I am – Hercules!!


Scifiwire.com has an interview with Joss Whedon that offers some encouragement for fans disheartened by Fox’s consigning the writer-director’s new sci-fi series “Dollhouse” to the network’s Friday Night Death Slot -- the same Friday Night Death Slot in which Whedon’s last Fox series, “Firefly,” met a speedy demise:

Q. How do you feel about the timeslot?

Whedon: You know, I feel fine about it. I know that it has a bad reputation. But so do the executives who built the sort of Terminator/Dollhouse entity, and they've been very up-front about a different expectation about audience numbers and slow growth. I think that they get—in a way that they really didn't back in the days of Firefly—that genre is ... something where a small group embraces it, and then it bleeds out.

“Dollhouse’s” Friday-night lead in will be the low-rated sci-fi hour “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” which stars “Firefly” alumna Summer Glau.

While a newer, hungrier Fox Network successfully launched “The X-Files” on Friday nights in 1993, more than a dozen short-lived "Fox Friday" sci-fi shows were subseqently cancelled in short order. Among the Friday Death Slot departed:

The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (1993)
MANTIS (1994)
Strange Luck (1995)
VR.5 (1995)
Sliders (1996)
Millennium (1996)
The Visitor (1997)
Harsh Realm (1999)
Freakylinks (2000)
Dark Angel (2000)
The Lone Gunmen (2001)
John Doe (2003)
Firefly (2003)

Whedon’s scifiwire interview also reveals, among many other things, that the 10th episode of “Dollhouse” is shooting now, and that the season’s final three episodes – which will be shot simultaneously – will be written by ace Mutant Enemy vets Jane Espenson (“Buffy The Vampire Slayer,” “Battlestar Galactica”), Tim Minear (“Angel,” “Wonderfalls”) and Whedon himself.

Read all of scifiwire’s interview with Whedon here.

“Dollhouse” premieres Feb. 13.

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