[To mark tonight's series finale of Dollhouse, we present a guest article by Jon Eric offering a controversial take on the show's cancellation. We've already had a lot to say about the series; see if you agree with Jon about the justification for the cancellation. And come back on Monday to hear the podcast panel's analysis of the final episode and of the series as a whole.]

For real this time.

Today marks the series finale of Joss Whedon’s most recent baby, a sci-fi drama named Dollhouse. It was a rough two years, and perhaps the biggest surprise was the show’s longevity—Whedon’s last attempt at a weekly television show was cancelled after only half a season, so his fans were especially vigilant this time around: “Save Dollhouse” websites had cropped up before the show even premiered.

But in between the appearance of the first “Save Dollhouse” website and the airing of the first Dollhouse episode, Whedon’s fans seem to have turned on him. What happenedx? Maybe it had something to do with the promotional materials – how can you encapsulate such a high-concept science fiction show in a :30 TV spot? – or maybe the perception (justifiable, even if incorrect) that Joss’ Dollhouse was nothing more than a particularly highfalutin whorehouse. In the face of controversial subject matter, Whedon loyalists had a hard time coping, and some lost their faith. After all, it’s difficult to defend, let alone recommend, a show whose first-season advertising was dominated by this:

Look at how they repeat-edited the words “Dominatrix scene!” Like the network was salivating over this one little bone Whedon and Dushku had thrown them: “At last, something we can use to market this nerdy show to the hornballs who actually watch Fox on Friday nights!”

But in fact, the “Dominatrix Scene” in the show is little more than what we see in that trailer – it’s an establishing shot, a throwaway scene. She’s returning from an engagement we never see, for a client we never meet, and why should we? It’s just your standard submissive john. Why would we be interested in some standard dominatrix encounter when there are so many more interesting stories to be told?

Somehow, the die-hards missed the subtext. Whether it was Fox’s failure to communicate the concept, or the netroots feminist movement crying out against Joss’ handling an admittedly delicate subject matter (or both), Whedon’s already-small fan base fragmented itself and Whedon’s self-proclaimed feminism came under fire.

Here’s the problem: when a core audience as small as Whedon’s fragments, the resuling fraction isn’t enough to sustain a show on a major network. Especially when it airs on a Friday night. Dollhouse didn’t have a large advertising budget, Fox didn’t seem that interested in pushing the ads, and it’s not as though the concept were easy to pitch, so the series never really had a chance at an audience any larger than the supposedly-loyal Whedon fanbase. As it happened, they got something quite a bit smaller, and now the show is cancelled due to poor ratings.

It’s easy to blame Fox for all the mishandling. Fox has killed so many worthy series in the past; what’s one more? I don’t deny that Fox’s lack of care with their product helped to ensure an early demise… But some of the blame rests with Whedon, too. I submit that Whedon’s show was terminally flawed from the start, that its premise defied an audience, that its writing team is guilty of fatal sloppiness — in short, that unlike its predecessor, Dollhouse deserved to be cancelled.

And good morning to you, Overthinkers. Is that a new sweater? You’ve definitely lost some weight, at least. No? Well, enough of these pleasantries.

In happy news, Steve Jobs announced the iPad in a demonstration earlier this week, Apple’s entry into the undercrowded tablet computer market. The demonstration promised slick graphics, fast loading and 3G access. Everyone’s already made all the “tampon” jokes? The “like an iPhone, but bigger, and it can’t make calls” observations? Okay, good; just making sure the low-hanging fruit was plucked.

Question: what would the iPad need for you to buy one (taking as read “a $100 drop in price”)?

The Apple is always a low-hanging fruit.

In less happy news, the world of academia lost two original Overthinkers this week. First, Howard Zinn, the fiery revisionist historian whose People’s History of the United States remains one of the most accessible counter-cultural texts on American history. Then, in short order, J.D. Salinger, reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey and other school reading assignments. Both took the same sort of hypercritical look at established institutions that Overthinking It plays at – Zinn, with his populist interpretations of history; Salinger, infusing suburban family dynamics with Buddhism. They were tremendous influences on our time.

Question: when a prominent author dies, do you go out and read their famous texts immediately? Or do you wait for the furor to die down? Or does it not make much difference on your reading habits?

I got namechecked in Good Will Hunting. How do you like DEM apples?

And finally, today marks the series finale of Dollhouse, bringing Joss Whedon’s latest attempt at a prime-time series to a close. Fans will doubtless have unanswered questions and bitter recriminations against the Fox network. I just hope people don’t lose respect for Eliza Dushku as a serious actor.

(Note: download our podcast on Monday for Overthinking It’s final thoughts on the series)

Question: what’s the biggest unanswered question about Dollhouse burning in your mind?

I'm trying so hard to avoid a joke about the mannequins upstaging her. So, so hard.

Not a fan of Apple products, academic literature or Dollhouse? Then as far as marketers are concerned, you don’t exist – but you’re still real to us! Tell us what you’d like to talk about, since this is your … Open Thread.

On the surface, Cartoon Network’s smash hit Clone Wars is a breezy little space adventure. Obi-Wan, Anakin, Padme, and the rest of the prequel pack (yes, even Jar-Jar) zip around the galaxy, taking out hordes of bumbling robots and crossing lightsabers with a series of snarling bad guys. Everyone is constantly in danger, but nobody ever gets hurt, and the good guys inevitably save the day while learning valuable life lessons. Even though there’s a massive interstellar war raging, the tone is doggedly upbeat. In other words, this is a high-tech version of G.I. Joe, Thunder Cats, Transformers, or any of those other boy shows we enjoyed with our Rice Krispies back in the 80s.

However, when you consider the series in the context of Episodes II and III, everything changes. The Clone Wars suddenly seems darker than the inside of a Sarlacc. In fact, it seems almost cruel to market it to eight-year-olds.

Here’s the key thing to remember about the galactic conflict known as the Clone Wars: they are a complete and utter farce. Palpatine is literally controlling both sides: he commands the Republic’s clone army as Supreme Chancellor, and he leads the Separatist’s droid army as Darth Sidious. The sole reason for the war is to solidify Palpatine’s political power, and to keep the Jedi bogged down in a bunch of totally meaningless battles.

“Alt wisdom comes from spelling terrors.”

- fenzel

Why is it that, in teen high-school sit-coms, all events that happen seem to happen to same the core group of friends? In all the possible ways that high school life could have played out, how is it even remotely possible for all the things that happened to Zack Morris in Saved by the Bell to have actually happened to the same person and not to have happened to a larger distribution of people in the same population (perhaps some of whom wore belts when they tucked in their shirts)?

One easy explanation is that Somebody wrote Saved by the Bell so that it works that way. The complexity and low probability of the glee club episode and the boys vs. girls episode involving precisely the same people proves that it must have been planned. Screech cannot have come up with all those crazy inventions; they must be planted there by a “writer.” A.C. Slater cannot have always happened to have turned the seat backwards before sitting on it – somebody must have planned it that way to teach us all a message about his character.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that anybody just wrote a show like Saved by the Bell. Next thing you’re going to tell me is there is a big Peter Engel in the sky who made it all happen, and that TV deity Aaron Spelling sent his daughter to live among the Saved by the Bell cast and love the least among them. Crazy talk!

But there is another explanation, borne to us by the cosmology of the 1960s and 1970s and a spelling mistake I make all the time for no reason. I am of course, talking about The Anthropic Principal.

The anthropic principal gives us an alternative explanation for various extremely unlikely things that we encounter in teen high school sit-coms. It frees us of the need to ascribe the rules of The Max or other such places to the sit-com version of legal positivism. It’s elegant, it’s startling, and it’s real.

On the two types of the Anthropic Principal, plus a bonus piece of topical humor after the jump –

I had no choice. My health insurance wouldn't pay for anyone else.

My doctor recently diagnosed me with Terminator: Salvation induced post-traumatic fanboy stress disorder (TSIPTFSD–if it’s not in the DSM yet, it will be soon). The treatment regimen consists of repeatedly watching Terminator and Terminator 2 until the names “McG” and “Sam Worthington” no longer send me into an apoplectic rage.

So far it’s going OK (the apoplectic rage that resulted from me typing those words only lasted five minutes this time), but one of the unfortunate side effects of this treatment is that I’m starting to nitpick the hell out of these movies, more so than they probably deserve (see also: motto of this site). Take, for instance, the famous ”hasta la vista, baby” scene from Terminator 2 in which Ahnuld shoots the frozen T-1000 and shatters him into a million pieces.

This seems like a poor tactical decision. Sarah Connor and Ahnuld are both injured. John isn’t much good in a fight. Their adversary is frozen pretty damn solid and isn’t going anywhere. Why don’t they run away, fix themselves up, and fight later?

Instead, he shoots the frozen T-1000 and shatters it into pieces. Okay, I know he needed to deliver a catchy one-liner, but look what happens. Moments later, the T-1000 quickly thaws out and reconstitutes itself.

Shouldn’t Ahnuld have known that the T-1000 would thaw out faster when shattered?

Here’s a better idea: why not take the frozen T-1000, pick it up, and just dunk it into the nearest convenient molten steel vat? It’s frozen. It’s not going anywhere. Its’s completely vulnerable.

[This article is full of spoilers for season 1 of The Wire.  It covers only season 1 of The Wire, which is, thus far, the only season I’ve seen. So no spoilers for later seasons in the comments, please.]

Overthinking It, if you haven’t heard, is two years old.  Hooray, good for us, pats on the back, etc.  What’s more interesting to me is that, over those two years, we keep returning to the same question over and over and over again: How do we judge pop culture?  Is there an objective way of saying “This TV show is Good” or “This movie is Bad,” and, if so, how do we do it?

Beneath that giant rhetorical umbrella drip these fascinating sub-questions: Is Glee “good” because it’s entertaining, or is it “bad” because it doesn’t have a coherent continuity?  Should we judge Avatar based on its opsis (Aristotle for “spectacle”), based on its mythos (a.k.a. “story”), or based on other criteria?  Why does everyone consider The Simpsons of the 90s to be superior to The Simpsons on air today?  And why can’t I like the new Battlestar Galactica even though everyone tells me it’s the pinnacle of televisioned arts?

We at Overthinking It haven’t come up with real answers to any of these questions.  Well, not answers we can agree on, anyway.  Because of that, I’m coming to the conclusion that looking for an objective measure of a piece of art is an impossible task.  That’s right, folks: I’m becoming a pop culture relativist.

So “good” art is relative, huh?  No one can define it objectively; no one can agree on what it is.

Except The Wire.  Everyone agrees about The Wire.

What’s the deal?  How can people who spend hours—days, even—bickering over the merits of Showgirls and Family Guy drop their verbal weapons and sing kumbaya together over some canceled HBO series?

My answer, or at least more questions, are below the fold.

Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Josh McNeil, John Perich, and Jordan Stokes to overthink the two year anniversary of OTI, rise and fall of Conan, and the apotheosis of Sandra Bullock in this year’s awards season.

Want new episodes of the Overthinking It Podcast to download automatically? Subscribe in iTunes! (Or grab the podcast RSS feed directly.)

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.

Download Episode 82 (MP3)

Good morning, Overthinkers!

Only one news story worth reporting on in the world of pop culture: the two-year anniversary of a little site called Overthinking It. Wow. Two years already. It feels like only yesterday we were asking, “Does pop culture deserve this level of scrutiny?” Thankfully, we’ve never received an answer.

Question: visit the Authors Page or dive deep into our archives. Tell us what you’ve liked from the last two years. Tell us what you’d like us to revisit. Tell us what you’d like to see more of.

And while we’re at it, tell us what you want changed about the site. More Excel charts? More product placement in the podcasts? More visits by our goofy upstairs neighbor Laronté? Sound off in the comments, for this is your … Open Thread.

(oh, and news happened this week, too; you can talk about that)

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

- William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

One thing I could never stand was to see a filthy, dirty old drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blurp blurp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking, rotten guts. I could never stand to see anyone like that, whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real old like this one was.

– A Clockwork Orange

Comparing A Clockwork Orange to No Country for Old Men takes no more effort than focusing a pair of binoculars. We have two fuzzy images on either side of us: Burgess’s dystopian future, as viewed through the past (1962), and McCarthy’s blood-soaked past (1980), as viewed in a contemporary novel (2005). But dialing the focus bit by bit until the image adjusts, we see that we’re actually examining the same time period from two different perspectives. The 3-D effect seen in binoculars comes, as with human eyes, from overlaying two images from different angles. Thus, too, does examining this chaotic time from two different viewpoints give us clarity.

(I make reference to Burgess and McCarthy’s visions throughout, even though I’ll be focusing primarily on the films – Kubrick’s and the Coens’ adaptations, respectively. Most critics consider these movies to be unusually faithful to their source material, however, and in any case they’ve reached a wider audience)

Since the beginnings of Western civilization, we have understood that knowledge, like freedom, isn’t free.  While we respect the time and effort it takes to learn, we long for a shortcut, a free sandwich from the lunch lady of the mind.  Because it takes so long to acquire and because time is #1 on the list of finite resources, knowledge has always had value. Since the invention of writing, however, that value has been in decline. Thanks to modern technologies, individual facts are worth their weight in Zimbabwean dollars in today’s market.  That devaluation has changed the way we work, the way we learn, and most importantly on a site about pop culture, the way we tell stories.

Ancient astronomers spent decades memorizing the sky.  Their ability to predict eclipses, equinoxes and such made these men high priests.  Then we invented writing, and suddenly, those young whippersnapper priests were spending their nights sitting on the couch, watching the latest episode of Gilgamesh, trusting in written sources for their sacrifices instead of the uphill-both-ways astronomy of their elders.   A couple of thousand years later, Guttenberg opened up the whole deal to the plebians and suddenly, knowledge is off the gold standard.

“Books were prohibitively expensive in the so-called ‘good old days.’ In colonial America, in 1760, a cheap schoolbook cost twice as much as a good pair of leather shoes; Smollett’s Complete History of England cost as much as eighty pairs of shoes, six head of cattle, or thirty hogs. An ordinary laborer had to work two days to earn enough money to buy the cheap schoolbook, or 144 days to buy the Smollett. The modern innovations of mass production and marketing have brought down the cost of a paperback to only slightly more than the American minimum wage.”

–Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture, p. 52

These days, whatever the RIAA says, information is free.  Google, Napster, Wikipedia and friends put all the world’s data on the internet and iPhone gave us free* and instant access to that information anytime and anywhere.

At lunch with a guy/girl who’s into Iraqi history? 10 seconds from now you can show her the Gilgamesh story in the original cuneiform.

Out for a fancy dinner that night and want to impress him/her with your knowledge of the stars?  There’s an app for that.

Can’t think of any good pillow talk?  Talk about the implications to society of the fact that the iPhone can now solve a Rubik’s Cube.

Now that your date’s over, we’re here to talk about pop culture, so let’s move on and take a look at how knowledge has been treated in our stories.