The deal with Fox may have gone south, but creator Joss Whedon is determined that Firefly will rise again.
From the start, Whedon creator of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel knew that his sci-fi/Western/Civil War space opera would be risky. And he was right. Last week, Fox announced it is canceling the show.
The original two-hour pilot and final episode, Serenity, airs tomorrow at 8 p.m. Still, Whedon, like his feisty Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, refuses to consider surrender an option.
The 38-year-old screenwriter plans to shop the show around to other networks in the hopes of finding it a new home, according to Variety.
"It will take a while before people warm up to it," said Whedon, whose immensely popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer was merely a cult hit at first.
"Some [viewers] will think its fantasy and others sci-fi. It doesnt fit either mold. Some people will watch it because it's got spaceships in it. Some won't because it has spaceships in it. I've never been one to follow the mold."
In truth, with Firefly, Whedon chucks the mold altogether. The story takes place 500 years in the future in a civil war-torn universe peopled solely by human beings. In the shorthand of Whedons universe, the War to Unite the Planets equals our own Civil War, and border worlds replace border states (like Maryland).
The rebel crew of the starship Serenity ekes out a meager existence doing dirty deeds and hiding out from law enforcement types along the final frontier. The captain (Nathan Fillion) is a confederate, and the crew includes a mercenary named Jayne (Adam Baldwin), a preacher, Book (Ron Glass), and a prostitute, Inara (Morena Baccarin). Filling out the crew are the sidekicks Zoe (Gina Torres), pilot Wash (Alan Tudyk), mechanic Kaylee (Jewel Staite), doctor Simon Tam (Sean Maher) and resident genius River (Summer Glau).
Their story is told with a startling lack of special effects. The engine room looks as though it were built 200 years ago. The faster-than-light drive spins on a spit complete with loose wires and exposed circuits and spews a green smog vapor trail. The ships interior looks like an ironworks filled with catwalks and gangplanks. The crew carries firearms that shoot bullets. A general retro, dirty and dusty feel pervades the drama.
However unlikely a combination the Reconstruction and science fiction seem, it all makes sense once Whedon brings up the series inspirations: Michael Shaaras Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War novel The Killer Angels (1974) and the best of film director John Fords Westerns, The Searchers (1956), Stagecoach (1939) and Rio Grande (1950).
Whedon was moved by Shaara's painstaking attention to detail that left him "feeling the beads of sweat running down your face like you were actually there [at Gettysburg]."
To translate this technique from literature to television, Whedon employs hand-held cameras and a documentary- style filming for a cyclic effect."History was happening then, he said, and its happening now."
What Whedon drew from Fords Westerns was the notion of "people who live outside of civilization, who are basically building a world where they don't belong. They are resolved to create a society that is decent and livable, and that's what makes them heroes."
Whedon calls The Searchers both a cinematic and inspirational forebear to Firefly and Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) a partial composite for Captain Reynolds.
Like Edwards, the ex-Confederate drifter whose search for his abducted niece turns into a search-and-destroy mission in The Searchers, Reynolds harbors deep resentments and seeks meaning in a life in a wild frontier.
Reynolds was firmly established by the close of the first act in the premiere episode, "The Train Job," written by Whedon, as the kind of embittered Civil War veteran who headed out west to become a gunslinger.
After a bar fight turns ugly, Fillion delivers the line, "This is why we lost, superior numbers ... I'm thinking well rise again." The viewer knows hes not only a reb but a one-more-man-and- one-more-horse-and-we-would-have-won-that-war" reb.
And according to Whedon, America long has had a love affair with the lost cause.
Somebody who fought for the South wouldnt have been on my side, but the fact that hes on the wrong side makes him a hero, Whedon said. Great American heroes tend to lose. He helps create a society that he can no longer live in. There is an inherent romanticism in that because he lost an elegiac heroism that the victors don't have. From the time of Buster Keaton to Clint Eastwood there has been a trend in Hollywood to romanticize the South.
And that tradition is alive and well in Firefly's pilot, where a place of bucolic splendor becomes a sight of horrific violence on a cosmic-Gettysburg scale that Reynolds and Zoe are lucky to emerge from as veterans on the losing side.
Whedon, who put in 16-hour workdays juggling three shows on three different networks Firefly on Fox, Buffy on UPN and Angel on WB figures to be just as lucky. He knows how these things work.
Whedon is a third-generation television writer. His father, Tom, wrote for Alice and Benson and his grandfather John for The Donna Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver.
His father tried to dissuade him from writing comedy, but, as it turns out, Whedon's earliest writing for television was on the hit 80s sitcom Roseanne.
"My dad tried to warn me not to be a comedy writer," Whedon said. It was too hard. He said, 'You've got a good story without a single joke, and people will watch it. You can have a show with a hundred jokes and no story, and no one will watch it."
Dad should have warned him about shows like Firefly, too. Its a good story that will take more time to maybe catchb on. It's time networks no longer feel they can give.
Whedon prefers writing tales about vampires, demons and spaceships to the usual television fare. He's unlikely to change his modus operandi.
"I like to tell stories about emotions, fantastic tales," he said. "Genre writing opens up a world of emotion, exciting and powerful. Don't we have enough lawyer and cop shows already?"