Ellen Gray: Creator Joss Whedon wants you to see the real 'Dollhouse'

DOLLHOUSE. 9 p.m. tomorrow, Channel 29.

JOSS WHEDON would like to welcome you to "Dollhouse."

Maybe you came in and had a look around when the show first premiered on Fox in mid-February.

Maybe you didn't. The show's first five weeks have averaged some 4.2 million viewers, which suggests room for improvement, if not grounds for dismissal.

But it's the next couple of episodes, starting with tomorrow's "Man on the Street," that the guy who gave us "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" thinks finally demonstrate where his new show is meant to go.

Obviously, he's hoping you'll want to go there, too.

"All of that brewing that we'd done became soup in that episode," Whedon told reporters in a conference call yesterday. "A lot of tumblers fell into place."

If this were "Buffy," someone other than me - probably the speaker himself - would be pointing out the hopeless mix of metaphors. But "Dollhouse" is not "Buffy," or "Angel" or even "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," to name just three of the projects for which Whedon is rightly revered.

Yep, you'll find a bit more humor in this week's "Dollhouse" - particularly in some of those man-on-the-street interviews - "but the fact of the matter is, this is not a comedy," Whedon said. "If there is a typical Whedon show, this is not [it]. It's not the light-hearted romp that the other shows were."

Do tell.

Eliza Dushku, for those who haven't heard, plays a woman whose memory has been erased, as have the memories of a number of other attractive people with whom she lives in a spalike facility - the Dollhouse - somewhere in Los Angeles. Periodically, each is imprinted with a new personality and leased out to clients with very specific needs.

That the most plausible of those needs happens to be sex was a stumbling block for Fox executives early on, and continues to be for some viewers.

"Some people at the network definitely said, 'Well, wait a minute. This idea we've bought is illegal. And racy. And makes us uncomfortable,' " Whedon said.

For his part, "I thought of [Dushku's character, Echo] as a sort of life coach . . . the sort of person you absolutely need in your life at a certain moment."

Responding to a comment about a scene some found particularly unbelievable, in which Echo's hired to deliver a baby, he said, "I still have no problem with the idea that someone very rich and very far off in the mountains would hire the perfect midwife . . . because you don't want a stinker."

This may be a point on which some of us are simply going to have to agree to disagree.

Whedon's right, though, about the next two episodes, which do indeed indicate a series that, however late, is finding its feet, and more importantly, its heart.

And it's heart, even more than witty banter and pop-culture references, that his fiercest fans have come to expect from Whedon. If "Dollhouse" stands a chance, it'll be because viewers are given a reason to care about people whose personalities aren't their own.

"The emotion of the thing is really why we're there," he said. "It's the only thing that really interests us. If we have to figure out a caper, that's work. but if we have to figure out a way that one of them is in pain, that's fun."

Another TV writer with a too small but nevertheless rabid fan base is Rob Thomas, whose credits include "Veronica Mars" and "Cupid."

That would be the 1998 "Cupid" with Jeremy Piven and Paula Marshall. He's remaking it with different actors but for the same network, ABC, that canceled it the first time, and you can see how that turns out on March 31.

In the meantime, though, Thomas has taken some of his "Veronica Mars" colleagues and a few other actors and put together a little cable confection called "Party Down" (10:30 p.m. tomorrow, Starz).

"Mars" veterans Ken Marino and Ryan Hansen join Jane Lynch, Lizzy Caplan and Adam Scott as cater-waiters, people who, as Thomas puts it, "had perhaps chased the dream for too long, people who had refused to join the rat race."

Thomas, who shares co-creator credit with John Enbom, Dan Etheridge and actor Paul Rudd, credits the British version of "The Office" for inspiring them. Watching the show together every week, "we started talking about wanting to write something that had a similar comedic tone," he told reporters.

Tone - and we're talking cringe humor here - only takes you so far, and those looking for "Mars"-like subtlety should look elsewhere.

But those who miss Veronica and company might want to tune in for the reunions alone: Enrico Colantoni guest-stars as a client in the the pilot, Jason Dohring plays a young conservative in next week's episode and "Veronica" herself, Kristen Bell, is expected to pop up later in the season. *

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