The Pitch:

A very mixed band of fugitives and travellers scrape a living on the fringes of an authoritarian future space empire.

How long did it run?

14 episodes plus the feature film Serenity, made a couple of years after the series was cancelled, largely in response to high sales of Firefly on DVD.

Who didn’t last?

The series doesn’t go on for long enough to kill people off, although the film Serenity has a couple of the regulars buying their respective farms.

There are a couple of attempts to introduce recurring (or potentially-recurring) characters like conwoman Saffron and the racketeer Adelai Niska, but again the series didn’t go on long enough for any new regulars to be introduced.

Any major format changes?

Cancellation after transmission of only eleven of the fourteen episode made.

Who’d Be A TV Exec?

In 2002 it must have seemed that Joss Whedon was the proverbial man with the Midas touch; not only had he revived Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the wreck of a film which failed to achieve the potential of its concept, but having put together a core cast of young, talented actors, he then created Angel as a spin-off series based around what had originally been conceived as a set of supporting characters for Buffy. So when the people in suits asked him what he wanted to do for his next project and he replied "A sci-fi western, please", the people in suits were only too happy to oblige- at least up to a point. After all, hadn’t Star Trek originally been pitched by Gene Roddenberry in terms of a western series set in outer space? And it was almost certainly with that kind of potential in mind that Firefly was commissioned- except the pilot that Whedon delivered, ‘The Train Job’, wasn’t the pilot that eventually went out. For a combination of technical and narrative reasons, ‘The Train Job’ was rejected as the series opener (it eventually took its place as the second episode) and Joss Whedon and Tim Minear were sent away to write a new pilot over a weekend or the deal was off.

‘Serenity’, then, is a self-consciously entry-level pilot; if there’s one thing which initially makes it difficult to watch, it’s that it’s so formulaic a pilot that many of the elements seem predictable. There’s a potential crewmember who turns traitor and a Firefly caper in miniature- which is a shame, because your introduction to a very carefully-conceived universe comes in the form of a story which is trying hard not to be too challenging. In fact, if there’s one weakness evident in ‘Serenity’ which presages the series’ early demise, it’s the sense of its universe having sprung fully-formed and in all its complex detail from Joss Whedon’s imagination, with few if any concessions to the audience. For example, although there’s a flashback to the Battle of Serenity Valley to explain Malcolm and Zoey’s shared past, at no point is it commented on that everybody in this future universe has Chinese as a common second language- people just get on and mutter or swear under their breath in Chinese (and no, I’m no wiser as to just how dirty they’re being) and the viewer has to work it out for themselves. It also tries too hard to justify the "sci-fi western" tag by trying to be both at the same time and the end result probably has enough of both genres to put off a lot of fans of the other- while the atmosphere and costumes are generally reminiscent of the American West and Malcolm Reynolds himself is a man with a surprising amount of integrity and honour, the Firefly universe is drawn in such detail that many viewers expecting a straightforward Western may have been alienated, while the lack of sophistication and selective approach to future technology probably put off many sci-fi fans.

This is a shame, because as with everything else from the Mutant Enemy stable, Firefly was written, produced and performed with a great deal of care and attention to characters and the dynamics between them. What ‘Serenity’ does well is to show Book, Simon and River joining up with a crew of reprobates and privateers, including Inara, whose role as a Companion illustrates the cross-cultural fusion of the Firefly universe by combining the career of a prostitute with the respectability of a geisha, and also bringing out some of the potential tensions between them. To take one example, while Kaylee takes an immediate shine to Simon, to Malcolm he starts out as a potential liability when it transpires that the Alliance are after him and his sister, and to a mercenary like Jayne there will always be the possibility of selling them out if the offer is good enough. And as with every Joss Whedon project, we have an ensemble cast of particularly talented actors who take to their characters like second skins and give one top-notch performance after another. There are better and more entertaining episodes later in the run, but ‘Serenity’ is certainly a good enough start- it’s just a shame that the concept didn’t win over enough people to allow the run it deserved.