First of all, the offending network was FOX:
The Sopranos: HBO
Lost: ABC
Gray’s Anatomy: ABC
The Shield: FX
Heroes: NBC
Firefly: FOX
Second, FOX’s objection to “Firefly” was, as I said, a hard-to-sell show (“cowboys in space?”) with a sci-fi budget that wouldn’t syndicate well. The threaded, arc-story aspect was just one of many reasons the show wasn’t what FOX wanted. FOX probably wanted “When Aliens Attack” or “World’s Most Dangerous Mutants” or “COPS On Location in Trantor.”
Perhaps that was a good thing. 
Fish, that pretty much sums up Joss’s comments on it. The suits just didn’t get the idea that when a man who has made a couple of the most successful, popular syndicated TV shows of all time comes to you and asks for money, you start writing checks and don’t worry about whether or not you get it.
[unintentional semi-hijack, so pre-emptive apologies are offered] I watched some of the Buffy episodes, and while my daughter absolutely loved it, I felt it was a bit…young…for me (I’m now 47, and so almost out of the hallowed “prime demographic”).
I’ve never seen Firefly or any other Whedon product. Just who is the demographic for these shows?
Whynot: Lord, how I wish I were Jane… 
I’d have a steadier paycheck.
Bosstone: I miss Dresden, too. As for Eureka, it truly has been a little show that could. I pass on weekly wedgies to its creator since the strike. Good people work there.
Captain Amazing: The other pair o’ problems with arc shows is one of production value and team writing. They’re a bitch to write in tandem and make for huge continuity nightmares. I mean, even non-arc shows cause continuity headaches – part of my job is to be a continuity weasel (I do a lot of story editing and continuity editing for character continuity and so on) and let me tell you, when you’re trying to churn out 24 episodes, with teamed writers who sometimes write in pairs, arcs are a royal pain in the ass.
On top of it, episodes are sometimes shot out of sequence, for logistical reasons, which makes actors bleed out of their ears. Sometimes, episodes they’re shot in tandem (especially for shows with big casts). It’s easy to drop threads at that point.
As you pointed out, they also make for crappy audience retention: if you miss an episode or two, you start losing the thread and whammo, you’ve lost another viewer. Not too bad if it’s brainless drama, but if it’s remotely complex storytelling, you’re really screwed.
The obvious reply just occurred to me:
**If “Firefly” is so great, why hasn’t it been resurrected? **
-because as it turns out, you can take the sky from me.
They did a horrible job of marketing. I was a Fox viewer and had never even HEARD about Firefly before the movie came out.
Wish I could say the same about some of their other shows.
I’m older than you & didn’t get into Buffy until I saw a bunch of re-runs consecutively on FX. (Currently, the show’s not on TV.) But I came to enjoy it quite a bit. And I like Angel, its spinoff. (Still on TNT every morning.) Whedon’s shows tend to appeal to intelligent viewers–with age being less important than the experts who bray about “demographics” might think.
If you think you might be interested, obtain (borrow/Netflix) the DVD’s for Firefly & watch a few episodes. In the order presented, please!
Thanks, I appreciate that, and will look into it. I think my daughter may have the DVDs, so I’ll give it a chance. Now I’ll back out and say carry on.
True enough, but I’m down with vampires. I’m down with cowboys in space. Blank-slate assassins that have personalities downloaded into them? I dunno. I suppose I’ll eventually give it a shot and like it, but hell, it took me this long to get into Buffy (Season 3, Disc 4 is sitting in my DVD player now), and I resisted it like mad for the longest time.
Off-topic: the amount of Buffy spoilers casually thrown around on this board is unbelievable. I’ll be reading along a completely unrelated thread when wham! a Season 4 spoiler comes out of nowhere.
I’ve always wanted to see what Joss would do with a show on the BBC or HBO. I think his style would be well suited to 12 episode seasons, perhaps with a 3 - 5 year season limit. Or, even a one-off, BBC style. I was really, really hoping that the Ripper series would come to fruition on the beeb. One can dream…
Amazing how much discussion one can get out of a question based on a preposterous premise (that the quality of a show has the slightest positive correlation with its ability to survive on American television).
I think Elenfair has nailed a number of reasons why Firefly failed/wasn’t resurrected. I wanted to elaborate on one key aspect of it: showing the episodes out of order.
The first episode shown was The Train Job which was an OK episode and passably served as a pilot. But it wasn’t the pilot. The pilot was Serenity, a two parter that got crammed in as the eleventh episode before it went off the air forever (or until Fox contractually barfed up episodes 12-14 six months later).
Serenity is unequivocally the best pilot of a series I’ve ever seen. It had everything a pilot needed (introduction to characters, character relations, the universe, and non-boring information dumps) plus the added bonus of several great action sequences, witty dialog, and a coherent plot that worked well on its own and weaved in threads of a larger story to come.
But they put it as the last episode! How could Fox possibly expect people to invest time in a series when the series didn’t invest time in an explanation of itself?
Because Fox’s goal isn’t happy, invested viewers, it’s goal is happy investors keeping the stock price up. If a television network could maintain reasonably growth and profit numbers and keep Wall Street happy by airing a test pattern 24 hours a day, it would. Television network executives don’t give two craps for the content of their broadcasts unless it gets them in trouble.
But Fox had already invested in Firefly! They wasted that money by handling the show so badly.
Your post said “TV execs” so I had no reason to assume you were talking specifically about one network. I find it hard to believe that Fox is somehow working on a different demographic than the other networks. Any Fox executive who tried to claim that a story-arc series can’t work would be given the same examples I gave. Or maybe they’d point to Fox series like 24 or Prison Break. But claiming that Firefly didn’t succeed because TV execs don’t like story-arc series is flying in the face of the evidence.
No need for Netflix. The whole series is on Hulu.
I love putting on a random episode at the office and listening to it while I work. The dialog alone is entertaining.
Somewhat tangentially: Is there any hope that that the Firefly/Serenity-verse could be further explored in novels or comics? The setting has its own value, IMO, even if authors chose not to follow the further adventures of the original crew (sadly diminished by the loss of Wash and Book :(). There’s at least one ‘respectable’ sci-fi author who has done an unauthorized fanfic novel already, but I’m not sure whether licensing would be unworkably difficult, given FOX’s “cold dead hands” approach.
Agreed.
Even so, people to this day poo-poo Buffy (and Veronica Mars) because the one-line synopsis you tell people sounds stupid. And there are precious few who are willing to listen to any more than that before they dismiss you as Dwight Schrute. I often have episodes of both Buffy & VM on in my room, and neither of my roommates have watched more than a minute.
LawMonkey- yes.
On a related note, now that I have a big new awesome TV, I realized that I’m going to have to spend another ~$50 to re-buy on Blu-Ray. Some would say that such a purchase is optional, but they would be wrong.
Yeesh, that reminds me of how Fox dumped the last two hours of Arrested Development on air the Fourth of July (or something like that).