I finally managed to pay my $3.99 on iTunes to subscribe to the three parts of Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and I have just one question: $howmuch.99 would we have to pay to get Whedon and company to keep making this show forever?
I’m as big a Whedon fan as anyone (OK, probably not strictly true), but I went into part 1 of Dr. Horrible with modest expectations. Instead, I’m delighted and heartbroken: delighted because this is the funniest thing I expect to see on any video screen this year, heartbroken because, between Neil Patrick Harris’ commitment to HIMYM and Whedon’s to Dollhouse, it’s unlikely this will be anything more than a one-off.
Despite having been conceived as a make-busy strike diversion, Dr. Horrible is no lame time-waster. It’s genuine Whedon: disarmingly funny, linguistically playful, convention-skewing and whimsically romantic. The premise: the title character (Harris) is an aspiring supervillain trying to get approved into the Evil League of Evil, despite some incompetencies and setbacks. (For instance, a transporter beam that turns gold bars into watery cumin.) He’s also in love with a girl he knows from the laundromat (not being successful enough to have a henchman to do his laundry for him). But he is thwarted in both areas by his valiant, egotistical nemesis, Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion). In his spare time, naturally, he posts and answers commenters on his blog. Oh, and it’s a musical.
The characteristic Whedon wordplay is on full display here; giving him the chance to invent comic supervillain names makes the show worthwhile alone. (Conflict Diamond! Bad Horse, who rules the League with an iron hoof!) Joss loves his inversions, and maybe his best move here is to make his hero a villain: Dr. Horrible is just inept and striving enough that by the end, you are fully rooting for him against Hammer, who is truly a tool of justice, emphasis on the tool.
One benefit of this being a low-budget, low-commitment spinoff, I suppose, is that it made it easier to cast the right talent. Watch Harris’ reaction to Hammer’s day-saving entrance toward the end of part one: the fleeting look on his face is not “Foiled again!” but “Oh, that jackass.” Around the edges, Simon Helberg does a nice turn as his evil buddy, Moist. (“You need anything dampened, or … made soggy…?”)
The songs, meanwhile, are sprightly and cut shorter than those in the Buffy musical, Once More with Feeling, but they strike the same balance of verbal fireworks and emotion. What made Once More stand out from other TV-series musical stunt episodes is that Whedon actually made the effort to write it as a musical: they advance the plot lyrically and through action, as in a good musical, rather than simply stopping the show, revue-style. (Unlike Alan Sepinwall, by the way, I think several of Once More’s songs do stand up solo, especially Under Your Spell and Rest in Peace.) Scrubs, or for that matter Viva Laughlin, could have learned a thing or two from Whedon.
My only criticism is that there are only two installments yet to come, but I’ll just have to accept Dr. Horrible as the fleeting delight that it is. Dr. Horrible may be foiled eternally, but his singalong blog has conquered my world.