Favorite Whedon TV Show Meme

[shadowkat]

I can't remember what Whedon tv shows my readership favors. So perhaps you can help? My current guess is that you rank them as follows:

1. Buffy
2. Angel (with about 25-45% preferring Angel to Buffy for various reasons)
3. Firefly
4. Dollhouse (with 65% squicked by the series and finding it unwatchable)


Only 5% read the comics and liked them. Everyone liked Dr. Horrible. Few read the X-men comics by Whedon or stuck with them. So comics Whedon - not a fav. Also few appear interested in the current films, Much Ado, Cabin in the Woods, or Avengers. Am I right?
Here's a poll to find out, assuming people participate. As all mathematicians and staticians know...polls are repsentative of the sampling. If only 20 people take the poll?
You guess based on those 20. So...I have approximately 150 who have friended me, of the 150, about 50 probably read on a daily basis, of the 50, 30% are into polls. So..I have no way of knowing, do I? The only way I can know is if everyone who reads my journal and likes or ever liked Whedon shows takes the poll. And that's well impossible. So this is ...far from an exact exercise. (A lesson to the people out there who do a lot of surveys for sociology, psychology and marketing classes - people? They aren't that reliable. You know that right? IF not, just read the internet - it will prove it to you. There's a reason that sociology, psychology and marketing are considering inexact sciences or soft. They rely on inexact data that can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Lawyers love to poke holes in statistical data.)

That said, for a bit of fun, take the poll and see if you can prove me wrong? Feel free to link, since a lot of readers seem to be through links at times.

[Poll #1831422]

[Note: Won't be able to respond until late on Thursday or Friday, since I can no longer access personal blogs via my workplace. So can only access at home. PS: I reposted this poll fifteen minutes after first posting, because I screwed up on the last question and had to fix it. Now it should be fine. If you responded to the deleted post, please respond again. Thanks.]

[ETA: Read the comments. Fascinating.]

Comments

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Hee. There's a smattering of people, as you can see from the poll numbers above, who love Firefly. But they were clearly in the minority - or the series wouldn't have been cancelled and we'd have a movie franchise. Star Trek, it's not. Or Star Wars for that matter. Star Wars is actually a better comparison - since Lucas melded sci-fi and the Western genre in that series.
But Lucas unlike Whedon thought more about the mythology and world. Whedon sort of figured he'd make it up as he went along - which does not work in sci-fi. Horror and gothic fantasy, yes, sci-fi, not so much.

Actually read the post directly above yours. You two should chat. Gingerwall meet embers_log. But you might want to skip the ones below...they really did not like Firefly and hated Dollhouse.

I love Buffy more than Firefly overall, I'm just not waxing as poetic, because that seems to be the general consensus (not the case with Firefly apparently - I didn't expect that.)

My flist is generally speaking lacking in enthusiasm over Firefly. You should have seen the boards at the time it aired. They did not like it. Actually that is an understatement. People were furious at Whedon for leaving Buffy and Angel to work on Firefly and held Firefly up to impossible expectations. Keep in mind many Whedon fans are insane sci-fi geeks, and sci-fi geeks, particularly the insane anal retentive ones, tend to be generally speaking...a bit...nit-picky. And Whedon isn't great at details. (Honestly I don't think he bothers with them, the man is a bloody gardener, no architectural skills whatsoever). You can get away with camp and skipping over fine details in horror/fantasy genre, not so much science fiction, particularly in 2003 when everyone has watched really good sci-fi, and if you decide to meld it with Westerns (not a popular genre with a lot of fans to begin with) and infuse it with a 1800s Southern United States Libertarian Mentality (Whedon based Firefly on The Killer Angels, a story about the Confederate Army that he'd become obsessed with) which frankly offended a lot of people, not to mention alienated the European audience completely - bad idea, Whedon shows up until Firefly sold very well overseas. Then, to add insult to injury, use Chinese but forget to add any Asians. Plus..Inara the Companion. Sigh. Poor Fox, they kept asking Whedon and Minear what they were doing and Whedon couldn't tell them. It was a disaster in the making.

But, I think, if Fox had been patient, and less worried about ratings, and the series was less expensive...it might have gotten better as it went. Hard to tell. Scripts that got leaked to the net after it ended along with a rather fascinating interview with Minear about a script slanted for late Season 1, around episode 17, that was never filmed...sort of alienated all fans except for die-hards. (It involved Inara's gang rape by the Reavers and Mal's rescue of her...you can sort of see why fans would hate that with the fire of five thousand suns.)

Anyhow, I do agree with you on Objects in Space that was a brilliant episode, and there were a few good one's in there. But? I also LOVE Westerns and find quirky shows interesting, and not the least bit nit-picky about sci-fi. ;-)

And Dollhouse... well, I enjoyed most of the episodes... I loved Topher and DeWitt and their dynamic. Most of the dolls were pretty good, but Eliza as Echo was underwhelming and that made it hard to really love. Eh.

Had more or less the same reaction to it. It was okay. I didn't feel the need to buy the DVDs. Or re-watch. And, unfortunately or fortunately my flist's hatred of the series sort of influenced my perspective. (Read the comments below and above to see what I'm talking about and to be honest those comments are actually pretty nice in comparison to the posts that I'd read when it aired). I think if they'd hired or had a better actress than Dusku to play the lead or better yet, had a guy play that role, such as James Marsters, it may have worked better for me - I honestly don't know. I do know that Dusku didn't work. She was the weak link in that series.

Topher and DeWitt and Acker were rather brilliant though, and it was almost worth watching for their performances along.