FIREFLY NECROSPY (POST #1 of 4) -- WHAT WENT WRONG? by xed

GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

FIREFLY NECROSPY (POST #1 of 4) -- WHAT WENT WRONG?

POSTED BY: XED
UPDATED: Saturday, December 21, 2002 07:07
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VIEWED: 737
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Saturday, December 21, 2002 7:07 AM

FIREFLY NECROPSY (PART 1) - WHAT WENT WRONG?

First, old business -- Firefly at its best qualifies as a killer show. Some folks thought I hated the show. Try again. Superbly written. At its best. Magnificently acted. At its best. It punches the top out of the curve in every way...at its best.

So why the %#@& didn't Firefly become a monster hit?

REASON #1:
Joss Whedon chose Fox network. This was the original failing, the error from which all other errors flowed. Fox didn't get it. It's pellucidly clear from watching the 2-hour pilot that Fox didn't get it. At all.
Zero. Zip. Bupkiss. Dick. Diddly. Nada.
Consider the evidence that Fox didn't have a ghost of clue what this show was -- Fox announced that it had shelved the 2-hour pilot because...it didn't have enough action.
Not enough action?
Not enough...?
Are the suits at Fox drunk? Brain-damaged? On hard drugs?
The 2-hour pilot for Firefly had more action than any 10 episodes of of most science fiction shows (okay, let's leave out the 4th season eps of B5).
For Fox to inexplicably shelve the _superb_ 2-hour Firefly pilot bespeaks the cranial capacity of an artichoke. We're talking brain death here, folks. The suits at Fox don't even come up to the level of lobotomized trilobites. Bacterial levels of reasoning. No -- sub-bacterial. Mental powers at the viral level. I take that back too. Below a viral level. At the level of a prion.
Fox execs have the brainpower of a prion.
In every possible way, the 2-hour pilot qualiifed as absolutely first-rate, riveting from start to finish. Ya wanna talk about media res? How's this for in media res -- start with Mal's side losing the civil war in the climactic battle. Slam-bang, graba ya instantly, never let's go. And that's the first 5 minutes!
Any Fox exec who could stop watching the 2-hour pilot at A*N*Y point should've checked hi/r pulse, 'cause said pserson mutsa been dead.
And THIS is the pilot Fox dumped on the shelf becuase it allegedly "wasn't action-oriented enough"...???
That's just incomprehensible.
It makes no sense.
The suits at Fox just did not comprehend what they were seeing. Lights on, nobody home. If they didn't recognize this show as a magnificently deft blend of western and drama and action, then we're dealing with relatives of Pythagoras here, 'cause their EEGs were a rigorously Euclidean flatline.
Well, guess what?
Fox didn't.
They just didn't get it.
Their eyeballs apparently didnot register the photons. Their axons 'n dendrites apparently failed to fire. Further than that, deponent sayeth not.
With the fatal decision to shelve this superb 2-hour pilot, all the other disasters which befell "Firefly" trundled over the series like a steamroller over the Mona Lisa.
Without the pilot, the second episode became incomprehensible -- it's in the pilot that we learn who Reavers are and what they do. Without the pilot, Inara's role in the first aired ep, "The Train Job" became bizarre and came out of nowhere. Why does everyone react to her in the sherrif's office that way? What's up? Who's on first? With the 2-hour pilot, we learn that Inara is a very high-class whore able to move in stratospheric social circles. Without being SHOWN (rather than told) that crucial info, the scene where Inara waltzes into the police station in "The Train Job" becomes meaningless. ('Member, kiddies, never enought o be told. An audinec emust always, always, always be s*h*o*w*n. The pilot does that.).
Of course, it gets worse.
Joss Whedon had to desperately patch and stitch the scripts to give some semblance of a background for the characters he had already developed with great skill in the 2-hour pilot. So we get clumsy gobs of exposition like the scene twixt Inara and Book in "The Train Job" and the infuriatingly tie-wasting recap of River's psychosurgery at the start of "The Train Job." None of that necessary had Fox simply SHOWN THE DAMN 2-HR PILOT FIRST!
Hobbled right off, "Firefly's" writing team faced an impossible task -- trying to develop characters already detailed in the pilot, and trying to fill in all the backstory so expertly woven already. There's just no way to make that work. It's like running a 100-yard-dash with sacks of cemnt tied to your ankles.
In retrospect, "Out Of Gas" had to function as a quasi-pilot, filling in some background. But how much more sense it all would've made had fox aired that 2-hour pilot first!
By the time "Firefly" started to take off (and it did, spectacularly, with "Airel" and all the subsequent episodes) 'twas too late. The initial run of crummy episodes combined with the lack of the 2-hour pilot killed the show. Crummy espidoes include "The Train Job," crippled by the need for exposition forced by the missing pilot, and "Bushwacked," whose premise simply MAKES NO SENSE unless we have a visceral feel for how terrifying the Reavers are -- which we got from the pilot!.. Well, by the time "Our Mrs. Reynolds" and "Ariel" and "War Stories" rolled around, "Firefly" had hit its stride and come out swinging. First-rate episode after first-rate episode.
Alas, by then, too late.
The killing foot-wide shotgun-wound of empty space left in the series' guts by the missing pilot was just too much for "Firefly"'s writers to overcome. The sheer stoppping power of that kind of hit killed the series right off. Viewers tuned in to see something they didn't understand sans 2-hr pilot, with characters who came out of nowhere sans 2-hr pilot...and viewers understandably tuned out.
Some folks have suggested that viewers should've tuned into the net to read up on the characters. Alas, in scriptwriting, it's not enough to tell -- you must SHOW the audience.
The 2-hour pilot SHOWED us vividly and memorably who 4 of these 7 characters were. Reading some sentences about 'em omn the web doesn't substitute for experiencing the characters themselves. A good writer always shows, never tells. And without that revelation of the series' characters in action, in person, right at the start in the magnificent 2-hour pilot, sauchcomplex and multilayered characters just couldn't come alive quickly enough to boost the audience and save "Firefly." I mean, c'mon -- how can ANY team of writiers do in 15 minutes of interstitial exposition in 1 episode what Joss Whedon took 2 full hours to do in the pilot?
If only.
If only Fox had aired the 2-hour pilot FIRST.
Alas, there are other reasons for Firefly's demise. Next post -- the failure of the anti-Trek.

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