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| Swatting the Firefly
by Hank Parnell
Posted on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 16:43
TIMES READ: 17935
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| Originally published in The Texas Mercury
The very week that Fox TV finally deigned to broadcast the pilot episode of its unique, ground-breaking sci-fi show Firefly, they also announced its cancellation.
You may recall that I predicted this. It gives me no pleasure to be right about these things. Further, while I consider mocking irony to be a force of nature as real and pervasive as gravity and the convection of heat, the way in which Firefly was mishandled by Fox seems a little too calculated to be anything but deliberate. Yes, I tend to be paranoid; but sometimes, you know, even paranoids have real enemies.
One thing became utterly clear while I was watching "Serenity," the pilot episode: there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. It had action, it had adventure; it had character and development. It was smart, funny, tough-minded, and 100 percent different. It set everything up perfectly. Unless the programming executives at Fox are retardate morons who need to be in an institution rather than making millions as the heads of a TV network, the decision not to air the two-hour pilot first and the rest of the series' episodes in sequence is too big a blunder to be a simple "mistake" or "accident."
They wanted to kill this show. I believe that, as surely as I do that the sun rises in the east. Had they really been behind the series, and wanted it to "go" somewhere, they would have first of all given it a decent time-slot, one in which it would have had a chance to find an audience—the nine-o'clock (Eastern) slot on Sunday nights, vacated by that overwrought piece of dreck The X-Files*, would have been perfect. It is—was—not an eight o'clock primetime "kiddie" show. It was a serious drama with a fantastic setting. And it was simply without question the best show of its type ever made for television.
So why did Fox kill Firefly so deliberately? Did they want to punish creator Joss Whedon for his "unexpected" successes with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel? Demonstrate to him conclusively that it is not the few genuinely creative people in Hollywood who hold the real power in the industry, but the men and women who hold the purse strings?
Long ago I reached the conclusion that the medieval system of patronage, whatever its faults and drawbacks, was infinitely superior to the modern "market" system of "free-enterprise" for encouraging the creation of lasting works of literature and art. I put these in quotes because market economics is only a tool, and hence is only as good—or bad—as those who wield it. A society of intelligent, thoughtful individuals could, no doubt, produce the highest art ever known to man through a market economy. A society of lowest-common-denominator swine, sheep, slaves and mindless, pap-programmed robots could only, I submit to you, produce the kind of utter dreck that is foisted on gullible audiences today as "entertainment," and for which the swine, sheep, slaves and robots are only too eager to pay, and, by so doing, to support its continuance.
Bear in mind that medieval society was likewise comprised of swine, sheep and slaves (they didn't have the John Dewey-style system of "public education" in those days required to turn out the robots), so that the system of patronage actually could work; rich aristocrats who genuinely had an interest in the arts could selectively choose who to support and who not to with a taste and consideration which, clearly, the vaunted "common man" of any age is incapable.
But now this hints at another problem with Firefly, and which may have contributed to its undoing. This was an uncommon show, aimed at uncommon people. It had depth, sensitivity and intelligence—things notably lacking in every other show on television. The latest Star Trek incarnation, Enterprise, for example, is as shallow as a puddle of dog urine, has a ton of squeamishness masquerading as "sensitivity," and is as stupid as only the post-original Star Trek clones can be. (My favorite pastime, when I bother to watch it, is spotting the inconsistencies and incongruities between this milieu, purportedly taking place a century before the exploits of Kirk and Company, and that of the original series.) The only other sci-fi show I have come to watch regularly is the eccentric Starhunter, a syndicated Frog-Limey-Canuck co-production that is simply not in anywhere near the same league as Firefly, though it is perhaps more "scientifically correct" in its vision of the future and has, in ways, echoes of the frontier aspect so adroitly utilized by Firefly—this is another show where they wear long-tailed coats and tied-down guns in the future. (Starhunter is obviously made on the very cheap, and is in its third year of production in Europe, though the first season has just now made it to American TV.)
But Firefly was just light-years beyond anything before it. Given its fate, there is surely likely to be nothing anywhere near it in the future. As I said before when I tried to interest you in it, Firefly never stepped too far out of line for an American TV series in the early twenty-first century, but it also, in its stubborn, eccentric way, refused to toe that line. Yes, Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) was a "good" man, ultimately, in the conventional sense; but he had to work at it, and in his case "being good" was an act of tragic nobility, for he believed in the life-darkened depths of his otherwise pure soul what little psycho-psychic River (Summer Glau) elicited from him with her mind-reading powers in the last sequential episode, "Objects in Space"—that "none of it means a damn thing."
You see, as with your author, it "meant" something only to him; and his decision to be good was, indeed, a conscious act—he was "good" because he believed that was the way human beings should be. He had no "proof" of it and every evidence against it. He also had the skills and knowledge, the talent and ability, to be more ruthless and clever than either of the series' crimelords, the slovenly Badger (Mark Sheppard) or the fiendish Niska (Michael Fairman). By all reason and logic, believing as he does that, ultimately and objectively, "none of it means a damn thing," he should at least have been as mindlessly and passionately mercenary as his shallow counterpoint Jayne (Adam Baldwin). But he is not.
Yes, he passed judgment and killed people on his own authority, and that is decidedly a "bad" thing in today's "law and order" climate—you are supposed to beat the crap out of them, then arrest them and turn them in for trial and prosecution; we have, in this society, supposedly a "rule of law" that ensures "justice." (Please pardon the hysterical and derisive guffaws in the background.) Malcolm Reynolds lived by a rule of honor that demands justice. He was in this respect quintessentially American—and, to be more specific about it, quintessentially Southern American.
And that, my friends, may really have been a problem for Firefly. The conscious patterning of the Firefly milieu on the Confederate defeat that Whedon publicly stated was the case may have not set very well in the Yankee-dominated halls of Political Correctness that rules modern America, be they "liberal" or "conservative" ("neoconservative"; again, the two are virtually indistinguishable). Firefly was an unabashed post-Civil War space Western where the losers were the good guys;
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