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TCA Wrapup Roundup: Welcome to the Dollhouse

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America’s TV critics are picking the cocktail spears from their clothing, heading for LAX and embarking for their home cities, having concluded one of the weirder TV critics’ press tours in a while. Weird because there was relatively little new TV to preview in it. Largely because of the writer’s strike, but partly because it’s starting to dawn on TV executives that they may need to start doing business differently, the broadcast networks are launching fewer new shows in the fall (and planning to launch more shows year-round instead), and providing only a handful of pilots for the shows that they will launch.

So unlike past years, at this point in the summer we critics can’t even give you preliminary reactions as to whether most new shows are any good or not: NBC’s lineup, for instance, remains almost entirely theoretical. Whether this is a one-fall-only blip or whether doing business on the fly is the new reality of network TV is something we’ll find out over the coming year. In the meantime, a last few highlights from this summer’s tour:

* Joss Whedon offers a tour of the Dollhouse set and says that, as with Firefly, they’re replacing the original pilot with another episode. But this time, he insists, it was his idea, not Fox’s.

* NBC insists it’s still doing a spinoff of The Office, though the rest of the world seems to be saying, No really, you don’t need to.

* What do Selma Blair and Ian McShane have in common? They don’t take any crap from critics. Also, neither of them are ever going to appear in a two-hour Deadwood wrap-up movie.