Joss Whedon

I enjoyed Firefly. Buffy and Dr. Horrible were mostly fun. Dollhouse sucked. I refuse to watch Angel after having been told how it ends.

Generally speaking, I enjoy Joss Whedon’s shows. He is a talented writer, but he can also be brutal.

I wanted to write a full post about this, but then I saw this comment posted by my husband on Facebook, as realized it says all I really wanted to:

“Joss Whedon is masterful at creating characters you care about; I don’t know if any do it better. He also believes that truly awful things will randomly happen to people [malevolent universe premise] and always does that to the characters that he expertly made you care about. Firefly’s the best because it was stopped before he could do that [notice that he did do it in the movie Serenity]. I don’t plan on watching anything else he writes because I don’t care to be made to care for characters and watch them have awful, undeserved things happen to them.

“Dollhouse was awful because the lead actress was not up to the acting required to make you care about a character that had no personality to care about [the premise made this a very difficult thing to pull off for anyone], and then, when the show finally started showing who “Echo” was before her personality was wiped out, she was extremely unlikable.

“Dr. Horrible was pretty enjoyable, but was marred by Penny [?] being a complete non-person; the only reason you care about her is because Dr. Horrible does. NPH was very good in it, and I think Felicia Day did a good attempt at a character who seemed to be written as “she is selfless, pretty and Dr. Horrible likes her”, but had nothing to work with.”

That said, I still love Firefly – enough to make the lovely needlepoint pictured above.