10 Amazing TV Shows With Surprisingly Weak First Seasons

6. Dollhouse

After Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, Joss Whedon was under a tremendous amount of pressure to produce quality when his new show Dollhouse was announced. And maybe those high expectations were ultimately what doomed the show. It had an interesting premise, about people who had different personalities and memories installed in their brains from week to week, depending on the situation and what the paying client required. OK, we would watch that. But the first few episodes were uninspired, conforming more to a network idea of what the show should be rather than Whedon's own aesthetic. While it improved a little bit over the course of the first season, it wasn't enough to win back viewers who had already given up. The second season was a vast improvement, and more along the lines of what we expect from Joss Whedon, but all the same, it was cancelled after just two seasons.