Adventure #34 – In Defense of Sparkly Vampires

You want to know really why Joss Whedon’s series are tanking lately (e.g. Dollhouse)? It’s not that the general viewing public doesn’t “get him.” They do “get him” – they just don’t like him. He’s alienated a large part of his former fanbase.

Ten years ago, he could Do No Wrong. Buffy The Vampire Slayer was at its peak, and Angel: The Series was a hot newcomer. Unfortunately, there were a lot of bad decisions made in the next couple of years (e.g. the death of Tara) that BtVS never truly recovered from. To make matters worse, Joss himself went online to address fans’ criticisms of the storylines and said, to all intents and purposes, that anybody who didn’t like the show’s direction was too stupid to appreciate good writing. Anyone familiar with Joss Whedon knows that he goes for the visceral, for the gut-punch, often at the expense of logical storytelling (e.g. Angel’s “happiness clause” on his curse – does that make sense to anybody?) Probably the only reason Firefly fans have not seen this side of Joss’ worldview is because the series was cancelled before Joss could drop the hammer on them.

In this time of media fragmentation, shows can live and die at the whim of a mere handful of fans. (Well, okay, a mere million fans.) Spitting in the face of your show’s fanbase is a sure ticket to cancellation. Granted, Buffy went onto another season after that point, but the ratings told the whole story: a fifteen percent drop across the board. Even if Joss (and Sarah Michelle Gellar) had wanted to do another year, I don’t see how the network was going to buy into it. A good portion of Joss’ former fan club have decided to vote with their remote, and are never going to watch any television series he is writing, producing or otherwise involved with again.