I totally paused!

I happened to be checking my twitter last night, and saw the information I, as a Joss Whedon fan, have been fearing from the start.  It’s all over Whedonesque – the ratings are going down, there’s talk already of the show being canceled.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am both a diehard fan of Joss Whedon and this show.  I will admit, it is not as good as his other TV shows, but I think a lot goes into that and I don’t feel that Joss himself is fully to blame.  My complaints about the show have really been that it is not up to my Joss Whedon standards because, let’s face it, they are so high.

Joss himself has said that the executives from the network have been more involved in the show from the start than he would have wanted.  What does this mean to me?  Each time there is a mediocre episode,  I wonder how much of that is to be put at the feet of Joss and his creative team, or the execs at Fox.  If a creator as fabulous as Joss Whedon is not able to run with his full vision, how is he ever expected to make a great show?

Many of the complaints about this season center around the plots not being cohesive (in the first episode), or the overall arc not being interesting (in the second).  I wrote a reasonably lengthy recap of the first episode, and yes, it was a pretty full show.  Some critics have said it should have maybe been a two hour premiere, or two episodes…but in this TV show economy, who is allowed that?  I would have also loved some background about that first mission, and admittedly Echo being a mother in the second episode is not for everyone.

The thing I feel people aren’t taking into account is the smaller things that go into this.  Like all Whedon shows, you get little tidbits in pretty much every episode, it contributes to the overall vision, and maybe the current TV viewership isn’t looking for that in their shows.  They don’t want a piece of network television to make them think!

I am eager for Echo to find Caroline, but I’m more interested in the process it takes to get there, and even more so in how we get from this present situation to the future we saw in Epitaph One.  How does it affect an active long term when Topher changes them on a glandular level?  And while we saw Madeline (Mellie) in the second episode, happy and over the grief which caused her to become an active, I want to see how other actives are affected by their return to the normal world.

What I’m essentially saying is that I feel the show has a future, and at the very least I believe Fox should allow it to finish out the season.  And as a special message to Fox: if you want Joss Whedon to pull in ratings like those of The Vampire Diaries, let him work his magic.  He can write a much better show than that, you’ve seen it, but he can’t do it if you don’t let him.