"Firefly" Review: The Best Debut Season Fox Ever Threw Away

I came to this sideways. I'd read that it had replaced Dark Angel, which I'd quite liked, at least the first season, and I wanted to see whether the thing that displaced it was any good.

I've just rewatched the whole run, and eight years on I'm still appalled that it was cancelled. Time hasn't softened this one. If anything, it's made the decision look worse, because we now know exactly who the audience turned out to be.

What Fox Actually Did

It's worth laying out, because "it failed in the ratings" isn't an explanation when the network spent three months making failure likely.

Whedon delivered a two-hour pilot, "Serenity", which introduces the crew, the ship, and the post-war setting. Fox decided it was too slow to open with, so Whedon and Tim Minear were asked for a replacement pilot and wrote "The Train Job" in roughly two days. That went out first, on 20 September 2002, dropping viewers into a heist with no idea who any of these people were or what they were running from. The real pilot didn't air until the eleventh episode, by which point the show was already dead.

The rest of the run was shuffled too. Episodes were promoted as action-comedy rather than the character piece it is. It ran Friday nights at eight, the slot networks use for things they've already given up on, and got pre-empted for baseball and for sweeps. It averaged around 4.7 million viewers and sat 98th in the Nielsen ratings, which is what happens when nobody can find your programme or follow it once they do.

Fox pulled it in December 2002 with three of the fourteen episodes never broadcast in America. People inside that building should lose their jobs for this: not for bad luck, but for bad planning, bad promotion, and an inability to recognise quality or potential when it was handed to them fully formed.

The Cast Is the Show

The characters and the actors are a real credit to this, individually and as an ensemble. They generate the emotion, the humour, and the occasional despair, and they make the whole thing feel like a place rather than a set.

Nathan Fillion surprised me above all. He's believable from the first episode, and he plays Mal's strengths and his considerable flaws with equal conviction: a man who won a war's worth of principle and lost the war, now running cargo and telling himself it's the same thing. The rest of the cast support him and take the lead when it's their turn, with no weak links.

Whedon's own pitch was nine people looking into the black and seeing nine different things, and that's exactly what's on screen.

The Two Complaints I Have

The western sometimes feels contrived. Occasionally, and nowhere near as badly as people claim. I suspect most of them haven't watched it, because the mix usually works: the frontier isn't decoration; it's the logical result of a colonised system where the core worlds got the money and the outer ones got the dust.

I never quite got to know Wash or Book. That's a fair criticism of fourteen episodes, not the writing. I'm confident both would have filled in as the story developed, and one detail about Wash makes his thinness more annoying in hindsight: Fox executives were uncomfortable with Zoë and Wash being married and wanted it changed. Whedon refused. So the one relationship that made Wash immediately legible to an audience was something the network actively tried to remove.

Stories, Effects, and That Theme

The stories are good and usually inventive, which is no small thing inside two supposedly clichéd genres. Every episode has laughs. Some have tears.

The effects hold up better than the budget deserves. Some shots are genuinely lovely and a few are ropey, and nothing there wouldn't have been solved by a second series and more money. Worth noting it took the 2003 Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series, which is not what usually happens to a show the network has already binned.

Even the title music is fantastic. Whedon wrote "The Ballad of Serenity" and Sonny Rhodes sang it, with Greg Edmonson scoring the rest. I watch almost everything recorded and normally skip straight past the titles. Not these.

What Happened Afterwards

This is the part that should have embarrassed somebody.

The complete series came out on DVD in December 2003 and sold far better than a cancelled Friday-night show should. Fans organised: they bought an advertisement in Variety, ran postcard campaigns, and generally refused to let it die quietly. That, not the ratings, is what persuaded Universal to fund a feature film, which Whedon had to call Serenity because Fox still owned the name Firefly. The three episodes America never saw finally aired there in 2005, three years late and only because the film was coming.

So the show Fox couldn't sell turned out to have an audience willing to buy it twice. That should have been a wake-up call for the people above the ones who cancelled it, because it proves what I suspected at the time: their subordinates weren't interested in quality or investing in something that could become a hit. They reacted to immediate ratings while wrecking those same ratings through their own scheduling.

Serenity itself is good, and I'm glad it exists. But the production values here were already high enough that the film is essentially a longer, more polished episode, and a longer episode was never what I wanted. I wanted another series.

I hoped the film would springboard it back. It didn't. Five years on, there's still nothing, and I've stopped expecting anything.

The Verdict

It's a great series; it had real potential to be a blockbuster, and it's easily the best debut season I've seen in science fiction or drama.

The shame of it isn't that it ended. It's that it was never allowed to start properly.