Firefly: The Crash of Serenity

So if this show is as good as I'm saying, and if I am a reputable source (am I?), then how come the show was canceled after only 11 episodes (12 hours) aired? After all, it was well written, with great characters and stories, received fairly strong reviews, and had a good pedigree (Whedon had already been lauded for years due to Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Sadly, there were numerous factors that led to Firefly's demise.

To start, one must not look much further that the above picture. Look at the time it was airing. How often are people rushing home to watch a television show on Friday nights (mind you this was before TiVo, the greatest invention ever, had become popular). Furthermore, how many people are going to come home on Friday to watch a NEW show that they are not familiar with. If CSI were to move to Fridays, it would probably still get some good ratings, but no doubt they would drop significantly. Why FOX would choose to air a brand new show on which they were spending millions of dollars on Friday night is beyond me. But may have been FOX's least offense against Firefly.

The advertising for the show was minimal at best. I still remember seeing the commercials for Firefly because it looked like a terrible show. I could not comprehend the draw of the the show, since none the clips shown in the ads were enticing. But even worse, most of the ads didn't even show clips, they were just brief mentions attached to ads for Firefly's lead-in show, which I thought also looked pretty crappy. I think that I saw about 6 mentions and 2 ads with actual footage.

Worst of all was the airdate order. The pilot episode, "Serenity", which set up the entire show, as a pilot should, was passed over by the FOX executives, who deemed it too dull and long. Joss Whedon and his fellow producer, Tim Minear, were forced to write a new opening episode over the course of a weekend. They came up with "The Train Job", which was written to set up the series, but kept "Serenity" in canon. Therefore, they were forced to get the audience caught up, as if everyone had simply missed "Serenity". Characters spoke of events in the pilot in passing, so that the audience would know why the Tams were on Serenity, but it was a rushed explanation that did absolutely no justice to the gravity of the events that brought them there. If that weren't enough, the following episodes were then shown out of order, if the were aired at all. I think the order went like this: 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 1. 11, 12, and 13 were never aired as part of the original run.

With circumstances like those described above, the show quickly died. And that was that.

Next: Why that WASN'T that, or: Pride comes after the fall...