Serenity Pushed Back to September
iontyre writes "According to Joss Whedon and reported at fireflymovie.com the much anticipated feature film adaptation of the superb but canceled tv show Firefly has been delayed till September from its original April release to supposedly avoid too much genre competition."
I'm posting this simply because I'd heard from a number of people that Firefly was worth watching, and want to continue to spread the word about it.
---
I download the Firefly pilot. I watched it. I enjoyed it so much that I then got off my ass, ran down to Futureshop and picked up the DVD set (that afternoon) without a second thought.
Not everyone may like this series, but I certainly did. Enough that even though I'd already downloaded a few of the episodes (without watching any but the first), I went out and bought the DVDs anyways, based on how good the first one was.
And it's NOT Sci-fi. It's set in a sci-fi environment yes, but the show itself is not sci-fi themed. (ie, there's no alien-of-the-week-kinda-crap going on..)
epIII. I sense great disappointment in you.
Fox didn't air the pilot.
Fox showed what episodes they did show, out of order.
Fox preempted the series several times for baseball playoffs, and poorly communicated time changes.
Fox did almost no promotion of the show, the only promotion for the show they DID seem to do, hinged around the "girl in the box" scenario, which they never even showed, because it was from the Pilot episode (which never aired until they had decided to cancel it).
Fox could not have done more harm to developing an audience for an episodic series if they had tried.
Huge Firefly fan myself, and this news makes me sad. However, thanks to some "peers" of mine I've been watching the revamped Battlestar Galactica episodes and have been blown away. It's obvious that Whedon was not alone in his realist approach to science fiction. He was just one of the first of what appears to be a School of scifi reactionaries, creative TV people tired of the fantastic and generally ungrounded science fiction of Star Trek.
The new BSG begins airing "officially" in January. What it lacks in wit and humor ala Firefly, it makes up for with amazing drama that rivals anything on ER or West Wing. I would not be surprised if it comes up for Emmy, and not just for special effects. Watch it to quell the pain of Firefly withdrawl, and you mind yourself nearly forgetting about Serenity. Nearly.
Hank Parnell of the Texas Mercury asserts that Fox deliberately killed Firefly for political reasons. Personally, I don't think Fox's politics had anything to do with it, but his article is entertaining. The complete essay is on fireflyfans.net. I copied the most inflammatory, er, interesting, excerpts below:
User Training for Busy Programmers
Lexx had four movies that ran on Showtime, then just three seasons. The first two for showtime, then the third for the sci-fi channel. I liked the first season, but the third was just terrible.
The sci-fi channel passed on buying Babylon 5: Crusade when TNT canceled it. They didn't pick up the Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers spinoff. They canceled Farscape! But they did buy the third season of Lexx (crap) and Andromeda (crap after 1st season). Plus their reality show, John Edwards, Scare Tactics, etc. double plus crap.
Sci-Fi Channel: Stuff so bad, we get it really cheap.