Fox is not to blame for the failure of 'Dollhouse'

Fox has canceled another Joss Whedon show. And there's a certain contingent of fans who are hurling invectives at the network — alleging that some big wrong has been committed against "Dollhouse."

Geez, folks, you are so off base, you aren't even in the vicinity of reality.

I'm going to condescend to you for a moment here because, well, you deserve it.

Commercial television is not a charity. Fox and every other network are in business to make money. It's the American way, after all.

They make money by putting shows on the air and selling advertising during those shows. If a lot of people watch a show, they can sell the ads for big bucks. If not much of anybody watches, they lose money.

The ratings for "Dollhouse" are horrible. Beyond horrible. Almost unimaginably bad. So Fox has canceled the show.

What part of this is hard to understand?

Let's review a couple of other facts.

First, you can complain all you want about how "Dollhouse" was scheduled, but a different time slot wouldn't have helped. The pilot wasn't good, and it took the show a good half-dozen episode to start to find its footings.

And these days, viewers make up their minds a lot faster than that.

Second, you can't accuse Fox of failing to support the show. Not only did "Dollhouse" get all sorts of promotion when it debuted back in January, but the network ordered a second season when there was no earthly reason to do so.

The first-season rating were so bad that I stopped watching the show because there seemed to be absolutely no chance that Fox would renew it. I figured I could catch up with it on DVD.

(And I did buy Season 1.)

I wasn't the only TV critic who guessed wrong on that. Because we didn't think we were guessing. It looked like cancellation was a foregone conclusion back in May.

And yet Fox Entertainment president Kevin Reilly renewed "Dollhouse," telling critics, "This is a bet on Joss Whedon."

It's a bet he lost.

I'm a big Whedon fan. Hey, I wrote that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was the coolest show on TV a couple of years before Entertainment Weekly got around to making the same declaration.

But I'm not at all convinced that Joss is capable of creating a mainstream hit. Or that I want him to be.

"Buffy" and "Angel" were both great shows that did well. But they were on The WB (and, for Buffy's final two seasons, UPN), where ratings expectations are much lower.

"Firefly" didn't work, and not all of that was Fox's fault. Oh, I'm still not happy with how the then-Fox programmers scheduled the show. Or that they didn't show any patience at all with it.