A little while back I posted an article about television auteurs, visionary producer/writer/directors that create shows because they have their passion, even if the show doesn’t last.  Talking about Bryan Fuller specifically, three of his brain children died young (Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls) all amazing shows, all cancelled early.  There is a much more successful example in Joss Whedon, creator of such amazing shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and the web show of awesome, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.  Each show has amazing writing, fantastic production values and more imagination than you could shake a stick at, and because of all of this, they were very well received.  However, for this article, I will focus on one of Whedon’s “failure”, Firefly.  Mind you, I use the term loosely, and only to describe the length of its run.

Anyway, Firefly is a complicated mix of sci-fi space opera and western cowboy drama.  I know, it sounds pretty insane.  But please give it a shot.  The way the whole story goes is Earth was drained of resources and to save the human race other planets and moons were teraformed to support life.  Think of it as a second wild west expansion.  The rim worlds are every bit the old west desert towns.  Saloons, brothels, lever action rifles and revolvers are more common than any computer.  The planets at the middle are full of advanced technology.  The central planets formed an Alliance, a body of government wishing to control and police the new human territories.  Also like the old west, a civil war had a good part in making outlaws.  The rim planets resisted the Alliance but were quickly squashed.  The men and women who fought in the resistance could either reintegrate into the rim worlds or keep resisting in their small ways.

One of the ways is to become what amounts to a space pirate.  This is where the story proper takes off, so to speak.  The crew of Serenity, a Firefly class cargo ship, led by Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds (played by Nathan Fillion) takes odd jobs to make enough money to keep their freedom.  The crew consists of a first mate, a pilot, an engineer, a mercenary, a companion (think very high class escort) a shepherd (AKA space pastor), a doctor and a young girl with an unknown and potentially lethal past.  Obviously there is much more to these characters than I am letting on, but come on, you have to do some work here too.   Anyway, the crew as a whole works as a jaunty mix of cowboy, criminal, Robin Hood and mercenary.  Any job that pays well and falls into a morally or legally grey area, they are likely to take.

Through no fault of the show, it was canceled after just one incomplete season.  Like most quality shows that die young, the blame rests on the network.  The pilot that Whedon initially shot was deemed not good enough and he was forced to use the second episode as the pilot.  This threw the entire series into a spiral of out of sequence episodes, losing the story as well as the audience.  In 2005 a movie based on the show was release.  Serenity was a way to continue the story that had gained a massive fan base during its short television run.  Now to try to explain why it got so much recognition.

For starters, Whedon had found a way to make space exploration and the colonization of other worlds believable.  Almost the entire human race was moved from Earth when teraforming started and thus nations basically disintegrated.  Populations mixed and mingled in a way that had never really happened before.  As a result, pretty much everybody knows at least a little Chinese.  It is integrated fluidly; characters drop in and out of it in times of anger or surprise.  The language is integral, but used lightly, indicating how well it has been accepted into daily vernacular.  Similarly, the spread of technology is slow in coming.  We see western styles because there is legitimately nothing better around.  These people have been dropped off on a deserted world with only the basic essentials of life.  It makes sense that with so many new worlds the government organizing the new settlement of the people would be lacking sufficient resources to adequately supply everybody.  Hence, disparity, poverty, sickness, crime and, in some cases, anarchy.  All the makings of Dodge City on a distant moon.

Like with Whedon’s other shows (Buffy comes to mind as a prime example), a strong feminist feel is apparent throughout the show.  The first mate and best fighter on the ship is a woman.  She can handle a gun as well or better than any man (I could go into a Freudian trip about castration anxiety and what a gun really is but I’ll spare you) but still has a motherly instinct that pops up towards the end of the series.  Similarly, the ship’s mechanic is also a woman.  She is young, adorable and knows her way around Serenity better than anybody else.  The feminist vibe is so strong and chivalry so important that instances of misogyny are promptly shut down, often violently.

What really makes Firefly shine is the characters.  Each one is a complex mesh of emotions with a sadly less than fleshed out story.  Whedon is a master of character development, dialog and storytelling, each of which Firefly has in spades.  Big things come in small packages and this show is definitely a small one, only 14 episodes, so it is certainly worth your time.  All the episodes and the movie are streaming on Netflix, so what’s your excuse?

What Do You Think? Discuss.