This just pisses me off. This is the first show I’ve actually looked forward to seeing since Babylon 5 finished. It’s ironic how similar the B5 spin-off (Crusade) was treated, compared to Firefly.
Fox has lost me as a viewer. After the screwups with Futurama (what, pre-empted again?), the Simpsons jumping the shark, the Moon Hoax Special, and now Firefly, I won’t be watching Fox in the future, and may it crash and burn as quickly as possible.
Crap. I hate this.
I’m not surprised, but really let down.
I wish this show had been on the WB or UPN. I’d have said the Sci-Fi channel, but if they cancelled Farscape, they would have probably cancelled this as well.
It’s amazing that over such a short period of time Firefly has developed this much of a fan base. It makes me think of a modified version of a quote from The American President:
People want good television, Mr. Murdoch, and in the absence of genuine television, they’ll watch any crap that’s run through the airwaves. They want good television. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand
And of course, Murdoch’s response: We’ve had tv shows that were beloved, that couldn’t find a coherent theme or plot with two hands and a flashlight. People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.
Noooo! That was one of the few shows I really looked forward to watching each week. Just last week I wrote a letter to FOX asking it to give Firefly another chance.
FOX, you just lost me as a viewer.
Just to round out the discussion, I don’t see the appeal. To me, it really wasn’t a very good show. I think that the people spoke and voted with their viewership.
So the real question is why did all of you think it was good in the first place 
Vertigo, I think it got off to a rough start: a couple of the earlier episodes especially had some rootin’ tootin’ cringeworthy attempts at dialect in them. If you only watched a couple of early episodes, I understand your dislike for the show.
However, it got much, much better, and the episodes are still continuing to improve.
Things I’ve liked about it:
-The show’s visual aesthetic is very strong and fresh: these spaceships look dirty, lived-in, clunky, not like the antiseptic spaceship environments we’re used to from the Federation or the Empire. And the contrast between the frontier spaceship aesthetic and the Alliance space stations is wonderful
-The characterization on the show is interesting: Mal as a captain is equal parts cunning and ornery, not the wise father-figure of Star Trek shows. Jayne is a mean stupid sumbitch who’s dimly aware of, and intrigued by, the possibility of being a good guy. The doctor is an arrogant snot when he’s not being a hero. And so forth. None of the characters quite match their archetypes.
-The dialogue is as sparkling and witty as any Joss Whedon show.
-Cliches get skewered. On a recent episode, the villain maniacally made another character choose which of her friends were going to die – except before he could finish describing her fiendish dilemma, she pointed at one of them and said, “him,” deflating the villain’s sadistic plan. Although the plan was completely predictable, the heroine’s response to it was completely surprising.
-The story is complex. Two protagonists are being tortured, and while they’re being tortured, one is mocking the other’s virility and threatening to sleep with his wife. He comes across as an asshole during the scene – until at the end of the scene, when he says something that makes it clear that he’s trying to distract his friend from the torture, that he’s trying to keep his friend alive.
If Fox were airing this show at a reasonable hour for its demographic, and if they were advertising it, I’d think your “the viewers have spoken” idea had merit. As it is, Fox has dumped the show in a shitty timeslot, hardly advertised it at all, shown the episodes out of order, and dumped it mid-season. I think the show’s problems have more to do with Fox than with the show’s intrinsic merits.
This is coming, by the way, from someone who watches about 3 hours of TV a week. Firefly is one of the very few shows that make having a television worthwhile for me.
Daniel
Emarkp, I got Tim’s announcement on a Buffy-oriented board about midnight last night. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth and I startedthis thread in the Pit.
I love Firefly because it doesn’t resort to the usual sci-fi props and gadgets. There’s minimal technobabble. The plots are solid, with no deus ex machina. There are no aliens that stereotype certain human characteristics. It has far better character development than any SF show I can think of. Not even Babylon 5 came this far halfway through the first season.
I like the way it deliberately avoids certain SF cliches. They use guns with bullets, not lasers or energy weapons. Explosions and ship engines are silent in space. Ships don’t meet in space with the same side up. There are no specific mentions of warp technology.
I first heard about the show right here and was so intrigued that I had to resort to, um, questionable means. I got hooked at the beginning of the pilot when I saw Serenity turn gracefully, light the engine and fly away in total silence. That told me that it wasn’t another space action series.
I didn’t think “Firefly” was anything special, either. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t particularly good, IMHO. The direction and acting, even in recent episodes, often seemed clunky.
If you guys want to help save it, go over to www.fireflysupport.com. Whedon and Minnear have been given permission by FOX to shop the show to other networks, and they are actively soliciting UPN as we speak. They have a PDF of a postcard you can download to send to the network execs to help convince them to pick up the show.
Thanks for the info, Sam Stone.
You suck, Fox!
I blame the execs. I mean, has there ever been a show (especially a SF based one) that lasted any appreciable amount of time in a major network’s Friday evening time slot?
I’m pretty sure that The X-Files got better ratings on Friday nights it’s first few seasons than some series, like Buffy, have in any time slot. That’s very rare, but seems to have convinced FOX that Friday night is a good slot for Sci-Fi :rolleyes:
Dang elfkin, that’s a good point.
“We put it in the best sci fi slot and it didn’t do well.”
hmmm, and to think I was planning on watching this regularly on Fridays.
It would have been, literally, the only show I watch on television besides the Simpsons.
Not that it was all that GREAT, mind you, I personally DO find it cliche-ridden, I sort of like it straight-up and sort of in a kitschy way. But still, it’s 1000% better than other shows out there.
Yeah!
I mean, who’s home on Friday night??
Nerds.
Old people.
Fox is NOT an ‘old people’ network.
(JK, But I’m sure there might be SOME truth to it. I know a bunch of ‘nerd’ friends that even get together to watch that show, and that one Farscape (Sp?) show on SciFi… I’m not smart enough for nerd status, I’m more of a dork. I do get out most Fridays though… nothing against nerds.)
I actually have seen several episodes, and most recently the one where the capt and pilot are getting tortured. That’s why I felt compelled to comment. Even the recent episodes are (to me everyone, to me…) a tad boring and not compelling. The character development seems very cliched, albeit with some small twists. I also find the bullets in space corny and a blatant attempt to remake a western without owning up to making a western. If they can travel through the galaxy, then there must be some evolution to guns or weapons (even if they are nothing like the laser guns we are now familiar with).
It’s like they took Gunsmoke and moved it into space. I kept waiting to see them go into the cargo bay and there’d be a guy at an old upright piano, with garter’s on his sleeves, banging out “Camptown Ladies”.
Now it you happen to like the Space Gunsmoke genre, then I can see the appeal. 
Strange isn’t it, that the only show that obeys Newtonian mechanics has antique gunpowder weapons?
I see this as the damage Star Trek has done to us. There is NO evidence that we’ll have spectacular beam weapons. There’s no such thing as a phaser or a photon torpedo. If you read serious science fiction, you never see phasers and other hand-held beam weapons.
I don’t see any evidence that the projectile gun is going away any time soon. We’ve been using them for hundreds and hundreds of years. One of the most popular guns today was designed in 1911, and it is still as effective today as it was then.
I find it perfectly plausible that projectile guns will still be with us in 500 years. In fact, if you were to ask me the odds of people using bullets vs some new beam weapon in 500 years, I’d but 5-1 odds on the bullets.
That’s just close-minded thinking. The idea is that frontiers tend to create frontier people. Tough, plain-speaking, matter-of-fact. After all, the people in the U.S. frontier who talked like that descended from people who spoke the Queen’s English. I would fully expect that in the future when people move off earth into tough frontier lives, a similar thing will happen.
Now sure, they probably won’t talk like the old west. They’ll have their own way of speaking. But frankly, if you try and cram a whole new language on a TV audience it’s going to be tough. So you get the same idea across by using an old west dialect, sprinkled with new things to give it an exotic feel (like cursing in Chinese).
And you know, even the horses and cows make sense. When you’re colonizing a new world, it’s a lot cheaper to ship a frozen horse embryo than to ship a jeep. In fact, modern technology makes it MORE likely that we’d use animals, because we have ways to freeze embryos and bring them to life in the future. A suitcase can contain 1000 horses, cattle, dogs, etc. Everything a new colony would need to become self-sustaining. But you’d also send some high-tech stuff - the things where the advantage-to-weight ratio was greater than alternatives. So I would fully expect to see a farm on a colonized world with a log cabin, a hundred head of cows, people riding on horseback, but with a fusion generator supplying power to everything.
And you’ll notice that they don’t skimp on the computer technology. That’s small and cheap, and would exist even on frontier worlds. So people play pool on computer-generated pool tables, and people sit in shacks and conjure up high-resoution displays to communicate with each other. One of the things I like best about Firefly is how all of these small details are worked into the plots in a very plausible way.
Robert Heinlein is considered one of the greatest science fiction writers ever, and he wrote extensively about a future just like this one. It’s very Heinlein-esque. Heinlein explicitly wrote about colonizing planets on horseback, and of colonized worlds that reverted to an ‘old west’ type of existence while co-existing with a spacefaring future (read “Time Enough For Love - The Tale of the Adopted Daughter” for a depiction of a world that would fit perfectly in the ‘Firefly’ world. Or read ‘Tunnel in the Sky’). Oh, and in Heinlein’s future, people still use regular old guns, even 2000 years in the future.
Star Trek is the show with the unrealistic future. Firefly’s is FAR more plausible. It’s too bad that people saw it the other way around.
Oh, I forgot to say - not everyone talks like that. Mal and Zoe and Jayne and Kaylee do, because they come from frontier cultures. But Simon and River have a more cultured tongue, as does Book. Wash is somewhere in the middle.
The creators of Firefly put more work into creating a plausible future for man than any other SF show that I can recall seeing on television. It’s ironic that so many ‘science fiction’ fans were turned off of the show because it didn’t have the same old tired cliches that Star Trek foist on us.