I like a lot of things these days. I like the Best for Babes Foundation. I like Rachel Ford’s status. I like the photo my husband posted of our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter scratching her ass in front of some student artwork—and I am duly pleased when four other people indicate that they like it too.
It’s so easy to like things nowadays that I can forget how hard being a fan of a TV series used to be. Pre-Internet me had to bid high on dubbed “complete series” VHS tapes off of eBay, subscribe by mail to fan-produced, photocopied, and stapled zines, and pore over ancient issues of Starlog otherwise gathering dust in my parents’ attic just to feed my obsession with the shows that consumed me.
I loved the world of TV fandom so much that back in 1996 I registered a domain name—tvgen.com—in the hopes of starting some kind of web-based clearing house for TV fans to meet other fans. I think I harbored secret hopes of financing a trip to Portmeiron, Wales, where Number Six from The Prisoner would magically come to life and whisk me off for a life of nonconformity and awesome scarves. Instead, I caved under my first offer and sold my future dreams for the ability to pay off my credit cards.
Ironically, as TV shows become more accessible, thanks to cable repeats, Netflix, streaming video, and TiVO, my ability to go nuts over a TV series seems to have decreased. It’s so easy to watch every episode that it’s even easier to give up when a show loses its footing. I’ll just go searching for something more exciting, or have a tawdry one-night stand with a couple of Real Housewives.
So when a student of mine back in the fall of 2004 handed me the DVD box set of a Joss Whedon series called Firefly, my only response was, “You know, I never really got into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Too witty for my taste.” So jaded. So cynical. So dubious—until I popped the first disc into my DVD player and found myself immediately swept off my feet by Whedon’s sci-fi/western hybrid featuring characters that seemed at once familiar and brand new.
Set primarily aboard a starship called Serenity led by Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), a war hero-turned-mercenary thief, Firefly fought hard against the inherent nerdiness of space opera with tongue-in-cheek humor and hipster posturing. There were very few thrusters, and a decent (though network-approved) amount of thrusting. And best of all, the women were about as kick-ass as they come, not just Summer Glau’s schizophrenic fighting machine, but also the ex-soldier with the biggest balls and best hair aboard ship, played with delicate subtlety by Gina Torres, and Jewel Staite’s bawdy, bighearted mechanic. (Fans of Mad Men will want to know that Christina Hendricks appears as a con woman in a few episodes.)
Glutting myself on the entire series over the course of a few weekends, I marveled over the taut structure, with every episode a master class in structure, risk and stakes. Infused with intelligence, humor, and pathos, Firefly had everything going for it—including a tragic premature cancellation by an unsupportive network.
Though most TV series garner rabid Internet fanbases, fans of Firefly got the chance to rally ‘round a good old-fashioned lobbying campaign to bring the show back on the air. They succeeded in generating enough noise that a feature film, Serenity, got made with a decent budget, but without enough heat to have a sequel built into the screenplay. And after a modest release in 2005, a movement died, and a world collapsed.
But wait! Is there a spark in those cold dead ashes? For now, five years later, 20th Century Fox and Titan Books have seen fit to publish Firefly: Still Flying, a glossy, magazine-sized compendium of interviews, photos, and original stories by Real Live Series writers—including the inestimable Jane Espenson, she of Buffy and Battlestar Galactica and Caprica fame. Could it be that Mal and his gang are gearing up to cruise the ‘verse yet again?