I saw the film, but not the show.
I couldn't even tell you how it aired in the UK or if it even hit terrestrial.
I see Firefly as the flipside of the coin to Lost that we recently discussed.
One of my main gripes with Lost was that it went on for too long with too many episodes per season and a lot of fluff filler and story threads dropped once the writers had stalled you with a couple of unnecessary episodes. I liked the show, but it's made me forever wary of investing time in shows with no set end.
Conversely, Firefly is held in high regard because it's so short. It had more legs than it was allowed, but it also means that it never jumped the shark. There was never a Picard space sax scene, Mulder abducted by aliens or introduced Scrappy-Doo.
There's some horrible potential storyline around Inara and Captain Mal’s relationship, where Reaver gang-rape is the central concept. Tim Minear discussed this potential future storyline as a way for Mal and Inara’s relationship to develop further, but had the potential for sexual assault of a sex worker to be used as a plot device for romance. “She had this magic syringe, she would take this drug and if she were, for instance, raped, the rapist would die a horrible death. The story was, she gets kidnapped by Reavers. and when Mal finally got to the ship to save her from the Reavers, he gets on the Reaver ship and all the Reavers are dead. Which would suggest a kind of really bad assault. At the end of the episode, he comes in after she’s been horribly brutalized, he comes in, he gets down on his knee and he takes her hand and he treats her like a lady. And that's the kind of stuff that we wanted to do. It was very dark. And this was actually the first story that Joss pitched to me when he asked me to come work on the show. He said, 'These are the kind of stories we're going to do.'” Wait... What?
Think about the other good things that came out of the cancellation. Whedon got to work on other shows like Dollhouse and widened his experience, paving the way to the Marvel films. All of the cast went on to make other things. The studio listened to the fans and made a whole damn film to conclude the story. The writers went on to make other new shows like Supernatural, Gotham, Agent Carter, The Vampire Diaries, Once Upon A Time and Torchwood.
If television show makers said there was a finite story arc, I genuinely believe more viewers would invest their time, because they know there'll be no fluff episodes, it won't get axed in the middle and a story gets resolved.
I couldn't even tell you how it aired in the UK or if it even hit terrestrial.
I see Firefly as the flipside of the coin to Lost that we recently discussed.
One of my main gripes with Lost was that it went on for too long with too many episodes per season and a lot of fluff filler and story threads dropped once the writers had stalled you with a couple of unnecessary episodes. I liked the show, but it's made me forever wary of investing time in shows with no set end.
Conversely, Firefly is held in high regard because it's so short. It had more legs than it was allowed, but it also means that it never jumped the shark. There was never a Picard space sax scene, Mulder abducted by aliens or introduced Scrappy-Doo.
There's some horrible potential storyline around Inara and Captain Mal’s relationship, where Reaver gang-rape is the central concept. Tim Minear discussed this potential future storyline as a way for Mal and Inara’s relationship to develop further, but had the potential for sexual assault of a sex worker to be used as a plot device for romance. “She had this magic syringe, she would take this drug and if she were, for instance, raped, the rapist would die a horrible death. The story was, she gets kidnapped by Reavers. and when Mal finally got to the ship to save her from the Reavers, he gets on the Reaver ship and all the Reavers are dead. Which would suggest a kind of really bad assault. At the end of the episode, he comes in after she’s been horribly brutalized, he comes in, he gets down on his knee and he takes her hand and he treats her like a lady. And that's the kind of stuff that we wanted to do. It was very dark. And this was actually the first story that Joss pitched to me when he asked me to come work on the show. He said, 'These are the kind of stories we're going to do.'” Wait... What?
Think about the other good things that came out of the cancellation. Whedon got to work on other shows like Dollhouse and widened his experience, paving the way to the Marvel films. All of the cast went on to make other things. The studio listened to the fans and made a whole damn film to conclude the story. The writers went on to make other new shows like Supernatural, Gotham, Agent Carter, The Vampire Diaries, Once Upon A Time and Torchwood.
If television show makers said there was a finite story arc, I genuinely believe more viewers would invest their time, because they know there'll be no fluff episodes, it won't get axed in the middle and a story gets resolved.
Comment