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Firefly Likely to be Cancelled
rscrawford writes "Zap2It is reporting that Firefly, one of the best science fiction shows to make it on to network television in recent years, is going on hiatus: read, getting canceled. Well, it was an interesting, well-written, provocative and intelligent show on Fox; is anyone therefore surprised that they're doing away with it? It lasted a lot longer than I thought it would. At least they're going to show the original 2-hour pilot in December. (And yet, somehow, Just Shoot Me continues...)"
Too bad each network has a few dozen shows to run each week.
This really gets back into the short term success syndrome that trashed Wall Street, among other things.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This would have been a perfectly good answer to the story earlier about likelyhood of OpenSource going mainstream. Why would anyone want OpenSource to do just that.
Help fight continental drift.
This is not flamebait.
I watched Firefly for a few episodes and found it very boring. The only part that was slightly interesting (the hidden crush thing) was overcome with the hokey idea of the gunslinger in space theme that, while interesting, was never taken advantage of, and therefore it lost viewers.
I'm sure showing the pilot would've helped the show, but the first three episodes that aired (the only ones I watched), just got more and more drab. It would've been nice to actually seen the origins of these characters but, gathering what I did on those that aired, the whole thing was a misfire. Regardless of its cult-like status (whenever a show is beginning it falter and the three people who like it complain, suddenly there's a "cult"), maybe Josh Wheadon doesn't have the golden goose.
You want to see a high-concept new show that's actually worth your hour? Check out John Doe. A slightly sci-fi, slightly X-Files, slightly CSI type show that delivers on suspense, mystery, and solid writing. While it can't be this good for long, it sure beats Firefly.
Good riddance.
The first few episodes weren't great at all. I was about to stop watching, but somebody lent me a couple more taped episodes and they were really good. Good old Josh has struck a great combination of interesting characters, unusual situations, and funny dialog. There's just something appealing about a honorable thief and his crew of misfits.
If it really gets cancelled I will definitely miss it, best SciFi since ST:TNG.
One thing that Firefly got right was that whenever the camera was in the vacuum of space there was no sound. That's one thing that's always bugged me about sci-fi shows.
I REALLY can't believe that human beings will still be having sword fights and rustling cattle two centries from now.
Why the heck not? We are still having sword fights and rustling cattle today, after all. We live in a world where 747s and Bedouins coexist. We have soft-serve ice cream, HDTV, and artificial limbs, but we also have subsistence farmers, yak herders, and those stone-age people they discovered in New Guinea a few years ago.
If you go to Australia, you can drive a couple of days from a 21st century city of four million people into the middle of the desert where people live pretty much the same way they did 40,000 years ago. But once you get there, you'll probably see somebody wearing an Adidas tee shirt or a pair of Reeboks.
The writers of Firefly just expanded this idea. Instead of having a few population groups living pre-modern lifestyles scattered across the globe, they have a few planets full scattered through a solar system. And just like in the real world, those scattered groups of "primitives" will have a few pieces of modern technology at hand, surrounded by whatever they could make themselves.
It's a much more plausible idea than you may realize.
I write in my journal
One of the top 3 (FOX don't count).
My job isn't involved with content. Truthfully, my job is to manage the maintenace costs for our headquarters. I expect to get paid for my work. If less people are watching our shows, we get less revenue. My job would be at risk. I could care less if my employer does or does not create "quality" shows. We are a business, people. Our business involves pleasing the biggest mass of people possible.
Not everybody wants to see "art" all the time. sometimes they want to be informed, or they just want to be entertained. We are in the entertainment business, not the art business. You want art? Paint a fucking picture. Want to be entertained? Watch our shows.
The problem with fox is multi-layered.
First, they did not air the pilot episode, which right out of the gates, was a mistake. I have seen the pilot, entitled "Serenity" (thank you, Kazaa!) and let me tell you, it rocked. Who needs aliens when you have Reavers!!
Second, the episodes that *have* been aired have all been out of order. I think the order they have showed them in is three, four, seven, eight, nine or something like that.
The reason? Fox didn't "get" some of the episodes so they aired them in the order they liked.
The terribly ironic part of this is that most people unanimously agree that the show got MUCH better as it went along. Lets face it, the first few episodes were mildly amusing at best, but the last 4 or so have kicked all sorts of ass.
Finally, as for why the show has been placed on hiatus. Fox really liked the last episode aired ("Ariel") and the decision was made to get it out of friday night hell. It was going to be moved to the wednesday 9pm/ET timeslot. The problem? WB announced earlier this week that Angel (another Joss Whedon show) was getting that timeslot.
Fox had no place to put it (Note: please please please make it monday at 9pm) for now so they have decided to place it on hiatus for now.
I don't think its necessarily cancelled. It certainly would be a small tradgedy. First family guy now this.
Come on, Tinkler, Tink!!
Fox can't really change their audience quickly, so they just drop the good stuff.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
Dark Angel was a good show. I thought that the 2nd season was getting a tad weird but they could have dramatically improved it over a 3rd season. The cost for producing Dark Angel was cited as the main cause for opting for Firefly. Well, IMO they could have just spent less on the 3rd season instead of axing the entire show. IIRC Firefly wasn't even going to make it as the 3rd season of Dark Angel had been pretty much confirmed but it was at the very last minute that fox went with firely at the detriment of dark angel. Ahhh well...blame fox!!
Assuming people move into space, then all those people in space would be of the same heritage and desire the same technology
No, not under these rules. The premise behind Firefly isn't that the people who felt like it moved to other planets; the mission statement of the show starts with, "After the Earth got used up." Migrating to other planets wasn't optional. This results in a blindingly diverse universe in which to set one's stories.
All colonies and space-faring civilizations would tend to use as much tech as they could get their hands on & I'm sure companies would be perfectly happy to sell them that tech for a fair price just as they do today.
First of all, imagine being a Bedouin and wanting to buy a DVD player. To you and me, a DVD player costs about $90. To a Bedouin, that's more money-- equivalent exchange value, that is-- than he'll see in five years. Not to mention the fact that he's somehow going to have to get his hands on an electrical generator to power the thing.
And that's just in our world, where getting DVD players to Bedouins is only marginally more difficult than getting them to suburban teenagers. Imagine a setting in which you'd have to send an entire cargo ship across millions of miles of empty space to do the same job. Suddenly the barriers to trade become very real.
Furthermore, how long do you think that DVD player would hold up strapped to the ass-end of a camel in the middle of a desert? The sand alone would turn it into a $90 boat anchor in a few months' time, and boat anchors are of even less use to the Bedouins than DVD players are.
So we have three things: (1) the poorer settlements simply lack the resources to trade for even moderately expensive goods; (2) the moderate cost of these goods is multiplied many times over by the extraordinary cost of transporting them to the outer worlds; and (3) the rough-and-ready lifestyle of the frontier colonists puts serious limits on their demand for technological goods, either because they lack the infrastructure to support them, or because the goods just aren't durable enough.
One of the most durable pieces of electronics I've ever seen is an old Walkman that I've had since the late 80's. That thing has been hauled all around the world, dropped, submerged in water, you name it, and it still works. So I probably could give it to a Bedouin with reasonable confidence that it's not going to fall apart in a week of exposure. But where's he going to get the batteries for it?
In general, when cultures merge, the more primitive one adapts to include the technology of the other. This is evident in the lives of american indians, eskimos (enuit ), numerous tribes in africa, and most in south america that have had contact with the outside world.
Um... actually, in most of those examples you just named, the more "primitive" (for lack of a better word) group has been wiped out by the more "advanced" group, either through active genocide, or through disease. The Europeans became the dominant group on the North American continent because smallpox killed off most of the natives.
But if you look at examples where two groups of wildly disparate technologies meet without war or disease in the mix, a different conclusion presents itself. Consider the native peoples of Siberia, or of Mongolia, or the Australian blackfellas that I mentioned earlier. There's some cultural and technological assimilation along the borders, but for the most part both groups continue to exist as they did before they met. In most cases, of course, the more "advanced" group has grown at a dramatically greater rate than the "primitive" group, so from a certain point of view it looks like the "primitive" group is dying out, but that's not really what happens.
The simple reason that there are areas where people live like they are in the stone age is because they have yet to either meet people more advanced, or have yet to learn how they can trade their goods for more advanced ones.
That's not true. There are stone-age peoples in South America, Australia, Africa, and the Pacific islands, and probably lots of other places that I'm not thinking of right now. They're not living in huts or caves and chipping tools out of flint because they don't know any better; they're doing it because, whatever each member's personal motivation, they want to.
Even tribes in south america that had never previously seen outsiders were more than willing to trade goods for knives made of steel.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that they're clamoring to move into condos and drink inexpensive but charming California chardonnays and rent movies from the Madang Blockbuster.
I imagine if they had seen or heard of a gun, they might have tried to bargain for one so they could use it instead of a spear to hunt with.
Not once they realize that it takes a shitload of infrastructure to supply oneself with bullets. These particular examples we're talking about are called stone-age peoples because they don't typically work with metals at all. They're cool with the idea of a knife made out of carbon steel, because it's useful as long as you rub it against a rock every so often to keep it sharp. But if you try to tell them about gunpowder, and mining minerals to make gunpowder, and melting lead to make bullets, and so forth and so on, their interest will turn rapidly back to the ka-bar on the other table.
If there is a better, faster, cheaper way of doing something (and likely there is)... people will use it over primitive technology anyday.
Yes. But "better, faster, cheaper" means different things in different settings. To an iron- or steam-age group-- say, like a medium-sized town out of the old west-- the idea of manufacturing bullets to use in their expensively bought rifles makes sense. But to a stone-age group, that's about as practical as microwave popcorn.
Joe Shmoe yak herder would be instantly working for acme corporation pushing paperwork after the mojo corporation found a better way to do his job for less $ on his planet.
Except... that's not the way it happens in real life.
Cowboys? please, they'd have electronic collars on all the cattle, robots, and cow kibble instead of real oats and grains for the cows in no time.
Not if electronic collars cost the equivalent of $5,000 each, and cow kibble went for hundreds of bucks per pound. Branding irons are easy enough to make from raw iron, and grass is free.
I write in my journal
Low sci-fi appeal?
Are you nuts?
Take a look at any list of the top grossing movies of all time. Here's one from July 2002:
1: Titanic
2: Star Wars (*)
3: E.T (*)
4: Star Wars I: The Phantom menace (*)
5: Spider-Man
6: Jurassic Park (*)
7: Forrest Gump
8: Harry Potter I
9: Lord of the Rings I
10: The Lion King
Four of the top ten are sci-fi, and three more are fantasy or comics, sharing much of the same demographic. If you'd looked just a year ago, instead of the newer movies you'd see two more Star Wars movies, Terminator 2, and Independence Day.
I've seen survey results that over 2/3 of americans consider themselves fans of "Star Trek". This is a TV franchise that has been going on for what, 36 years now? On it's fifth show, with weekly viewerships still in the tens of millions? And which has spawned 10 movies? Can any other show anywhere make claims like that?
On the whole people LOVE visual Sci-fi. Fewer people read it, but in the film/video worlds it's a genre with a great deal of pull for most Americans.
-Evan
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
How did these "primitives" get off of earth in the first place, if they don't have advanced technology?
This isn't a new idea in science fiction; for a point of reference, read either The Legacy of Heorot or Destiny's Road by Niven. They're both very easy reads, and they tell the story of extrasolar colonies that are basically designed on the seed-pod principle.
A plant normally needs light and nutrients to grow, but a seed is buried beneath the soil and has no roots with which to feed. So how can a seed sprout? A seed-pod contains both the embryonic plant itself and also a bit of tissue that feeds the plant while it's sprouting. As the plant sprouts, it "digests" that bit of plant-stuff to get the energy it needs to grow.
It's easy to imagine a colony that works the same way. The spacecraft-- a giant slow-boat, in this case-- is packed to the gills with lots of useful stuff: mining tools, farming tools, seeds and bulbs, livestock, pre-fab housing, a certain supply of prepared food, and so on. When the boat lands and the colonists get out, they have a great big party and start making babies willy-nilly, and then the next morning they start tearing their spaceship apart. All the stuff inside, and even the structure of the spaceship itself, gets turned into houses and mines and farms and fields and stuff to eat and build and use. This is like the seed-pod; it gives the colony enough stuff to set up a basic community, with shelter and sources of food and of minerals and all that, but that's all. After that point, the colony has to start squeezing out the pups and getting back to nature. Till the soil, milk the cows, real frontier-type stuff.
So to get the whole world off the planet, we have to postulate some of the spaceships. How many? Well, let's start by guessing that there are about 8 billion people on Earth when the shit starts to hit the fan. Due to disease and famine, say that population drops by 50% over a century: 4 billion people. Of those, half are going to get left behind, either because they're too old or too sick or too young or whatever: 2 billion.
Figure each spaceship can hold about 200 people, and the tools, equipment, and supplies they need to start a colony on a habitable world. That comes to 10 million spaceships. Ten million spaceships, each filled with stuff like goats and guns and clothes and lumber and pigs and wrought iron and seeds and medical supplies and books and ploughs and anvils and chickens, with a little room left over in the corners for the passengers.
Who could build such a vast fleet of spaceships? Oh, let's say in the West it was a joint venture of the National Geographic Society, the Gates Foundation (can't sell Windows if humanity is extinct, can you?), and Fox. (Fox got in by selling the ad rights to a yet-to-be-produced series called "When Space Colonies Go Bad." Check your local listings.)
The government of China, of course, accepted the responsibility for migrating its vast population upon its own shoulders; in 2250, Chairman Ken (China having become surprisingly Westernized in the past couple of centuries) proclaims the Great Leap Upward, and they start building Little Red Spaceships in low Earth orbit.
Improbable? Of course. Impossible? Probably. But remember that the fundamental purpose here is to establish a setting in which stories can be told. Maybe the number of people who got off the Earth is a lot smaller than 2 billion. Maybe it's more like 2 million, which would only require 10,000 spaceships, which is a hell of a lot easier to imagine. But whether you go with the high or the low figure, it's just plausible enough to make the reader, or watcher, or whatever go "Oh, okay, that's all right then, now get on with the stories."
I write in my journal
Did it ever occur to you that this asshole is being honest and feels that the crap on tv is exactly that, crap. I could care less about Masterpiece Theater, C-SPAN or those annoying as hell Tasters Choice commercial. Also the British snob bs you threw in was a nice touch. C-SPAN is a waste of two channels for me, I get the most basic cable package available because my wife and I realized we didn't watch anything but C.S.I. and whatever happend to be on the Discovery channel. I watched sci-fi when andromeda or farscape was on and occasionally star gate, but those were rarities. So we reduced our cable bill by over $20 bucks a month and continued to watch the same two things.
I have no desire to watch ER, WWF anything, any soap opera, or the fresh prince. Sure I watched the fresh prince when I was much younger, and the wonder years and things like that. That was ten years ago. Today I find there isn't shit on tv worth watching other than Histories Mysteries or the various Discovery specials.
I recently got in touch with a friend from high school that had joined the army and had just moved back home after being discharged at the end of his service agreement. While we were catching up tv came up because he wanted to get cable internet access, but the cheapest way to get it was to get cable tv and intenet access in a package and he didn't want the cable tv package. His reason was that the only thing he could see himself watching was Discovery. Of course his wife wanted it for other things so I'm sure they'll get it anyway. The point is that we are completly differant and have the same opinion of tv. I'm a tech geek working as a system admin and developer for a very small company. He's going to school for achitecture. We don't share any of the same interests any more, and are as differant as can be, but both feel that tv is crap. Just because you don't feel that tv is crap and become insecure when other people let you know they think it is does not give you the right to make outlandish generalizations about them.
I could also give a flying fuck what everyone else thinks of me. If I cared about that I wouldn't be posting on Slashdot. Someone made a blanket statment about everyone loving the dialog on Firefly and I simply responded that I, like the parent poster, thought it was crap. I get up early on Saturday mornings to play Barren Realms Elite and have breakfast with my wife. If the television is turned on its to watch whatever we happen to have in from Netflix, not to watch cartoons, not to watch whatever the hell "Chico and the Man" is (Telemundo is the Spanish broadcast network right?). If they were showing loony toons first thing Saturday morning I might sit down and watch them. Power Rangers? No thanks.
Sure, we are all friends here, that's why you have to resort to calling me a snob, oh, even better, a guy pretending to be a snob. If you want to challenge what I have to say, please do so. However you could at least do it without outlandish generalizations and immature insults. Or better yet, come on over some time and watch tv with us. I think "When Dinosaurs Roamed America" is going to be on again and I didn't catch the whole thing last time. I'll make tea and we can have scones.
Call me a skeptic, but I've heard this before and it will certainly make a lot of people think twice before jettisoning Firefly out of the airlock if you join the campaign to save the show.
If you want to support what many (including me) consider to be the best show on television, join the campaign to support Firefly by voting to save it at SaveMyShow.com, by sending a postcard asking Fox to save the show to:
FOX BROADCASTING CO
ATTN: SANDY GRUSHOW, CHAIRMAN, FOX ENTERTAINMENT GROUP
10201 WEST PICO BLVD
LOS ANGELES CA 90035
Donate (via paypal) to Firefly: Immediate Assistance to support the campaign to save the show.
Put a banner, graphic, or link on your web site to support the show.
The terribly ironic part of this is that most people unanimously agree that the show got MUCH better as it went along. Lets face it, the first few episodes were mildly amusing at best, but the last 4 or so have kicked all sorts of ass.
Yeah. The original pilot (which they didn't show) kicks ass. The first two episodes they showed were mediocre - not bad, but not great. Then comes "Our Mrs. Reynolds", which made me go whaaaat? at one point and for good makes it clear that this is not Star Trek. Trek would never dare to do the things that this episode did. So now I have a problem, I'm really starting to like the show and now it's possibly getting cancelled. First Farscape, now this..
To people who didn't like the first few episodes... watch the third episode. If you don't like that fine, the series is not your cup of tea. But don't judge it on the basis of the first few eps, they don't do the show justice.
It's clear that this is a series that mixes genres, and if you want your science fiction in the squeaky clean Star Trek fashion you will not like this. But please don't go around spouting nonsense like "it's not science fiction, it has some low-tech in it!". Go to the library, read a pile of good science fiction - start with Ken MacLeod if you will - then come back and discuss.
Here and there, I've been saying that Firefly needs to go away. It's a direct double rip-off of Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star, and probably several other interstellar programs I might have missed. But the big two victims are enough. Maybe its failure will teach the American media that they can't just go ripping off our friends in Japan.
Feel free to slap me around and Mod me "troll," but this is something I won't let go. And PLEASE!!! No "I Am Firefly" campaigns like that goofy "I Am Farscape" thing. Just remember that it's only a television program, and all of them eventually get cancled...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Don't forget the rescue efforts.
Many Firefly fans decided that instead of waiting to see if the show would be canceled they would start a rescue effort right away. Firefly support has been raising money, and on December 9th they will run a full page add in Variety supporting Firefly, they are sending copies of that issue to advertisers and to the execs at Fox. They have also used some of the money raised on producing T-shirts and bags with the Logo of the support campaign, this too will be send to Fox execs.
One guy in American Mensa paid for an add to telling other members about this new program, another guy in Ohio bought cable adds to get other people to watch. And tons of people have been writing the advertisers thanking them for supporting the program, and generally oozing goodwil towards it.
Its not over yet. There are two episodes and the pilot to be shown in December, and two more episodes already in the can. I you like the show, make a different spread the word, send a postcard, take a chance on something which is not the usual premasticated gruel. If you hate the show... don't do anything, no need to actively annoy other people is there?
http://fireflysupport.com/
Think its sick to try to save a TV program? A sign of looserhood? Perhaps, but it makes more sense to fight for something you like, as opposed to spend effort on something you dislike, no?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Whatever. I've yet to find a sci-fi show on television with the depth of characters that Firefly has. Stargate SG1 is a lame rehash and completely wasteful extension of what was once a lame 2-hour movie. Farscape was alright, kinda, until they started using the same empty plots for every freakin episode. Don't even get me started with Babylon 5 or any of the Star Trek repeat-o-crap series that keep coming out. Its like Roddenberry won't die!
Firefly really impressed me, and this is coming from someone who totally despises Buffy and other works of the producer. Every episode has been original, and the silent-pychological drama episodes are some of the best I've seen on television.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
after all. We live in a world where 747s and Bedouins coexist.
Sorry, I don't buy that. Bedouins and Quakers live their backwards lifestyles out of religious conviction. You expect me to believe that a zillion people on hundreds of different worlds all suddenly agree to adopt a cult-like belief that "the simple life is best"? And if that's the case, how come it's not ever mentioned in the storyline? Simple - because no thought was ever put to it. It's 100% stylistic.
Style is fine and dandy - but why cant they at least put a little thought to it?
For instance, the clothing. I know it's really important to convey the "western" style that these people on backwater worlds are wearing handmade vintage clothing. Who is making it?
Here's how I see things.
Earth's used up.
Big megacorps launch pre-fab factories to the other planets, and settlers come looking for work. They'll be the exploited third world labor of the future. This is the culture, clothing, and architecture you'll see in the future on these backwater worlds. Not some glorified historical re-enactment society.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.