Revolt of a TV Genius

It's no small thing for Whedon, a third-generation television writer, to be looking beyond TV. His grandfather wrote for Leave It to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show, and his dad spent years on hits like The Golden Girls and The Electric Company. "I learned about stories from him, but I also learned about business," says Whedon, as he grabs some lunch on the Fox set in Los Angeles. "My dad always said, 'Read your contract — and look out for yourself.'"

Whedon took the advice to heart. With Buffy, he established the business template that every breakout hit from Lost to The Dark Knight now follows. He worked the blogs and courted the geeks at ComicCon years before anyone else, and he was the first to push his TV characters into the realm of novels and comic books. His fans pay tribute to the "Buffyverse" in online social networks and at conventions dedicated to Whedon — and they stage uprisings when their hero is wronged. In 2002, after Fox canned Whedon's sci-fi Western, Firefly, fans orchestrated a protest against the network. Thanks to the outcry, Fox signed up Whedon to write and direct Serenity, a movie spinoff of Firefly.

But the debacle left Whedon reeling. To this day, he feels bitter that the network never gave the show a chance — refusing to allow him to film in widescreen, airing episodes out of order. "Firefly changed me," Whedon says quietly, picking at his lunch. "It wounded me in a way that I'll never get over. I know that sounds melodramatic. It's not like, you know, I lost my face, but I'll never get over it."

Whedon was coaxed back into television in September 2007, when he got a call from the actress Eliza Dushku, who had just struck a deal for a new show with Fox. Over lunch in Santa Monica, she begged Whedon to help. "We started talking about the Internet," Dushku recalls, "and ended up talking about fetishes." Whedon came up with the Dollhouse concept on the spot: Dushku would be an unwitting agent-for-hire named Echo. Like other members of a mysterious group called the Actives, her personality would be programmed to serve the needs of rich clients, only to have her memory erased after each assignment.

Fox, in need of a hit, was thrilled. "I thought there was no way he was coming back," Kevin Reilly, the entertainment president of Fox Broadcasting, gushed at the time. Whedon was optimistic. "I just had a really good feeling," he says. "I felt like we were all on the same page."

But from the start, things went wrong. Whedon wanted Dollhouse to be introspective and emotional; Fox pushed for more screaming and guns. "It went well at first," Whedon says. "Then it went not so well. And the not-so-well is about them going, 'You know, we don't really have room for these kinder, more contemplative stories.'"

Though his geeky male fans might imagine Whedon curled up at home with a Watchmen comic, he calls gender studies and feminism, which he studied in college, "the real interest of my life" and feels a personal responsibility to "bring the world up to the fact that women are not lesser physically or morally incomplete beings."

In Dollhouse, Echo is a fucked-up ingénue in a twisted scheme. Her only way out is to discover her true identity and strength, just as Buffy had to find the courage to slay the demons who plagued her. But Fox didn't care about the feminist subtext — it wanted to crank up the volume. Whedon tried rewriting and re-shooting, but it was no good. "I knew Kevin Reilly would look at it and go, 'You have to be fucking kidding me,' " Whedon says. He was right. Fed up with the interference, Whedon shut down production of the show in September, after only two episodes had been shot. "I no longer know what you're going for," he told the network.