“Well there’s 80 minutes of my life I’ll never get back”
----Mark Waid
(Comics Writer)

It’s fun to watch unsold pilots. It’s fun to second-guess the network executives who passed on a particular show. It’s fun to get a glimpse in to an alternate world where a show may have lasted a whopping 13 hours on Fox, rather than just one. For me, the highlight is seeing the kind of high-concept crap that people developed with no real thought of how they’re going to keep it going.

Every year there are dozens of pilot episodes made. These are essentially a working model or proof of concept episode for a potential new TV series. Some of these are fully-fledged episodes, and some are only partial-length. Others are feature length. Based on the strengths or weaknesses of these ‘proposals’, networks decide which new shows they’re going to pick up and which ones they’re not.

Ah, the summer doldrums, when young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love and TV networks burn off their unsold pilots in an attempt to amortize their development costs. It’s romantic, really. We get a chance to meet and bond with characters that we’ll never see again, never get to know; we get a glimpse down a road the network, in it’s wisdom, decided not to travel down. We get to test the waters of what the suits think us hayseeds will like. We get a window in to which failed shows from the last few seasons the other suits feel are worthy of ripping off.

Joss Whedon trades on the goodwill he's built over the years making such interesting series as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and Doctor Horrible, and hands us... this.

So, what do I think of Dollhouse?