But this is not about you, Too Stupid to Live Video Magic, it's about Firefly, which aired for less than one season on Fox a few years back before being idiotically yanked from the lineup. The affair didn't register a blip with me at the time. But bitstreams of hosannas gradually coalesced and trained themselves in my direction, and eventually I took notice. I succumbed to the rhapsodies socking me and went to see the 2005 movie in the theater that somehow got made on the strength of a show cancelled even before all of its first-season episodes could be aired. Then I signed up for Netflix, saw all the episodes of the show on DVD, and am planning to see the movie again on DVD.
Now, I'm sure that whether any particular viewer cottons to Firefly is a matter of taste, but, for the thing of its kind it is (boffo smart-ass SF western caper), it could not have been done better. Fox execs could have seen what they had merely by watching an episode, and given it a little time to find its market. They should have tried to—ah, but it's too late now. What's done is done.
What I like most about the show is the caper aspect, and the smart-ass aspect. It's a crew of seven or eight guys and gals on a Firefly-class space ship, which is named Serenity after a battle in the lost war against the Alliance. The crew of Serenity goes around the galaxy doing banditry and heroics and kicking bureaucrats in the groin. Even though it's the far future, the guns have bullets in them, not laser—so that people can actually shoot each other instead of beaming special effects at each other. Everybody speaks Western-twang plus Chinese (the Chinese when they want to curse, it seems; no, I don't know whether it's Mandarin or Cantonese, and please stop asking). Whenever the show looks like it's going to take a TV-show-cliché turn, expectations are foiled and anti-PC muscles are flexed.
Every character is my favorite when the camera is on that character—they're each completely individuated and compelling—but I can't get over Jayne, the towering gunslinger for hire with the name that sounds like "Jane." Jayne is simultaneously a little slow (in some things) and very savvy; a lot unscrupulous but not so much that the captain, Mal, can't keep him in line enough to keep him on the team. All in all, a damn potent ruffian.
Article comments
1 - Nicolette Rivers
I can't even begin to describe my adoration of this smart, funny, meant-to-be-iconic show.
Rent it, buy it, borrow it from someone -- just watch it!
And it doesn't matter if you're into sci-fi as long as you're into well-written.
2 - David M. Brown
Rivers/River. Hmm....
"Firefly" is sort of the anti-"Star Trek." Much as I intermittently like "Trek," they sure can gunk up the warp engines with the pieties and techno-folderol. The next time the holodeck characters take over the ship we really should unplug the thing. "Firefly," by contrast, is just pure get-it-right in every scene. And when a bad guy deserves to be blown away, he's just blown away. There isn't a huge debate about it in the We've-Got-A-Situation Room.