Countdown to 'Dollhouse': Fran Kranz spills Attic secrets

In “Dollhouse,” Fran Kranz plays Topher Brink, the brains behind the morally dubious operation that rents out customized humans to a high-paying clientele.

You might remember Kranz, 26, as the kid writer who moves into a legendary Hollywood apartment complex full of kooks in the short-lived CBS comedy “Welcome to the Captain.” (He won't hold it against you if you don't.)

The actor's role on "Dollhouse," however, is a little less straightforward. He tries to explain:

Tell us about your character.
I play the whiz kid mad scientist behind the Dollhouse. He’s the guy who understands and knows the technology behind how the whole imprint process works. The dolls are imprinted with different personalities for each of their missions or clients’ fantasies, and Topher designs these personalities.

Is he OK with it?
He’s sort of a cocky, punk kind of guy. He loves his job, and his job is morally questionable. Whether he’s ultimately good or bad remains to be seen. Does he have a conscience? Or is he completely unethical? That’s not something that I’m ready to say. But certainly he loves his job, and that says volumes about who he is. Because of him people are used and abused. Some die.

Seems kind of clear-cut to me: He has no conscience.
But he sees it as an artistic, creative process. When he builds these personalities, I like to look at it like he’s building a brain. He’s using real parts of real personalities. Nothing is completely artificial. They’re pieces of real people. They’re kind of his color palette, and his final product is a complete person. The show meditates on this, obviously.

Will we hear about where these personalities, or “pieces of real people” as you said, are coming from?
What I know and what I can say is that there is a place in the Dollhouse called the Attic that stores failed Dolls and personalities. There’s like a whole warehouse where actual bodies are kept.

Bodies? Yikes.
Exactly. It’s like a library, so to speak. Where do we get them? I can’t say. They are real people.

But you know, there is one episode where a friend of someone working in the Dollhouse downloads his or her personality intentionally for the sake of maybe using it later. So that just goes to show that people can come and download their personalities and clearly go on existing as functional human beings too.

Much has been written about the ups and downs of the production of this show. How has it changed from that original pilot?
From where I stood, it seemed very simple: The network wanted more action, sex and something a little more glamorous. That was one of the major impressions I got, that we needed to make it more flashy. Hence –- minor spoiler warning -- the motorcycle race and that dress. The original pilot started with Echo (Eliza Dusku) talking to some girl in the hospital who had had a drug overdose, trying to help her out.

But I’ve read things where Joss has said that wasn’t exactly the case, that Fox wanted to cut to the chase. They thought there was too much on the characters within the Dollhouse and the conflict and mythology of the Dollhouse, as opposed to seeing what the Dollhouse does on a day-to-day basis.

In one sense, I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s important for the audience to define the Dollhouse before they’re introduced to the rest of the conflicts and stories.

How’s it been so far?
It's been really great. We're all excited. And the good news is that the season ends stronger than it starts, because once we’ve gotten through the first few mission-of-the-week episodes, the show turns in on itself and starts to become more about the characters and the story and history of the Dollhouse. The stories of past relationships, past doll malfunctions.

Anything else Whedon fans should be prepared for?
The pilot is the humorless episode of the 13. There are episodes that are hysterical. There’s one in particular that I found to be pretty much a comedy. So stick with it. The last couple of episodes that we’re shooting now are unlike anything I’ve seen on TV. And it could get really, really exciting from there.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/show...own-to--2.html

Eliza Dushku: Echo in the House

“Welcome to our Dollhouse!” Eliza Dushku beams. She’s speaking about the elaborate set for Joss Whedon’s new drama about a mysterious agency that hires out people with specially-tailored personalities - including Dushku’s character Echo. The Dollhouse set itself is elegant and multi-layered, with a variety of interconnecting spaces that make it easy for cameras to slide through. The actress took time out to tell Abbie Bernstein more about the show.

Does the set look the way you imagined it would?

It surpassed what I would have expected. It’s beautiful!

The story going around is that you and Joss Whedon went out for lunch to talk about your career. He then went to the bathroom, came back to the table and had the idea for Dollhouse. Is that what really happened?

I don’t know if you know my history as an actress, but I tripped and fell at my brother’s audition when I was nine years old and got my first part. My mom was a professor in Boston and went, “Well it will be good experience, she’ll meet lots of people, she’ll travel a lot, and who knows? Then when it fizzles out she can do what she wants to do and go back to school and be whoever she wants to be." That’s truly always been in my mind.

The way that I see my career is that I’ve had some really awesome luck, but the real luck was when I met Joss when I was 17 and I came out to LA to do Buffy. I came into this successful show and I was getting all of this praise and I was doing all of this material that I really loved. That actually made me really start to love acting. I thought, ‘Hey, maybe I’ll defer my college application and stick around for a while and be an actress.’

And then I did a few films and you can’t win them all. Everyone has those movies that you want to buy every copy and put in the closet and burn them, but I maybe have more than some. I always try, and things can seem like a good idea at the time, and I am really proud of some of the work that I’ve done. But when it comes down to it, if it ain’t on the page, then it ain’t on the stage. Good writing is so important.

On the one hand, I’m never ashamed or never threatened or made uncomfortable when people ask me how I feel about being typecast as a strong, smart young woman. I can think of worse things to be typecast as, but I hit this point of, “Okay, what now?” I called Joss because I just knew that he was someone who saw me in different ways and he would tell me about it. Every time he came and saw me in a play he would say, “That piece of work that you did was special and important, because of this and it showed you doing that,” which most people don’t see.

So I called the guy that I had trusted the most in my 17 years in the business. He came through and I bought him a hot steamy Gouda pizza at The Ivy [restaurant in LA]. We started out talking about our careers, and then we just started talking about what’s on television, and what we were watching, and what we’re interested in, and what we saw on the internet the week before. “There was that guy, and he had a fetish about this! And isn’t it wild that there are people on the internet where you can click and have so much control of what you see, and yet everyone is so out of control!”

We just started having a philosophical conversation about all those things, and I had laid in that I had a deal at Fox and that I was up for doing a show – there was lots of strategy in that meeting! So it was a four-hour evolution of, “Are you hungry? Let’s eat, I have a few questions about my career, what’s going on in your life, what’s going on in my life?” And then, God bless him, Joss just got up and went to the bathroom and when he came back, he sat down and said, “It’ll be called Dollhouse and it’s a show about this. It’s a show about all the things we were talking about.”

In Dollhouse, the ‘dolls’ are chosen to be imprinted with various identities, and when they’re done with one job, the memory of that identity is erased and replaced with a new identity on the next job. Is the premise of the show a metaphor for being an actress?

An actress and a young woman. I think in our society today there’s this constant pressure on men and women, but especially young women. Every day you’re being pulled in all directions and trying to figure out who people want you to be, so I think there’s a parallel.

In addition to being the star, you’re also executive producer on Dollhouse with Joss Whedon. How do you divide your jobs?

I have a hat in my trailer. It’s my producer hat and I put it on when Joss wants to talk about all things producorial (laughs). It was the kind of thing where we’re in this together and we’re really a team in what we’re doing, and he cares how I feel about things. He’ll come into my trailer and say, “Okay, Eliza, put your script down and put your producer hat on and come out here, I want to talk to you about something [regarding the production],” and so he really has included me in that way.

Have you had to do much physical training for the show’s action scenes?

I’m working out with a trainer, a good friend. I think he makes real good women’s bodies. He doesn’t go for über-skinny, but he doesn’t go for really bulked up – he tailors everyone’s bodies to be strong and functional. He has it down to a science.

So, to sum up, how would you describe your experience of working on Dollhouse with Joss Whedon?

It’s one day at a time. We have an awesome team of writers. People are excited. My confidence and my enthusiasm and my excitement have only gotten more fierce. It’s like a dream to be working with someone who has such a serious soul and such as serious voice, and he knows what he is saying and what he is creating and how important and how relevant it is.

And Joss is a liberated, clever guy. He wants people to think that he is super-cynical, but he is not at all. He has this view of the world that I feel is so extraordinary, because nothing is black and white. He can play in that grey area and with good versus evil so spectacularly that every script and every piece of material that I get from him is a joy.

http://www.dwscifi.com/interviews/30...o-in-the-house

Dollhouse Review By Ken Tucker

Joss Whedon's new series Dollhouse stars Eliza Dushku
 as Echo, a young woman
 who has signed on with the Dollhouse, an organization that ''wipes'' the minds of its buff employees, reprogramming their personalities to fit the 
 desires of its wealthy clients. The ''dolls'' can become anything from playful romantic partners for lonely guys to butt-kicking adventure junkies. In the first two episodes, Echo becomes both of these and more — indeed, in the second installment, she both makes love to a client and kicks his butt.

This being the latest creation from Joss Whedon, master of sly subtexts, I'm immediately on the lookout for this series' organizing metaphor. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for
 example, soulless bloodsucking was a stand-in for the agony of adolescent romance; in 
Firefly, a scruffy band of space cowboys was Whedon's take on the broken nuclear 
 family. But ''dolls'' doing the bidding of their 
masters? Is this Whedon's ironic update of the cheerful work-enslavement of Charlie's Angels? The typically clever dialogue suggests it may well be, as when the Dollhouse is described as ''cutting-edge technology in a house full of hot chicks.''

In the premiere, Echo tries to rescue a kidnapped girl by assuming the identity of a ''facilitator,'' complete with business 
suit and glasses that signify brainy. The Dollhouse is hired by the 12-year-old girl's 
 father: But why would he settle for a ''wiped'' woman like Echo — whose personality has been assembled from parts of 
 other people's personalities — to get his daughter back, when he could go to any number of private investigators? Plus, the series' technogeek who oversees the re-wiping (a snarky hipster played by Fran Kranz) programs a flaw in Echo's new 
persona that causes trouble for this mission. That seems like an excessively elaborate setup, albeit for a darn good action climax.

I worry about Dollhouse's concept as a weekly show. If Dushku is always playing a different sort of character, sure, she gets to show off a wider range of acting chops than she did when she was the brilliantly broody Faith on Buffy and Angel. But in effect, we have to start from 
scratch with each installment and buy into Echo's new personality. The result: no consistent hero to root for every week.

And yet, and yet...Dushku's acting is dexterous and beguiling. Given the artfully vague hints of an intriguingly desperate past for Echo, as well as Whedon's track record, we ought to cut the show some slack. Let's see if Whedon can bring this doll to greater life. B–

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20256831,00.html

'Dollhouse' Whedon's newest, strangest work

What if you could be anyone?

What if you could do anything?

If your memories were erased, again and again, would there be anything left of you?

These are the questions to be examined in Joss Whedon's new TV show "Dollhouse," starring Eliza Dushku, premiering Friday, Feb. 13 on FOX. Other, equally important questions to be answered are: Can Eliza Dushku convincingly play several different people every episode? Will viewers tune in and follow a storyline guaranteed to be as psychological as it is action-packed? Will viewers tune in at all on a Friday night, in enough numbers to satisfy FOX?

My quick review, for those "don't tell me anything, la la la I can't hear you" people who are avoiding even the slightest hint of plot: It's good. It's going to get even better. Watch it.

For everyone else, the concept is a simple one. There's a super-super-secret place called the Dollhouse. For the right price you can get anyone you want, for (presumably) any task. Want the perfect girlfriend, the perfect assassin, the perfect musician, the perfect hostage negotiator, the perfect spy, the perfect, I don't know, backgammon player? The happily amoral folks at the Dollhouse will take your money and your specs, create that personality and download it, including skills, experiences, and muscle memory, into an "Active," a person whose own memory has been completely removed. The Active utterly becomes that newly created person, thinking and acting as such, until the assignment is over, whereupon the Active will feel a compulsion to return to the Dollhouse for a "treatment." The new memories get wiped and the Active is returned to a blank, gently puzzled state to await the next job.

Simple, easy to follow, straight-forward, only this is a Joss Whedon show so you know that can't last.

The Active we're following is Echo, played by Eliza Dushku. As the becoming-legendary story goes, she had a development deal with FOX and took Whedon to lunch to pump his brain for ideas. After they observed that everyone still sees her as "Faith" from "Buffy" without getting an idea of her range, Whedon went to the bathroom and came back with the name of the show, the storyline for the pilot, and several of the episodes already mapped out. This is the sort of thing that makes writers hate Whedon just a little bit.

And while there are many excellent actors in "Dollhouse" -- Olivia Williams plays Adelle DeWitt, the person running the place; Harry Lennix is Boyd Langdon, the Actives' handler and DeWitt's unrequested moral compass; Tahmoh Penikett is the relentlessly persistent FBI Agent Paul Ballar; Fran Kranz as neurotech wizard Topher Brink; Reed Diamond is Laurence Domini, DeWitt's hard-edged security man; Whedon-alum Amy Acker as the scarred and silent Dr. Claire Saunders, medical doctor for the Actives, and the Actives themselves (Victor, played by Enver Gjokaj, and Sierra, played by Dichen Lachman) -- the show's success lies squarely on Dushku's shoulders. Can she play the part, or parts, and make us believe it?

In the first episode, "Ghost," she makes a good start. We get a few glimpses of her past before we see her in several guises: party girl, harsh professional, and blank slate Active. Dushku still has some mannerisms she'll need to lose before we believe she's really become a new person -- and I can't help seeing some Faith in there, still -- but she does a good job and I think she'll get better. We get a hint that maybe her personality is a little stronger than the Dollhouse people are used to, and a startling peek at what may be waiting for her in her future.

We also get a feel for the rest of the cast, as every one of them gets some screen time that shows off their place in the story. And surprise! Almost all of them have conflicting desires and hidden agendas. Besides Echo, the two we learn the most about are Langdon, the handler and ex-cop, who is getting a little more involved in the Active's cases than he should be, and Topher Brink, who apparently has no problem at all mucking with people's brains and will tell you why, at length.

This is a show that grabs your attention slowly, and works its way into your brain more with re-watchings. The initial 10 or 15 minutes of the first episode started off gradually for me, and the rest isn't exactly nonstop raging, exploding violence. It's as close to a procedural show as Whedon's ever gotten, with more real-world interaction. There's also not as much humor as his fans have come to expect, although Topher Brink is clearly the one getting the best quotes (from a promo clip: "This is cutting-edge science in a house full of hot chicks!"). But it got my attention, it held my interest, and even after watching it again I found more new details and new questions every time.

There are warring personalities inside the company itself. There's a somewhat obsessive cop devoted to hunting the place down. There are jobs that won't go quite right. There are the hidden histories of the Actives' pasts. There are the hidden mysteries of the pasts of the implanted personalities, one of which surfaces in the first episode. There are other threats to the Dollhouse looming. There's the ongoing ethical issues of playing with someone's memories. And despite those memory wipes, Echo seems to be remembering things...

This isn't "Buffy," with pop culture references, teen slang and makeup monsters, or "Firefly," with space travel and an invented society. This is something new, something different.

This is "Dollhouse," a psychological thriller that will bring you back the next week, and the next.

"Dollhouse" premieres Friday night, Feb. 13, at 9 p.m. (right after the newly scheduled "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," which isn't a bad pairing at all)

http://blogs.news-journalonline.com/...est-stran.html

Dollhouse Review

I got three episodes of Dollhouse to review before it begins, because one only hints at the potential for the series. As a single episode, the pilot might not be the most gripping hour of television, but it sets up the premise and suggests all of the different permutations that may be explored week to week. It’s the differences from week to week that make it compelling.

Dollhouse is a secret organization that implants its actives with different personalities for each mission. They can have any skills required, and be wiped clean at the end. Obviously this means a variety of action scenarios. More fun will be the moral and ethical tasks asked, and the philosophical questions of existence each blank slate active may face.

The premiere begins with the emotional costs of this procedure before getting into action. We see Echo in a night on the town, clearly having the best time ever with the perfect guy for her, and you know they’re just going to pull it away from her. Your heart just breaks for this delightful, happy girl.

The mechanics of the Dollhouse are easy to grasp, at least for those of us who keep up with this stuff. I mean, a few Total Recalls, Matrixes and Flowers for Algernon and any version of mind warp makes sense. The base state is baby-like and they eventually explain some of the nit picky “how does it work” questions the deep thinkers would have. They’re already touching on what the process does to the actives, so it’s like a little science experiment they’ll get to play with each week.

The first episodic plot, a hostage negotiation scenario, hardly seems worthy of the grandiose concept. It’s a fine execution of procedure and it shows how things can go wrong with the actives, but you’d think they’d big a more impressive first mission. That’s why I’m glad I got to see the next one. They open with a flashback to an accident in the dollhouse. That’s the juicy stuff. What happens when a little thing called reality gets in the way of their perfect plan? The client has a more morally questionable request too. I mean, we can all get behind saving a kidnapped girl, but some of the viewers won’t like this guy’s purchase.

The action can be outdoorsy adventurous, but of course we don’t need another stunt of the week show. What’s cool is you think it’s going one morally questionable way, and then it gets so outrageous you can’t believe they’re doing this on TV. If they can push the boundaries of TV plots every week, that’ll be worth checking out. The question should become, will they have to pose a juicy moral proposition each week, or can some just be straight action?

The third also makes you think it’s about one thing and then reveals it’s another. Now the game will be trying to guess if the mission is straightforward or a switcheroo. We’ll also have to see if the TV spots give this away before the episode airs. Dushku truly gets to play different characters each week, and if you think one seems familiar, trust them, they’re tweaking it. You’ll see backup plans and more of the supporting actives get into the action.

There are a few effects that look like television, but we suspend disbelief. I really wouldn’t be any more impressed if they hung Eliza Dushku off Mt. Everest. They can do stunts or they can fake stunts, I’m involved in the stakes of what they’re doing this for.

Some of the episodic players don’t hold up with the regular cast. They ham up the clichés in a way that’s surprising Joss Whedon allowed. But you only have to deal with that once and the regulars are high class. These are the pros who can play the reality of the most fanciful situation, so who cares about a suit playing by the books A-hole?

The only thing really missing is humor. There’s no pithy Joss Whedon banter full of references. So, this is going to be his serious show. It seems like a missed opportunity because all the gravitas creates an unrelatable distance. They could be having fun with the premise. I mean, they’re providing everything from tailor made “escorts” to ultra nurturing midwives. There’s gotta be a one-liner in there somewhere. Actually, the dialogue is a tad simplistic which is a disappointment for such weighty themes, but when things go wrong, you feel the impact of the story.

It’s easy to see why the perception is that the show is troubled. It’s doing a lot and any element could not work for someone, or not work together. It’s not perfect but would you rather have a safe run of the mill series that worked out all its kinks, or a show that’s going out on a limb to entertain you and maybe feeling its way around a little?

http://www.craveonline.com/articles/...se_review.html

Split Personality by Emily Nussbaum
Joss Whedon attempts to play it safe and weird with Dollhouse.

To judge from the buzz online, Joss Whedon’s new series, Dollhouse (Fox, Fridays at 9 p.m.), will be canceled any day now.

That’s a pretty sad state of affairs, given that the show—an eerie, unsettling sci-fi procedural about a mysterious organization that programs girls to suit any fantasy—hasn’t even aired (it debuts on February 13). But then, that’s the nature of scripted television these days: Hovering between TiVo and Hulu, threatened by a crumbling ad model, a new series must hit the pleasure buttons, hard, first time out, or be snuffed. And so the audience hardens its hearts with anticipatory cynicism, unwilling to fall for something strange that might soon disappear.

A decade ago, network TV, inspired by the freeing influence of cable, was overflowing with a crazy new race of auteurs: Whedon, Tom Fontana, Aaron Sorkin, Mitchell Hurwitz, Amy Sherman-Palladino, David E. Kelley, and J. J. Abrams. We seemed to be entering an age when original artists might blow the aesthetic horizons of TV wide open; but instead, the walls have narrowed, and today the few excellent network shows left are squeezed in by blocks of reality programming. Just one scripted genre has thrived, the cops/docs/lawyers procedural, from Law & Order to The Mentalist—a format that thrills TV executives, since the viewer can easily dip in and out of the show, allowing for easy syndication and overseas sales, unlike, say, a layered puzzle like Lost.

In this environment, Whedon introduces Dollhouse, a show that seems both a capitulation (it’s a procedural) and an innovation (it’s damned weird). His series have traditionally been hyperstylized projects, initially off-putting mash-ups of juvenile genres (teen soap meets goth, vampire noir, cowboy-flavored space opera) with sharp philosophical undercurrents that take a few episodes to emerge. And while Dollhouse, from its first episode, is recognizably Whedonesque, revolving around a superpowered heroine (the slinky-husky actress Eliza Dushku, who played a naughty slayer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer), it’s not simply a procedural, but several procedurals, nested like Russian dolls.

Whedon isn’t the first TV auteur to try an experimental spin on this genre: Tom Fontana flopped with The Jury, and J. J. Abrams’s Fringe is still limping along. Despite some clunky elements (the pilot, reworked from scratch after network notes, has a few puzzling sequences and off performances), Whedon’s attempt is far more provocative and promising than those earlier gambits, bubbling with Philip K. Dickish mind games. And yet the series may in fact be doomed, scheduled as it is in the notorious Friday-night death slot, the same place where Firefly met its fate.

Dollhouse begins with a scene of pure TV escapism: Echo, a hot girl in a motorcycle helmet, barely loses a playful road race. Then she shakes out her dark hair and shimmies onto the dance floor, cracking kinky jokes. Echo is wild, but she’s also vulnerable, capable of love; when her dance partner gives her a gold-heart necklace, she is convinced she’s met “the one.” Then she vanishes into an unmarked van to be deprogrammed.

Because Echo, we learn, is not actually the perfect girlfriend. Instead, she’s a perfect performer, a member of the Dollhouse, a fantasy-fulfilling corporation based in L.A. Like a reverse Pinocchio, Echo used to be a real girl, but now she has been recruited/coerced into an attractive clan of “Actives” or “Dolls”; after each mission, her brain is wiped clean with an electric sizzle (a process conducted by the smirky IT person of your worst nightmares).

Judging from the first episode, the Dollhouse itself is a juicy concept, reminiscent of Blade Runner and suggesting unnerving notions about memory and identity. Unfortunately, this procedural is encased in what appears to be a more conventional procedural: an FBI plot in which a hunky Mulder type hunts down the Dollhouse, shrugging off doubting superiors. But then, as the plot progresses, there’s an even odder twist, as Echo herself has essentially been hired to star in yet a third procedural, with a gruesome plot straight out of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit playbook, where fetishized female bodies are traded like playing cards.

In this plot-within-the-plot, a Dollhouse client has his daughter kidnapped by Mexican thugs. To help him, the IT nerd splices a personality for Echo from a database of real people. She becomes a flawed but brilliant crisis negotiator whose icy diction (“I don’t have any hobbies,” she explains soberly), stiletto heels, and Sarah Palin bun suggest, as with the perfect girlfriend, less a cop than the TV fantasy of a cop.

Like Buffy, it seems, Echo is a real person who is also a metaphor: She’s a Frankenstein’s monster made of imitation selves, a flawed copy, which is what, the show implies, being a traumatized girl can feel like—the traces of former selves emerge, no matter how much you try to blot them out. “You can’t fight a ghost,” Echo insists at one point, and one imagines that Whedon plans his series to be about exactly that ghost: the one in the machine, both the body and the television screen.

Whedon has touched on these themes before. On Buffy, the satirical “Buffybot” was the docile fantasy blonde prickly Buffy could never be, and one episode featured a girlfriend programmed never to cry; on Firefly, a damaged young woman crackled with repressed memories. Like United States of Tara, another show with a splintered heroine, Dollhouse is ungainly at first glance, but full of rich themes: about false consciousness (that old feminist bugaboo, when a woman can’t tell if she wants something—implants, marriage—or has been brainwashed into it), the mystery of personality, the nature of memory in an age of digital copies.

But perhaps the strangest thing about Dollhouse is the way in which it seems to reflect Whedon’s anxieties about TV itself. Echo is as much like an actress as she is like a prostitute, a beautiful drone who behaves the way wealthy men think a woman should act. Whedon has always written about feminism, but as he’s progressed through Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse, another theme has emerged: the question of how to live within a system that co-opts any attempt at rebellion.

Like many of Whedon’s loyal fans, I want him to be the auteur who cracks that code, who can again create a hit like Buffy that succeeds economically and also “invades people’s dreams.” But whatever happens to Dollhouse, whether it’s a success or just a great audition reel for Dushku, I have my doubts whether network TV can truly embrace weird. Whedon got it right when he launched his last great/odd project, the musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, on the Internet—a project done on the cheap and launched right at his fans. If a renaissance is coming, it will have to happen online, where, with no middlemen, video might finally embrace the risk of the truly original. A passionate audience is waiting there, ready for something strange.

http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/54047/
http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/54047/index1.html