I don’t have anything to add to the ‘sex slave’ discussion but will throw out some comments on the general subject of this thread. Sorry if this ends up getting long. I’ve seen the following entertainments created by Whedon: Season 1-3 of Buffy (and this just within the past year), all of Firefly plus Serenity the movie, all of Dollhouse and Dr Horrible.
I’ll say, first of all, that I sometimes wonder how any of these shows ever got made. I imagine, for someone not necessarily interested in the sort of sci-fi premises that seem to make their way into graphic novels, the themes can seem awfully silly and obscure. Balancing vampire killing with high school angst? A vampire detective? Civil War-era carpetbaggers in space? A secret organization that deals in indentured servants with artificial personalities? Hey, well, are these really any more silly than such wildly popular guilty pleasures as The A-Team, Knight Rider or Airwolf? Next, to really get into them seems to require an investment of time and attention that many simply don’t feel up to. What many have said about Whedon’s themes being slow to develop is spot-on, IMO. Buffy, for example, doesn’t really take off (for me) until the last episode of the first season, and I can imagine it doesn’t really work at all for someon who is unwilling or unable to wade through a half-dozen or more mediocre episodes to really begin to understand the richness of scene and character in his works.
Anyway, I have gone ahead and made some investment in time, and so far things I like about Whedon’s creations (and personally find rather addictive) include an emotional authenticity that almost always rings true no matter how preposterous the story premise, the (mostly) extremely high quality of acting he obtains from his large casts; the simple and shallow pleasure of looking at all the wonderfully beautiful people with which he populates his stories, the frequent flashes of brilliance in dialogue, and, well, the darkness and pessimism that seems to seep through all his fictitious worlds.
Things I don’t necessarily like include a certain degree of politically correct preachiness, a related tendency to (only sometimes) take the themes a bit too seriously, and sometimes, too much ‘inside baseball’ for a given episode to accessible to a casual viewer.
Of the broadcast shows I’ve seen, Firefly seems to be the least flawed and the most accessible. Dr. Horrible is a fantastic illustration of imagination over (non-existent) budget, but basically a throwaway. Buffy, or what I’ve seen so far, creates a rich, complex and almost operatic legend that ends up being severely handicapped by the constraints of TV budget in a show that requires relatively large numbers of difficult special effects to even hope to be plausible. Dollhouse is perhaps the most philosophically complex of all his works, but as many have said, it was let down at first by requiring us to spend quite a lot of time with an actress of already limited range playing a blank slate, by having to wait a rather long time before finally getting to the more interesting implications of the dollhouse technology, and then later on, after cancellation was a done deal, by trying to cram about five years’ worth of ideas into six or eight one-hour episodes. I have to acknowledge that despite the show having some brilliant moments, I can understand the viewpoint of those who may have found it a frustrating mess.
As far as structure goes, there are common elements to all of his TV works that could verge on schtick, but for me at least, don’t quite (yet): the great attention taken by the writers to each little cliffhanger revealed just before a commercial break, a seeming obsession with exploring unconventional family units, the famous ‘Big Bad’ intended to support a season-long story arc, the merciless killing off of main(ish) characters in whom the audience has built up an emotional investment. Maybe it will enventually become too cliched to be of further interest, but right now I’m enjoying the hell out of his work.
