to it (and there is nothing wrong with this) it is better devoting your creativity to other mediums.

Quote from: Reckall;501507Which is one of the problems I have with Whedon's shows. My friends go fan-rabid over them; I check them out of curiosity; the show sucks hard; I confront my friends about it (since I only watch shows on DVD it always means lost money), and the answer invariably is "Of course you have to endure the first ELEVEN SEASONS, but then you will see how good it gets!!!"

Which brings me to my main doubt: how comes that shows like "Six Feet Under", "Battlestar Galactica", "The Sopranos", "The Big Bang Theory", "The Wire", and even (believe it or not) "Xena" manage to be good from Season 1, Episode 1, Scene 1?

I understand the "slow burning" story structure, where something starts out as banal and derivative, and actually uses these "flaws" to pull the rug even harder from under the viewer when the good stuff hits. I even admit that I love to start with banal situation when I write, so to better hide the plot stunts when they come.

But this works in a more compact form of storytelling, like a movie, a graphic novel or maybe a novel. A weekly show simply needs to grab you from the beginning and give you a reason to watch it week after week. It is the nature of the medium. If you cannot adapt to it (and there is nothing wrong with this) it is better devoting your creativity to other mediums.

Not sure where you are coming from, Whedon's shows usually start very strong right away. Probably just a personal preference thing.

I do so miss Space Above and Beyond... and I agree, that show was way too advanced for its time.

Quote from: Reckall;501507Which is one of the problems I have with Whedon's shows. My friends go fan-rabid over them; I check them out of curiosity; the show sucks hard; I confront my friends about it (since I only watch shows on DVD it always means lost money), and the answer invariably is "Of course you have to endure the first ELEVEN SEASONS, but then you will see how good it gets!!!"

Well, that wasn't what I meant to imply. Obviously this is all a matter of taste, but the show starts strong enough, IMO, it's just that it seems at first to be this incredibly sexist, overtly sexualized, modern Charlie's Angels and then, well, it consistently pulls the rug out. I say that as a good thing, but I am, at best, a lukewarm Whedon fan. I liked the first three seasons of Buffy, I think it went straight downhill after that. I think sometimes Whedon is so obsessed with destroying tropes that, while sometimes it works great and means some of the few shows that contain genuine surprises - it also, in the long run I found, led consistently to anticlimax. I also found his Buffy/Angel cast to be a little too self-aware, to the point that it defused the drama and quickly turned badass characters into ineffectual running gags. And the writers seemed to make character choices based more on what would be "cool" rather than consistency, hence Willow suddenly becoming gay because...well, in the late 90s gay witches were "in". Nevermind that it threw out the ongoing plot with Xander. (Sometimes I think Whedon just has an issue with relationships in general).

I liked Firefly better than Buffy/Angel, and I think Dollhouse was a work of genius, but I also understand why someone would seriously dislike his stuff.



And my vote for a sci-fi show that deserves a modern remake - Max Headroom.

OTOH, I'd much rather just get some more Farscape, w/o a revamp.

Quote from: TristramEvans;501515And my vote for a sci-fi show that deserves a modern remake - Max Headroom.

That's a great suggestion, because the show had such untapped potential. It holds up surprisingly well for what was really kind of a slapdash attempt to exploit a gimmick. But I think it'd suffer from future creep, the way Shadowrun and Cyberpunk do. I'm not sure it would survive its own update.

Quote from: Soylent Green;497704I think the trouble with Fate is that people take the rules too seriously. Take any other game and there is a good chance the GM is ignoring a whole bunch of rules  and giving the whole thing his own spin because that's just the way it is. And you happen to run that odd session in which no one even touches the dice, that's cool too. But when it comes to Fate it's like you got to use all the rules all the time or your not doing it right.

Fate started working a lot better for me the moment I said to myself "Screw that" and simply used the rules as and when the felt right for me.

I think the worst advertisement for FATE has been people on forums "demonstrating" how you can perform simple actions with all the system elements, when I would just wing it in practice. My favourite example is killing someone with fire by tagging an Aspect to tag them with the "On Fire" Aspect, then dousing them in gasoline which has the "flammable" aspect, and so on. FATE is great but some people want the economy of spending Fate Poitns to be the entire game.

My worst experiences-in-practice have tended to have more to do with how the game was played than the contents of the book. Mutants & Masterminds, for example, as run by somebody who actually wanted to look up how heavy a 4-story building is to see if a hero can lift it, instead of just roughing it based on the handy benchmark chart. Physics-engine gaming blows.

Quote from: stu2000;501382I like the music he writes for his shows. The Buffy musical, though a gimmick, was nicely done.

Aside from that "Once More, With Feeling", one particular music scene I find hilarious is Giles suddenly bursting into song in "Restless", which certainly qualifies as one of the better "dream episodes" in any television show that I can think of.

Quote from: TristramEvans;501515And my vote for a sci-fi show that deserves a modern remake - Max Headroom.

Quote from: stu2000;501519That's a great suggestion, because the show had such untapped potential. It holds up surprisingly well for what was really kind of a slapdash attempt to exploit a gimmick. But I think it'd suffer from future creep, the way Shadowrun and Cyberpunk do. I'm not sure it would survive its own update.

I got the DVD collection of that when it came out and it holds up remarkably well. It is kinda spooky that way.

Max headroom is almost constantly rumoured to be gettign a remake so im guessing it'll turn up eventually probably as a syfy remake that stars the original actor in some way.