Dr. Horrible: A Whiff of the Future?
Joss Whedon’s online musical “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” starring Neil Patrick Harris as a geeky, weirdly idealist villain is not like anything I’ve seen on the web. Made during the writer’s strike on a super-low budget, it is just slick enough to rise above most of what can be found on YouTube. At the same time, it’s not quite TV. For one thing, it can’t be seen on television–it’s available for free on Hulu and the Dr. Horrible fan site, and can be purchased through iTunes. For another, it’s aimed squarely at the online audience.
References to blogging are knitted into the fabric of the story from beginning to end. The premise of the show is that we’re watching Dr. Horrible’s personal video blog (or “vlog” as they’re sometimes called). Considering how truly awful most vlogs are, this is a very funny premise. Harris even makes the kinds of moves that you often see on the part of vloggers, like looking down at the screen as if to check how he’s doing, staring into space, searching for something to say, and so on.
The character of Dr. Horrible has a mad scientist personality that of course draws on old comic book stereotypes, but is also very much in line with today’s Internet trolls, as profiled recently in the New York Times Magazine. He is evil, but with a sense of purpose fueled by anger at the mediocrity of the masses. He wants “social change” and “anarchy–that I run.” When his attempt at stealing gold bars from a bank goes wrong in the transmatter process, he defensively notes that the point isn’t getting money, but taking it away. His arch-nemesis, the shallow, jocky Captain Hammer played by Nathan Fillion, he refers to as “Captain Hammer, corporate tool.”
Get it? This is an inside joke for the geeks who swarm the net, and they have responded so enthusiastically that the day the show was made available, they crashed the site. According to Wired, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” was getting 200,000 hits an hour that day. The remarkable thing about it is that Whedon, while well known for directing such offbeat TV hits as Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Serenity, and Firefly, didn’t do all that much to promote this particular piece of work. He didn’t need to. It spread in that peculiar way that good stuff online seems to–I myself found that I just “knew” it would be on, and when. (I sensibly waited a few days and then watched it for free on Hulu.)
All of which points to the possibility that finally the day is arriving when major talent is willing to expend energy on projects like this, knowing full well that they’re not necessarily going to be highly profitable, or become long-term TV propositions. There is a giddiness in this — a sense that all the wacky ideas that wouldn’t or couldn’t quite fit into the dimensions of the idiot box can now be set free to roam around the net unchained, like pets gone feral and wild. Time will tell where this will all lead. For now, I’m happy to have something fun to sing along with.
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