Revolt of a TV Genius

Joss Whedon, the George Lucas of television, is standing on the set of his first new series in six years and dismissing the very medium he helped to revolutionize. "I don't see myself creating another TV show," Whedon says between takes on Dollhouse, a dark, quirky fantasy he created that debuts February 13th on Fox. "I'm beginning to wonder how viable the medium of television, as it's run right now, will be a few years down the road."

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It's a sign of how bad things are for TV that Whedon — the genius behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the pop-drenched fantasy that gave birth to a generation of shows from Charmed to Heroes — thinks it may not have a future. And it's not just because of the problems he's encountered on Dollhouse, which has been beset by production delays and network meddling. It's because television's business model, Whedon believes, has been irreparably broken by overblown budgets and the Internet.

But while the networks grope for answers to their woes, Whedon has quietly pioneered an alternative model. During the writers' strike last year, he paid family and friends out of his own pocket to create Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, a goofy, homemade musical series about a wanna-be supervillain. "I was very interested in the idea of making things on the cheap, with the people that I love and trust," he says. "It's a whole new way to create content."

What began as a lark turned into something far bigger: the first series in history to find an audience and make money entirely online — outselling every TV show on iTunes in the weeks after its release. "Dr. Horrible is generating tremendous excitement among people like me," says Tim Kring, the creator of Heroes. "It clearly represents that there is a different model outside the traditional network for creating content and reaching a fan base. We've all been trying to figure out what these models will look like, and he just went out and did it."