Burn the land, boil the sea; You can't take the sky from me.

[usernamenumber]

So everyone from friends to slashdot to total strangers I've spoken to at (admittedly geeky) social gatherings have been telling me about Firefly; How it's the best sci-fi to ever grace the television screen, how terrible it was that it got canceled, etc etc etc.

Damn, they're right.

Early last week disc one arived via netflix. Late last week the series boxed-set arrived via amazon. We have one disc to go. We would've gotten through it sooner but we keep oscilating between wanting "more! more! more!" and just not wanting it to end. I'm almost (almost) tired of exclaiming "that's so cool!" in the middle of an episode. The writing so far, especially the episodes by Wheedon, Minear and/or Edlund (which is all but two), is fantastic. The acting is such that I can't point to a single weak link in the cast. XanderWash's non-stop "look how witty I am!" quipping gets a bit irritating at times, but that's the closest thing to a complaint that I have and it's still a believable facet of the character.

I find it suprising how closely my feelings about Firefly having been cancelled mirror my feelings about the presidential election. Obviously there's no comparison in terms of importance but both seem to denote a fundamental difference between what appeals to me and what seems to appeal to the majority of the country. Or maybe it's not the rest of the country's fault at all. If the airdates shown (prominently, so I think Mr. Wheedon was trying to make a point) on the back of the discs are to be believed... wtf was Fox thinking? They aired the pilot, which explains why everyone is there in the first place *after* everything else?? If that's the case then no wonder it never caught on. Chalk up one more reason to love Fox for taking on great new shows and then hate them destroying said shows, wondering why nobody's watching and then replacing them with more proffitable things-- like Fear Factor reruns. Grr.

--Brad (continuing his proud tradition of getting in on trends two years after the fact)

Comments

[eruthros]

It was really depressing -- I mean, it was practically like Fox was trying to kill it. They were showing it at 9 pm on Friday night, which is Death to a show. (Unless you're lucky enough to be the X-Files, in which case for some reason they won't get around to canceling you even though you don't have great ratings, and they'll keep you around and hope for more ratings later.) And then the way they ordered them! I mean! They wanted to start with "action" so they started with Train Job, and Joss had to shove in all of this exposition so you could sort of work out who everyone was. And then it was canceled, and it was just so so depressing. Except then the DVDs sold incredibly -- something like 25th on amazon.com's ranking system. And so they're giving us a movie!

In a way, though, I wish I'd seen the show on dvd in the right order -- because I think the pilot would be much more tension-making if you didn't already know who was going to be sticking around later and people's motivations and stuff.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

Believe me. It was quite, quite tension making. Especially since we started it with an hour before we had to leave the house, not realizing it was a two-hour pilot. We had to pause it and leave at the commercial break right after Malcolm kicks open the doctor's "cargo"!

Painful, that was.

[eruthros]

Oh man, yah. That must have been pretty tense. I wish I'd had that first-viewing experience. :)

And it makes the Reavers much scarier.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

And wtf is this about the pilot not having action?? It had a hell of a lot more action than, say, Encounter at Farpoint. And I hear that series did OK.


Yeesh. #%$%$#@ing Fox...