Joss Whedon interview: "Dollhouse"

Continuing our Joss Whedon lovefest, Salon.com has this interview today about Whedon's newest TV series "Dollhouse." A few highlights:

You have a huge cult -- it's not very often that TV show creators and writers get that kind of adulation.

I was one of the first. The Internet community started forming right when "Buffy" started airing, and the notion of a show creator being anything other than a name people recognize on the screen was completely new. When you become a writer you assume it's this life of anonymity, and then all of a sudden it's this other thing. But at ComiCon everybody's like that. There's a reason all the comic book artists trudge out there, because they do get, as they say, treated like rock stars.

I don't know that there are a lot of other instances of people taking their own TV shows and continuing them on as comic books for years after the series ends. Do you have the same kind of emotional attachment to the characters in "Dollhouse"?

It's different because this universe is so complicated. It's not a gut-punch like, "She's little and she beats up monsters." Echo is a much more complicated character by virtue of being hardly a character, and the premise itself is designed to be kind of distancing. I did pitch it with a six-year plan. But when we did the [first] 13 episodes, we eventually said, instead of holding back, let's just go nuts. And by the second half of the season, we just started blowing shit up. And I don't mean literal explosions, because we couldn't actually afford those anymore.

There's also an interesting discussion about "good" and "evil":

But you also like to play with the whole good-and-evil-are-relative thing in your shows. How is that gonna play out in "Dollhouse"?

Constantly. The good and evil is kind of the point, the relativity of both and our assumptions about what's evil is something we want to explore all the time. The Dollhouse is by definition kinda sketchy. And very illegal.

It's kind of a combination human trafficking/whorehouse/corporate fulfillment center.

There's also some assassination. Actually, did we ever do that or did we just talk about it in the room? And of course the network is like, can we have more assassination and less sex?

There's also this feature from Wired. "Dollhouse" debuts Friday, February 13 at 9PM EST on Fox.