Eliza Dushku, star of the Fox TV series Dollhouse, paid a visit to The Late Show with David Letterman to do a bit of promo for her show … which is great danger of being canceled. As some of you may be well aware, Dollhouse struggled in the ratings for the duration of its first season on the air … since the show returned with its second season, the ratings have gotten even worse. Entertainment Weekly published a great article explaining what the hell is going wrong with the show but without a major turn around very soon, it’s very unlikely that the show will be able to survive. At least Eliza is doing everything she can to promote the show in the hopes of keeping it on the air. Here are a couple photos of Eliza’s arrival at the Ed Sullivan Theater for her Late Show appearance last night and the article from EW explaining why they believe Dollhouse is very close to death:

In case you haven’t noticed, Dollhouse is tanking. It’s second season premiere didn’t perform well in the ratings, and last Friday’s episode did even worse — Stargate Universe kicked it in the cortex. Dollhouse is in very real danger of being canceled. Why isn’t it doing better? Where did Joss Whedon and company go wrong? Perhaps that isn’t fair — the blame can’t be put on Whedon’s shoulders alone. There is Fox’s decision to leave Dollhouse on Friday nights, bereft of any real advertising support — a programming block of one. If Fox really wanted to give Dollhouse a chance, they’d have paired it with Bones or Fringe, and not after a pair of sitcoms (one of which stars Michael Strahan) that no one is watching. Stargate Universe did well because Syfy Channel has been pushing it relentlessly, hammering it into their audience that something new is coming down the pike. But the thing you can level at the Dollhouse writers and producers is the middling way the show came out of the gate. Whedon has always been great at ending TV seasons — Buffy and Angel have tons of memorable season finales, and Dollhouse’s S1 ultimatum was terrific — but not so great at starting them. Listen, I’m all for Joss taking his time to build his universe and layer his stories with emotional substance topped with an action frosting. But anyone looking objectively at the Dollhouse situation for the season would have to see that the show has its back against the wall. It’s the fourth quarter and Team Dollhouse is down by a whole mess of points — it’s not the time to do slow burn undercovery episodes. Dollhouse needed to score, early and often, and it didn’t. Is it too late? I fear that it might be. Whedon and company are telling the stories they want to tell — and unless those stories suddenly bring the whup-ass in the next couple of weeks, they might not get to tell them for much longer. The saddest part of it is that I desperately want Whedon and Dollhouse to succeed — I want smart genre content to work on broadcast television, so that networks will continue to take risks on programming that doesn’t have a host. I just hope that it gets the chance.
I am in 100% agreement … Fox has done NOTHING to promote a show that they have exiled to a night that no one is home to watch TV (and the people who are at home on a Friday night are not the people that would watch a show like Dollhouse no matter what night it aired). AND, the show itself has yet to deliver an episode that would WOW a casual viewer. The show does great with Joss Whedon fans but I don’t know that it has yet to really pull in new viewers … yes, it’s tough to get people to watch your show on Friday night but if Whedon and the gang were to deliver a slew of kick-ass episodes then it would at least pull in some new viewers, which would help their sinking ratings. Since the ratings are going down, it sounds like even the Whedon fans are watching less and less. But … I’m not sure what more can be done at this point. Fox has continually dropped the ball in promoting the show and it is prolly too late to turn it all around. Eliza, for her part, has been championing the show as best she can … after the jump, watch video of her interview with David Letterman on The Late Show last night …
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