Jason Pomerantz Stuff

Last night we watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, by geek overlord Joss Whedon.

It’s the story of a would-be super-villain who maintains a video blog detailing his plans for world-domination.  Of course, all Dr. Horrible’s plans go wrong.  Most distressingly they backfire in relation to his obsession with a shy woman he meets in a laundry mat, played by Felicia Day.

Dr. Horrible himself is played by Neil Patrick Harris, best known as Doogie Hauser.  The character is essentially a stand in for the prototypical nerdy-geek: Convinced he’s smarter than everyone else.  Obsessed with technological toys.  Impossibly shy around girls.

Like most geeks, he’s certain he could run the world better than the idiots currently in charge.  The only difference is Dr. Horrible actually tries to do something about it.

Also like the average maladjusted nerd, Dr. Horrible is picked on and bullied by an obnoxious jock.  In this case, it’s local superhero Captain Hammer, played with over-the-top enthusiasm by Nathan Fillion (star of Whedon’s much mourned, prematurely cancelled series Firefly.)

And, of course, since it’s a ‘sing-along’ blog, the characters have a propensity to break into song.  It’s a lot of fun revisiting Whedon’s cheesy but infectious musical style, last heard in the indisputable pinnacle of his career, ‘Once More, With Feeling…’, the all singing, all dancing episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  (Buffy ties with The Wire for top spot on my list of all time best TV series.)

Almost as interesting as the show itself is the story of how it came about.  Whedon says he conceived of it during the writer’s strike of 2007-2008.  Since he couldn’t work on his normal professional pursuits, he decided to do an end-run around the restrictions and produce something entirely for the net, with no investment from the picketed studios.  Originally presented as three short episodes, at first the plan was to show each for free, for a limited time, and then charge a small fee to view the whole production together.  That ambitious experiment in web economics doesn’t seem to have worked out, since it’s now all widely available at no cost.  (I watched it on Hulu.)

Dr. Horrible is an excellent example of the currently popular genre of meta-superheroes:  Since the whole idea of caped crusaders and villains is so obviously ridiculous, and has been so overdone over the years, just about the only way to do anything new is to highlight self-aware riff’s on the conventions of the genre itself.  Other examples are Brian Michael Bendis’ comicbook Powers, Ben Edlund’s The Tick, and, most prominently, Pixar’s The Incredibles.

While not a masterpiece, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is a pleasant diversion.  It’s an amusing, if minor, addition to Whedon’s impressive body of work.

TV and Movie Reviews, Way of the Geek Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon