Does Fox expect/want/need "Dollhouse" to succeed?

Given:

1) Friday nights have become a wasteland in terms of TV viewership.

2) Particularly for Fox...

3) ... who killed off Joss Whedon's ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") last TV series, "Firefly," by scheduling it on Friday nights, then unceremoniously canceling it.

What to make of:

1) The fact that Fox has scheduled Whedon's new show, "Dollhouse," on Friday nights, where it will lead out of the surprisingly low-rated "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles?"

2) Particularly given that Fox had really trumpeted this show last May at its upfronts, announcing that it would air on Mondays with limited commercial interruption?

"Dollhouse" stars Eliza Dushku, who has roughly as many facial expressions as she does voluptuous mammary glands, as Echo, who works for your prototypical sinister corporation that trucks in human tabula rasas for well-heeled clients - they wetwire her brain into thinking she's whatever the client wants, whether it's what "The Andy Griffith Show" called a "fun-time girl" or an art thief or just a really bangin' martial-arts expert who can save the world. Her bosses are evil-ish, or at least that's what we can presume (shows with this convoluted a mythology are notoriously tricky), and for some reason, her brain wipes haven't been particularly meticulous, so that she still holds some vestiges of memory of who she once was, or something.

(She's so malleable!)

Anyway, as Denise Richards (who would make a pretty decent Dollhouse apartchik herself) might put it, it's complicated. But perhaps not as complicated as the corporate mindthink that conspired to take a show that once had a lot of buzz surrounding it and plop it in a Friday-night death zone where it's more or less destined to underachieve.

Asked about this at last month's TV Press Tour, Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly dissembled thusly:

"Joss does a certain kind of show. I think he's right in the zone again on that. It's a kind of show that we know has a core passionate audience. You hope for upside. There could be upside. In some of the other scheduling scenarios, we think there was going to be enormous pressure on it. We didn't want to go through that thing where we had to play it, you know, either put pressure on Joss or worse, yank it from the schedule. ... We're going to let the show play out for 13 episodes and hopefully catch on."

Which doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement. Whedon himself admitted - with, no doubt, no small amount of understatement - that his initial reaction to the scheduling was "mixed:"

"I'd had a bad experience once on a Friday. You might have heard about it. But at the same time, I knew that was just sort of an instinctive reaction to something that had happened before. The fact of the matter is, I felt also a sense of relief. ... Friday, you know, when we talked about it, the guys made it very clear that this was a different agenda. They weren't looking to stick us on a Friday, not promote us, and then expect us to be a huge hit instantly. It's about rolling out the 13
episodes and letting people come to the show and kind of grow with it. And that takes a lot of the pressure off of us. And ultimately, I feel much more comfortable there than I did on Mondays."

Translation: At least all the episodes will air, as opposed to the show getting cancelled after four episodes.

So will this show fly on critical acclaim? Here's The Washington Post's TV columnist, Lisa de Moraes, in an online chat:

"It is the most craptastic thing I have seen in years and years - and years. Eliza Dushku is the most insanely bad actress ever, though I do have to give her props for killer hair and gorgeous bod. She plays a chick who has her memory wiped out every 'mission' and a new personality implanted in her every week to help her accomplish her 'mission' - she's in the employ of a sort of 'Mission Impossible' mercenary fighter kinda Big Brother-ish firm. So in the first episode I saw, the braintrust in charge of coming up with her perfect personality each week decides it's really really important, so that she can do her next kick-ass job - that she be asthmatic, among other things. Genius! So, naturally, when she's chasing some bad guy, she has an asthma attack. Really, I can't make this stuff up."

(Here's the main reason to watch "Dollhouse" - and this shot doesn't even appear on the show. So maybe you're just better off reading this blog.)

Here's the more-measured, more old-school-critic-y Brian Lowry in Variety:

"Trying to explain the first hour required a bit of cribbing off Fox's website ... Dushku first appears in a micromini dress, showcasing her most formidable assets. This triggers an obvious thought: If you had the equivalent of a human blow-up doll resembling Dushku, one suspects her assignments would primarily be more of the indoor variety than action-adventure. ... Attempting to unravel this convoluted package suggests that by the time 'Dollhouse' finds itself, there won't be anybody but hard-core Whedon worshippers left to play with."

What we have learned from this: A more entertaining series could be divined from critics contrasting Dushku's physical attributes with her acting skills.

- "Dollhouse:" 9 p.m. Friday, Fox (Channel 11 in L.A.).