I was planning to write about Project Runway today, but as the internet appears to be unusually withholding in that quarter, it’ll have to wait until later. In the mean time, allow me to briefly express some further appreciation for Supernatural, which may not have the flash of Big Love or the epic complexity of Lost, but it continues to do what it does very well.

Last night’s Valentine’s themed episode was a great example of the show firing on all pistons. It began with a super creepy, gore-tastic opening scene where two cute people on a first date start to make out and then transition into actually eating each other to death. It followed that up with some humor, a guy who killed himself by using a toilet brush to cram himself full of Twinkies, the arrival of Famine (of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse fame), and a brief but moving exploration of Sam and Dean’s evolving, twisted relationship.

Supernatural isn’t built to be a powerful, world-changing television show, but it’s so consistently effective at being scary, funny, and thoughtful that it’s head-and-shoulders above other, similarly lowbrow shows. Perhaps more than any other positive feature, Supernatural is just exceptionally good at balancing its conflicting story demands. The usual strain between week-to-week episodic stories and the long arc apocalypse plot is almost absent, letting minor ghost problems and the end of the world get all mixed up together, to the benefit of both plotlines. It’s also reliably fun, which is more than I can say for The Vampire Diaries.

***

A few updates on the crazy Chuck-pocalypse:

There were a lot of great things written about the whole shipper angle of the blow up, particularly this piece by Linda Holmes, and this one on Cultural Learnings. This blog also got a link on the LA Times Show Tracker blog, which was pretty cool. Most importantly, though, this interview with Chuck creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak addresses both the special relationship between Chuck and its fans, and gives Schwartz and Fedak an opportunity to mildly reassert that they are actually the ones in charge of the story. Shipping can be positive and build loyalty to a show, but a show’s plot is not a matter for popular vote.

It’s been a while since I blogged about a new television show just because it was so unpleasant I had to share. Generally, I like to like things. This week, though, I stumbled over a new show that’s souring my whole afternoon, and so I’m sharing.

On paper, I can sort of see why Past Life is appealing. It’s a procedural format with the standard quirky lead characters, it’s got a healthy undercurrent of fantasy – or at least, mysticism – and a strong whiff of inoffensive spiritualism, complete with pseudo-scientific terminology. It’s Fringe without the horror/scifi genre atmospherics, Medium without the strong lead character and slowly developing confidence in clairvoyance, and Cold Case without the historical backgrounds. It’s a lot of “without”s, but with very few added elements to fill the resulting voids. This in itself is not that remarkable, and helps Past Life descend into the ranks of “meh” without distinguishing itself as especially poor. These things, however…

Past life regression trauma looks like this. Convicing, no?

1. The fantasy/pseudo-science is insultingly ill constructed. Reincarnation is the essential underpinning of Past Life, with the fictional premise that people can access their former selves through regression and those regressive traumas can be used to solve crimes committed in previous lives. The pilot episode begins with a teenage boy shaken into some disturbing memory of his past life, and then jumps straight into gumshoe, sort-through-the-case-files detection, with nary a hint of wonder or curiosity about, say… how reincarnation happens? Are you actually all those previous people, or do they just live in your brain with you? Why people aren’t constantly experiencing regression trauma, if reincarnation is real? I’m not saying fantasy always requires real-world explanations, but it needs to be detailed and internally coherent enough to at least create an illusion of plausibility. Also, how could a mother with a disturbed son happen across reincarnation as a possible explanation?

2. It’s narratively lazy. That plot I explained in the previous point – solving crimes through past life regressions – is not the most obvious procedural premise. You’d think it would require a reasonable amount of set-up, some healthy suspicion about the idea, at least a sense that its practitioners are mavericks intent on bucking the system. You’d be wrong. The pilot episode introduces a cop to the team of past life specialists, whose purpose is ostensibly to ask the audience’s questions, to be skeptical, to doubt. His doubting lasts approximately five minutes before the cop is swept away into the bland flood of reincarnated murder victims, completely shortcutting the whole world-building process.

The doubting cop, eagerly searching for reincarnated murder victims

Even worse, the procedural details are lazy! The show is set in New York City, and to identify the reincarnated murder victim, the detective picks up on the detail of a building with a red light on the top. He quickly points out could be almost anything in New York City… but only a few things in Washington, DC. Why Washington, DC? Who knows! Presumably, it could also be any of the millions of tall buildings across the world, but no! It’s the Washington Monument! Case solved!

3. Richard Schiff. Why is he in this show? I know this is primarily my own nostalgic love of The West Wing surfacing and unfairly coloring my criticism here, but Toby Ziegler, why on earth are you hanging out with these people who believe in reincarnation? He looks unconscionably erudite standing next to the two main leads, totally unbalancing the otherwise uninterrupted atmosphere of goofy spiritualism. Really, as bad as the rest of Past Life is, Richard Schiff was the nail in the coffin for me. Heh, coffin. ‘Cause, you know, they’re dead…

Seriously, that right there was the most entertaining part of watching Past Life.

The general consensus among the Lost critics (see here and here) is that last night’s episode was a little lame, or at least not as satisfying as it could have been. The most interesting take on this is the idea that an episode like “What Kate Does” is going to be far more enjoyable in retrospect, when we have some idea of why we should care about these alternate timeline Losties. At the moment, the most exciting thing about that entire chunk of the episode was that Ethan shows up as Claire’s OB-GYN, and manages to be just as creepy in the guise of kindly doctor as he was as a masquerading Other. It may be true that with the benefit of hindsight, we’ll be able to understand this episode for all the pieces it cannily shifts into place, but that doesn’t diminish my sense of slight disappointment.

What Kate does: drive a cab, look surly, look suspicious

The problem is not just that we don’t have any reason to be invested in the alt-Losties – it’s that the episode was directly billing itself as a companion piece to an earlier, far more meaningful episode and failed to live up to that promise. Season two’s episode “What Kate Did” finally fleshed out the magnitude of Kate’s crimes, giving us context for her presence on Oceanic 815 courtesy of the US Marshal service and detailing her twisted family tree. That lovely hanging past-tense verb, “did,” gets a satisfying response – Kate killed the guy she thought was her abusive stepfather, only to discover he was actually her biological parent. As a bonus to all that pleasing backstory, the black horse that aids in Kate’s escape from the Marshal then appears on the island, totally freaking her (and me) out. In contrast, the answer to “What Kate Does” is much less interesting. Kate steals a cab. Kate hangs out with Claire, and they go to the hospital. Kate likes the name Aaron. Kate does nothing all that exciting.

To be fair, the episode titles do act as a nice little key to the narrative techniques here. While season two was still heavily in flashback land, “What Kate Did” is clearly a question of note. Immersed in an alternate timeline with as-yet-unknown significance, “What Kate Does” gives us a nice grammatical clue. Kate and Claire’s Super Exciting Hospital Adventure is in the present tense, further clarifying that these two storylines are simultaneous (or at least, that the alternate universe is the one happening now).

As for the rest of the episode, it managed to be both more compelling and more predictable. Sayid’s un-zombie resurrection is, as guessed, going to cause some problems down the line. The infection business is intriguing, especially as it connects with Rousseau’s account of her arrival on the island and Claire’s gun-toting reappearance. Unlike most other Lost characters, mystical Asian man seems to have spent some time sorting through lostpedia and is fully aware that Claire and Jack are siblings, which, coupled with his horticultural skills and wacky language preferences, hikes his “mystical” aura up into the stratosphere. And poor Sawyer is still broken up about Juliet.

I’m certainly intrigued by the temple and its mysterious restorative dirty pool water, and I’m all for the return of Claire and watching Sayid slowly turn into a werewolf. (Because as he made clear, zombie is not an option). Unless Lost gives me something to care about in the alternate timeline, though, it’s going to continue seeming disjointed and hollow.

Did you watch Chuck last night? If so, did you hear a small screaming sound somewhere in the distance, a million voices crying out in pain? Yeah, that would be the internet.

Culled from twenty-seven pages of comments on the NBC boards:

Wow, I have never actually seen a show commit suicide live before.

Josh Schwartz is on my **** list. It’s like he is purposely digging a grave for this show and hosing over the Chuck fans so he can move on to other projects.

Man this show just jump the shark

Worst episode ever.

For me at least, last night’s episode of Chuck was a standard-to-meh range offering, with less pop and fizzle than you usually like to see, some character development pacing issues, and some definite plot silliness, but for the most part, it was essentially in line with the usual programming. Imagine my surprise, then, to browse through the usually quite reasonable comments on Alan Sepinwall’s blog post, and then read through the NBC website’s Chuck boards and discover that last night’s episode was actually Chuck-pocalypse. Chuck-mageddon. ChOMFG. A few die-hard Chuck fans, who went to extensive lengths less than a year ago in order to save the show from the very teetering edge of cancellation, are now demanding a Chuck boycott to tell NBC who’s boss on this show.

From a commenter on Alan Sepinwall’s blog:

When Chuck returns after the Olympics, no one should watch it on air. Rather we should all watch it online at Hulu or any other online service we can find. Failing that, DVR the show and watch it that way.

That way we can send a message to NBC and the producers of the show that we are still interested in the show but we are not prepared to settle for the caliber of show we saw last night. “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore”.

What actually happened to incite this mouth-foaming rage? Chuck and Sarah, whose star-crossed, will-they-won’t-they relationship has formed a central premise for the show since its beginning, agreed to date other people. I know. Chuck’s been interested in this new girl who works at the Buy More, Hannah, and last night Sarah expressed an attraction toward the new boss, Shaw. After some poisoning/suffocation in a museum vault shenanigans, Chuck and Sarah found themselves embracing Hannah and Shaw respectively, and then had an adult conversation about exploring new relationships.

As many commenters on these boards point out, what’s happening here appears to be a fissure between the casual Chuck fans and the shippers. Fans whose enjoyment of Chuck is contingent on the success of Chuck and Sarah’s relationship (or “Charah”) cannot sit back calmly while those characters walk away from the each other. I’m fascinated by the response, because it’s both an essential part experiencing fiction serially, and it requires some significant blindness to other fictional experiences. In a long novel released all at once, there’s no opportunity for this intense animosity – you keep reading and watch everything ultimately resolve itself. In this instance, the week-to-week gap (in this case much longer thanks to the Olympics) is double-edged: on the one hand you get fans declaring a boycott and announcing themselves to be finished with the show; on the other, the space between episodes is the time when your fans whip themselves into a veritable audience-building frenzy.

The willful blindness to other fictional experiences is an intrinsic aspect of almost any shipping. At least in the case of other infamous shipped relationships – the Twilight triangle, Veronica Mars, Buffy – one character has a choice between two other characters, and fans take sides. For shows like Chuck, where Chuck and Sarah are clearly built to be together, complete obsession with their relationship requires that fans ignore any previous fictional knowledge that leads them to the obvious conclusion. Of course these new characters are minor obstacles in the longer-term relationship arc. Of course Chuck and Sarah will fall in love again. It has happened innumerable times before, on television, in novels, in comic books, in plays, operas, and radio dramas. It will happen again. I suppose Chuck or Sarah could die, or another character could join the permanent cast, but in either of those instances, you’d know what was going on. This type of minor roadblock is never the end point, but in order to continually invest yourself in Chuck and Sarah, you have to ignore any previous knowledge about how These Things work. It’s a bizarre, intriguing, and I think relatively recent breed of fandom. I can only hope very few of them carry through with the boycott idea, because regardless how angry they might be now, Chuck and Sarah fraught with problems has to be better than no Charah at all.

I continue to struggle with Big Love and its perpetual substitution of “more” for “more interesting.” But last night’s episode is a good example of how the show can sometimes approach coherency, as well as a reminder of why the entire Juniper Creek plotline was even a part of this show to begin with. This whole season is built on a problem – Bill Henrickson running for State Senate is such a wacky, unlikely idea that it’s difficult to move past it and consider anything else going on in the show – but in episodes like “Sins of the Father” you can glimpse the plan underneath the craziness.

As has been noted again and again about this show, everything that happens in the Henrickson family is so complex, twisty, and fascinating that it’s baffling why any episode would waste time with the unsubtle, overwrought Juniper Creek gang. Big Love has made it too easy to forget why we should care about Juniper Creek at all, and “Sins of the Father” did a far better job of sewing together those plot threads than any other episode in recent memory. Juniper Creek haunts the Henrickson family, but their worlds are so distant that it becomes difficult to see the meaningful connections: I could care less about Bill’s mother’s absurd Mexican bird smuggling scheme. But when the Mormon lost boy story makes the news and Bill is forced to go on record about his past, suddenly the emotional impact of Juniper Creek becomes a live wire. Bill’s teenage mug shot is plastered all over his campaign office, and it’s as if this enormous and meaningful aspect of the Juniper Creek plotline is staring out of those posters, literally overlaying this ridiculous State Senate story with the glaring history of Bill’s misdeeds. Bill’s father exiled him at fourteen, and Bill has now thrown his own son out of the house for the same kinds of fear and jealousy that caused his own exile. Roman Grant is finally dead, and much as he’d like to deny it, Bill feels the same desire to seek power that comprises the foundation of his marriage and his family history. At least in the world of Big Love, the nature of polygamy brings about conflict between fathers and sons, and Bill has fallen into the same trap he desperately wanted to escape.

Instead of the typical scattershot, haphazard flickering between the casino, the Henrickson compound, what I now discover to be the ironically-named Henrickson’s Home Plus, any of the three households we follow in Juniper Creek, Sarah’s new life, and the entire State Senate story, “Sins of the Father” provides some order to the chaos. These stories are actually one story, telling the life history of this enigmatic man whose childhood abandonment has spurred him to constantly build himself newer, bigger homes. (“Build with Bill” – a lackluster campaign slogan proves more effective as a thesis.) And yet he falls prey to the same jealousies as his father, and throws his own son out of the house. The parallels are almost too neat. At this point, though, unless they’re hit-you-over-the-head obvious, they fail to withstand the sheer onslaught of other stories.

Am I supposed to be reading some metaphor here with all the caged birds? Because it's just too weird and uneven.

So – a good episode. A sad episode, full of a tragic Phillip Glass-like musical score and an uncharacteristically revealing portrait of Bill, who usually acts as the background for his more interesting wives. As effective as it was, it still doesn’t solve the deep problems with the show’s construction. Individual episodes rarely reach this kind of internal harmony, and the fact that Bill’s son Ben refuses to come home and is reaching out to his bird smuggling grandmother doesn’t bode well. Still, episodes like this are why I keep watching.

There was less inspiring craziness than I usually like to see on Project Runway, but last night’s episode and its Campbell’s soup theme did make a perfectly adequate showcase for ugliness, tearfulness, and delicious judgy meanness.

The Campbell’s soup theme was less challenging than I would have liked, and the contestants were mostly interested in sending their models down the runway in enormous stop-sign colored dresses. Which I guess is okay, but my preferred techniques might have included: a dress made entirely out of Campbell’s soup cans, forcing the model to come clanking down the runway in a suit of soupy armor; a dress dyed red with Campbell’s tomato soup; a Warhol-esque application that involved sewn-on multi-colored fluorescent soup can artwork; or perhaps a dress printed with the nutrition information in enormous, serious sans serifed lettering, accompanied by a billboard-like hat that read simply, “SOUP.”

All I’m saying is, it was all right, but it could have been better.

The designers were no doubt held back in part by the presence and challenge of dressing “real” women, who required clothing that would look, you know…flattering. Despite this obstacle, a few designers managed to come up with dresses that totally ignored that request, most notably:

Jesus. (Jesus is the designer’s name, not my own exclamation of surprise. But notice how it kinda works both ways?) The best thing about this dress, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was the delicate shuddering and completely unmasked disgust it elicited from Michael Kors. “*Deep sniff* Where do I start? You basically took a checklist of everything that can turn tacky and combined it into one garment. Tight red satin, that short, plus the built in straps…”  And later, “Hmm! Hmm hmm hmm… The second best thing was the look on Heidi’s face as she refrained from commentary and then asked Michael Kors to give his opinion, clearly relishing the impending avalanche of criticism.

The judges all liked this dress from Maya, but for me it was borderline fugly. Even the guest judge’s comments seemed to encompass this reaction to the dress: “I did like it, but I wasn’t sure whether I should like it.” Maybe the idea of incorporating an abstracted heart shape into the bodice was cute, but the sash cutting across the front of the dress looked a little pageanty, and the pleating and folding seemed unnecessary and sloppy.

The winner this week was Amy, who made a dress that was well constructed and also normal-looking. Even though this week was something of a flop for outrageous reality show productions, the judges’ commentary alone elevated it out of the dullness of last season. I’m just waiting for the show to take its inevitable turn when there are fewer designers left and the individual personalities stand out a little better.

• Apparently, there’s some sort of major televised sporting event happening this weekend. While I know very little about football, the Super Bowl has always been most interesting for its status as the one televised event where advertisements are just as renown as the actual programming, and this year is shaping up to be particularly notable. There are already controversies about two Super Bowl ads, one about a dating site for gay men that has been removed from the Super Bowl lineup, and one ad produced by Focus on the Family in which football star Tim Tebow discusses his mother’s decision not to abort him. (Presumably the message is that your unborn child might also grow up to play for the Florida Gators, and thus deserves life). To recap – the Super Bowl: not interested in gay men or Democrats.
• Conan O’Brien’s future has not yet been settled, and although it’s been widely rumored that he’ll jump over to FOX, apparently Rupert Murdoch isn’t so sure yet. It seems they’re not entirely certain they a FOX Conan show can “make a profit.”
• You know what, I just did these bullet points as an excuse to keep talking about Lost. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were on Jimmy Kimmel Live Tuesday night after the episode aired, and Jimmy grilled them on a list of observations that may or may not be coincidences.
  
  
  Obviously they confirm that changes to the alternate Flight 815 are meaningful – Shannon’s disappearance, Jack’s slightly altered conversation with Rose and the flight attendant, etc. They also confirm that Evil Locke is the Smoke Monster, much to the shock of several audience members who clearly weren’t aware that spoilers of that magnitude were going to be revealed. My favorite thing about this interview,* though, is when Cuse and Lindelof remark on the importance of the punctuation for the season opener’s title: “LA X.” Kimmel asks them if they meant to put a space there, and through the joking about typos, they agree that the space is actually significant.

  I love stuff like that. It’s a such a tiny, nit-picky, fine-toothed comb thing to do, and these guys know that their fans are crazy enough to instantly pick up on and caterwaul endlessly about the fact that they put an unnecessary space in the title of one of their episodes. And I want to close read it as much as the next crazy Lostie, although more because I like the exercise than because I’m painfully impatient to get some answers.

• *When I said that was my favorite part of the interview, that probably wasn’t true. My favorite part was actually the bit when Jimmy asks them if it’s important that Hurley picks up a book by Soren Kierkegaard in the recent episode. They say yes, of course they knew what they were doing, but the subtext here is really “Um, duh. No one – no one -  throws in a Kierkegaard reference and expects it to be a meaningless gesture. It’s Kierkegaard.”

Lost is off to a strong start for its final season, and it looks like it’ll have a fairly strong audience for its farewell tour – over twelve million people watched the premiere last night, up significantly from the season opener last year. There may have been some significant viewer attrition during seasons four and five, when the narrative looked particularly convoluted and didn’t seem overly invested in providing answers. Now, though, the prospect of jumping down the rabbit hole is a lot more pleasant with the guarantee that you’ll eventually come out the other side.

Lest you get too comfortable, last night’s episode did want to make it clear that you’re definitely jumping into a crazy narrative free-for-all. The biggest question to come out of the two-hour “LA X” was the real nature of the alternate storylines. The first few seasons were flashbacks, the next few seasons were flashforwards, and we now appear to be living in a Sliding Doors, Star Trek-reboot, Back to the Future, alternate timeline limbo land. There was some grumbling about this from some people I watched with last night – unless everything gets stitched together in a way that allows for meaningful conclusion, alternate timelines can be a serious cop-out. It’s already on weakened ground in terms of character development, because we’ve spent a great deal of time becoming invested in Jack, Kate, Locke et al. as they are affected by the island. I don’t really care about Alt-Kate or Alt-Locke, because they’re nascent, undeveloped versions of the characters I already like. (I don’t care about either Jack or Alt-Jack, though, so that’s okay.) If I grow to be invested in them only to watch them get snuffed out of existence when the timelines get fixed, it’s going to be seriously annoying. I think the best case scenario here is for the timelines to have a significant impact on each other in a cause-and-effect sort of way, and I’m holding out hope that Desmond’s disappearing act on Alternate-Flight-815 is the beginning of a breakdown between the two timelines. He travels between them? He’s a Matrix-like glitch in the timeline split?

The episode did offer quite a bit in the way of answers, giving us our first view of the temple, returning to Cindy-the-flight-attendant-turned-hippie-priestess, and fleshing out this whole Evil Locke, Man in Black business. (By the way, I believe there are now three Lockes: Dead Locke, Evil Locke, and Alt-Locke. Sigh.) Evil Locke/Man in Black is the smoke monster! Which is pretty cool! In fact, one person I watched with last night stated that all he wanted out of season six was to figure out who Smokey was, and now that it’s been revealed, everything else is pretty much extraneous. It has some nice implications for previous information about the island, too – if Smokey is actually Jacob’s nemesis, and The Others have been Team Jacob all this time, that explains why they built a big sonic fence to keep out Smokey, and why Jacob’s cabin was surrounded by magical anti-Smokey ashes. Smokey’s ability to look like other bodies could also explain various islandy illusions, like Kate’s horse vision, Eko’s visions of his dead brother, and the many early images of Walt scattered around the jungle. Did Smokey make Ana-Lucia shoot Shannon?

Evil Locke, Alt-Locke, Dead Locke. Heh, "Deadlock."

So now we’re left with poor dead Sayid, who is probably now also three people (Jacob-Sayid, Dead Sayid, and Alt-Sayid). The idea that Jacob is now inhabiting Sayid’s body might require a little tweaking, though, because why does Jacob need Sayid’s actual body while the Man in Black had no trouble becoming Evil Locke without actually inhabiting Dead Locke’s skin? What is it about this show that leads me to end every paragraph with a question?

In any event, Lost is back. Break out the fish biscuits, Dharma beer, and Apollo bars, because I think it’ll be a long, confusing season.

I was going to write about Chuck today. Instead, I spent most of the day thinking about Lost.

As a result, you get this very special crossover blog post, featuring my nascent royal icing skills. Namaste, everyone.

It’s hard to even muster up a sense of surprise about it at this point, because it feels like inevitability – the last episode of Dollhouse was brilliant, funny and tragic, imaginative and full of banter and emotionally satisfying. The show is finished, and I’m sure everyone now wants more.

Appropriately, this final episode returned to the post-apocalyptic world Whedon introduced at the end of the first season, which allowed him to carry his characters through to the future we know they’ll encounter and follow the Dollhouse technology to its end. The episode succeeded in bringing all the major characters to fitting ends, most especially Topher, whose sacrifice to undo the mindwipes was really the only imaginable resolution for this particular sociopath/genius/soulless engineer/Bringer of Death. I also loved the conclusion to Adelle’s character. As Alpha so aptly puts it, she’s always been a “class act,” and she’s the only character on this show I’d trust with the responsibility of putting the world back together.

Certainly the best new feature of post-apocalyptic Epitaph Two was Victor and his Mad Max crew of tech heads. They came complete with an armored tank modded from a semi-truck, sweet tattoo-esque data access points affixed to their skulls, and necklaces hung with what looked like teeth salvaged as spoils of war but were actually USB thumb drives loaded with pertinent zombie apocalypse skills. There’s nothing quite like a tiny Asian girl with giant spiked shoulder pads grinning as she shows you the USB stick where she stores her mercy so she has room to load more weapons skills. (At what point, exactly, did giant shoulder pads become the de facto costume of choice for end-of-the-world warriors? I’m not complaining, it’s just an observation.) Victor’s merry band was a great addition to the Epitaph landscape – their use of the technology was unexpected and cool, their motivations were ambiguous and believable, and their conflicts were novel.

Planet earth gets hit with a reset button; everyone who was wiped goes back ten years and everyone who survived without getting wiped remembers the horror of a ten year zombie apocalypse. That would actually be a pretty interesting show, don’t you think? And that’s really my response to Dollhouse, after considering the thing as a whole. It was always going somewhere fascinating, but the process of getting there was never as gripping as the destination. It was never clear to me how high the show’s stakes could be until Epitaph One, and without that crucial knowledge that Echo’s silly prostitution jobs would lead to the end of humanity, every new mission was just another reason to put Eliza Dushku in a tight skirt. Once season two was imbued with that additional sense of significance, the moral quandaries actually became meaningful rather than just absently speculative. By that point, though, the show had lost its audience, its marketing, and its goodwill from casual viewers.

Thus ends Dollhouse, troubled, interesting, and short-lived. I can only hope this experience will move Joss Whedon out of network television and into cable, where he might have an opportunity to make a show with more freedom and actual swear words.