"Dollhouse," the new series by Joss Whedon, creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," premiered Friday on Fox. The Dollhouse is a high-dollar establishment that rents out "actives" to fulfill any imaginable whim of rich clients.

Actives are humans whose memories and personalities have been erased and are custom programmed for each new "engagement" with just the right mix of real individuals' characteristics from a data library of what look like 8 track tapes.

Eliza Dushku stars as an active named Echo. Buffy fans will remember Dushku's great performance when her character, Faith, switched bodies with Buffy and probably share Whedon's eagerness to watch her revolve through characters and to try search for some essence of Echo that survived the erasure.

Anyone familiar with Whedon's work will recognize certain themes -- the stoic, unwitting heroine with the calm, fatherly guide, the back and forth between the realistic and the fantastic, the dangerous allure of power, the conflicting desires for freedom and belonging, and the big question -- what makes us human. Maybe the funniest Whedon standby is his own dual alter-ego thing, here split between the programmer -- a (redheaded youthful) genius unencumbered by moral concerns and fascinated by his ability to create magnificent beings, and the FBI agent -- a (redheaded youthful) clear sighted, handsome soldier of righteousness whose conflict stems from the fact that his moral standards are higher than his line of work will allow.

Whedon has been criticized for the moral ambiguity of his characters and situations. (The fact that critics see complexity as a problem seems like more of a problem.) The FBI agent in trouble with his boss for jeopardizing an investigation of major human traffickers is compelling precisely because it is complicated.

"Dollhouse" has also been panned because the actives are attractive and (presumably) often hired out as dream dates; there are concerns that Whedon's losing his girl-power soul. It could be that he's just moved from (totally awesome) magic and vampires to technology and slavery -- quite real aspects of today's world -- a world where hopefully feminism can exist just as well as it did in that imaginary high school library built over a hell mouth in Sunnydale.

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