And commenter bingol asked:
What's the larger issue, here? I'm not a huge Whedon fan, but I haven't seen much of his stuff. Though I liked Serenity v. much (despite thinking that they really fumbled by making the captain the main character instead of the doctor). Is the demographic to which his sensibility appeals just too small? Did Buffy obscure that fact because it crossed genres with the Dawson's Creek demographic?I've given the question a lot of today, and while I've come up with a number of ideas, I don't think any of them is complete. I think part of it is that Whedon's shows often take a while to settle into a groove, usually because the ideas behind them are fairly complicated, and therefore take some tweaking of the writing and acting to really get running smoothly. Said complicated ideas also aren't terribly easy to advertise, thus the blur between Dollhouse-as-brothel and Dollhouse-as-sophisticated-exploration of identity. And I also wonder if Whedon's own reputation also isn't a challenge. Despite the variety of ideas he's worked on and genres he's shown adept at playing with, he's an artist people tend to feel ferociously supportive of, or think just isn't for them. Those ferociously-supportive people tend to rely more on word-of-mouth rather than a traditional criticism structure to decide whether they are going to check something out or whether they're going to like it. So while a cult show like Mad Men will gain viewers when critics as a whole fall for it, a Whedon show isn't necessarily going to get significant and heavy critical coverage, and even if said coverage is great, it won't necessarily pull in a large new audience. So Whedon's shows take time both to build in concept and support, and in a world where we have vastly more user data, where the economy is bad, and where studios pull plugs very, very quickly, that's a difficult formula to persuade networks to be patient with.
It's really too bad, and not just for Joss Whedon and his co-conspirators. Something like The Unusuals, which didn't have an auteur with a following like Whedon's, could have built a cult following, especially if it was able to draw Bones fans (the creator was a former writer for that show). Instead, it had its ten-episode run and vanished. Other potentially good television's undoubtedly suffered the same fate.