Glider_Pilot is offline Glider_Pilot Post #21  November 18,2008, 3:44pm
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jamesp81,350079 wrote :


A great TV show, and the movie 'Serenity' is great too. Whoever decided to cancel that show should've been horsewhipped.


Have you heard the story?


The studio who had Joss Wheadon on the payroll doing the hugely popular (and profitable)Buffy the Vampire Slayer wanted desperately to have another Wheadon property, on the theory that they had a golden goose on their hands. So they asked him to pitch another show.


He'd apparently had Firefly in mind for years, so when given the opportunity, he took it and pitched it to the studio. They jumped at it without really looking at what he had in mind - it had his name on it, and that's all they cared about at the moment - and funded the the two-hour pilot "Serenity" (The episode, not the later movie of the same name). Once the studio execs saw it, they started to backpeddle - the premise is odd at first glance - and asked him to produce a single additional episode to "see what the finished show would look like." That's not often done in TV, from what I'm told, and shows the depths of their doubt. They'd gotten another Wheadon property, but this wasn't what they were expecting.


By that time the ball was rolling and the timeslot had already been committed, so they rolled with it anyway, on the strength of the Wheadon name and his connection to Buffy. But they insisted that the 'additional' episode ("The Train Job") run first, before the pilot, which would be aired 'sometime later'. Trouble is, the pilot starts almost all of the major plot threads, so the public was a little confused for the first few episodes. Which meant that the ratings numbers weren't immediately in the stratosphere, as the studio wanted. They axed the show after airing - eight? ten? - episodes, and just as the fan base was starting to absolutely skyrocket. Essentially, they got cold feet without waiting to see real results. They got a bad taste in their mouth because the show wasn't what they'd had in mind and then when it wasn't an immediate block-buster hit, they reacted impulsively and cancelled it.


Given the wild popularity of the show after it was cancelled - how many first-season-canceled shows do you know that then go on to be adapted to a major motion picture? - cancelling Firefly was probably one of the greatest all-time blunders in TV history- but the die was cast and there were studio exec egos on the line at that point. They couldn't reverse course without feeling foolish. The cancellation was upheld, and that was that.


Most of this info is on the Special Features of the DVD set for the show, and the rest I've picked up from various places online.


Unfortunately, since Firefly is so dependant upon the overall story arc, newcomers who started withthe movie Serenity were left wondering who these characters were and what the heck was going on - and so thebox office for the movie, while good, wasn't enough for the(other) studio to take a chance on a sequel, despite persistant rumors to the contrary. Now the franchise lives on only in convention appearances by the cast, fan books, games, and an upcoming comic-book series based upon one of the characters (Shepherd Book). I've never been a big comic-book fan, so I'll probably miss out on that.
 
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bigfincat is offline bigfincat Post #22  December 5,2008, 7:48pm
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joss Whedon is my favorite writer. All of his shows have been excellent. Unfortunately, shows with such depth & character development are ignored by the mass public.


To understand these shows, you need to be pretty dedicated to watching them. I think that it is well worth it. People complain that TV is not well-written but never watch the ones that are.


Joss Whedon's showsactually are about the characters. The battle against evil is secondary to that.Some people cannot get past the costumes in Angel & never gave it a shot.


Upon hearing that they were going to spin-off of Buffy, I was a little concerned. But Angel was actually an ENTIRELY different show than Buffy. Even better was the way the storylines mingled at times showing more genius from the writing crew.


I hear the new show is having issues, but I like the cast (a couple of old favorites).I am not sure if FOX will be the best place for it, but the CW would be just as badI guess. To me, everything Joss Whedon touches is gold so I am optimistic.
 
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