Joss Whedon on the Set of Firefly

2002

Firefly

It’s the classic thing to have a preacher on board your stagecoach. I don’t mean Stagecoach. I mean original idea of my own.—Joss Whedon (Serenity 11)

In a recently published collection of essays on Firefly and Serenity, Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran begin an examination of Joss Whedon’s first failed television show and the movie it improbably generated with a look at a moment from “Our Mrs. Reynolds” (1.6)—an episode written by Joss Whedon. In the process of an attempted seduction of Wash, “the trickster” Saffron regales the pilot with a myth, supposedly her own, of “Earth that was”:

[W]hen she was born, she had no sky, and she was open, inviting and the stars would rush into her, through the skin of her, making the oceans boil with sensation, and when she could endure no more ecstasy, she puffed up her cheeks and blew out the sky, to womb her and keep them at bay, 'til she had rest some, and that we had to leave 'cause she was strong enough to suck them in once more.

“By the time she has finished making a world with words,” Wilcox and Cochran note, “Wash, that most Whedon-like of characters, can only respond, feelingly, ‘Whoah. Good myth’” (15).

From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).

A wonderful moment dramatically, the scene, as the critics brilliantly explain, has even greater import for understanding Whedon as a creator:

Whedon has been making worlds for many years now, and in Firefly he takes us to the sky. In his space Western series (coproduced by Tim Minear), characters use the contraction ‘’verse’ for their universe. The pun should make us think of poetry, song; it should remind us that Whedon creates a world with words—as do we all, in a sense. The stories we tell ourselves about our lives, the ways we mentally shape our experiences—these stories construct our worlds for us, at least in part. Whedon wonderfully uses images and music, too, but here the foundation is words—the dialogue and the story. Perhaps this is what makes him pre-eminently successful in the long-term medium of television. . . . Whedon’s Firefly still spins through the sky of our minds. (15)

Firefly would introduce us to a new Whedonverse, one far from present day “Earth that was” in space and in time. It is set 500 years in the future after the human race has relocated to a nearby solar system after abandoning a too-crowded home planet in order to perpetuate civilization on newly terraformed inhabital worlds. It exists now in the “sky of our minds” because it existed only briefly on our television sets. “The Train Job,” Firefly’s unintended pilot, aired on September 20, 2002; on December 2nd , less than three months later, it would be cancelled; on December 20th, “Serenity,” the series’ intended pilot, became the last Firefly episode actually broadcast.

From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).

Network interference with Buffy and Angel up to the time Firefly went into production had been minimal (discounting for the moment the WB’s failure to continue Buffy after Season Five). The WB, it is true, had asked for a more attractive Willow, postponed the airing of “Earshot” and “Graduation Day, Part II,” did not want Tara and Willow to kiss, and demanded less seriality on Angel, but FOX micromanaged Firefly. It rejected the planned pilot, demanding something more action-oriented (Whedon and Tim Minear came up with one, “The Train Job,” over a weekend). It asked that Zoe and Wash not be married—not sexy enough they were convinced (Whedon refused and FOX demurred); it demanded that Mal be more of an action hero (without network interference, Whedon acknowledges, Mal would not have kicked Niska’s muscle-bound henchman into the engine in “The Train Job” [Firefly: The Official Companion I 6]); it warned him to scale way back on the Western elements (the genre being no longer popular on big or small screens)—in a series whose opening credits would introduce the name of each actor and its creator with an homage to the classic Western series’ Bonanza’s (NBC, 1959-1973) “branding” graphics and end with an iconic image of the Serenity buzzing over a herd of horses! The budget for Firefly was even smaller than Buffy’s or Angel’s (Firefly: The Official Companion I 8). The handwriting was on the wall from the outset: "It wasn’t like they were saying ’just tweak this’ and ’just tweak that.’ It was over before it began" (Underground Online).

From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).

As a vote of non-confidence, FOX would schedule Firefly on Friday night, American television’s graveyard. The odds against survival were great. As Keith DeCandido reminds, “FOX’s standards for success are considerably higher than they are for the WB or UPN—which are, in turn, higher than they are for cable or syndication. Shows like Stargate SG-1 [1997-2007] and The Dead Zone [2002- ]—not to mention Deadwood [2004-2006] and The Shield [2002-2008]—can afford to attract a smaller viewership because a show needs considerably fewer viewers to be successful on Showtime, Sci-Fi, USA, HBO or FX. These shows can thus afford to appeal to a more limited audience because that’ll be enough to sustain them” (56-57).

Nine years before, however, The X-Files had begun its nine year run (1993-2002) on the same network on the same night. For at least two years, one of the great cult science fiction shows of all time would fare poorly in the rating game, but FOX allowed it time to secure a fan base, and it would go on to become a huge hit, a cultural phenomenon, and a cash cow for FOX. Firefly, on the other hand, arrived at a time of “desperate networks,” as Bill Carter would call them in a book that chronicled the turbulent first few years of 21st century American television, when the sort of long-range thinking and patience that made Chris Carter’s show possible simply no longer existed.

From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).

Firefly’s from-the-outset precariousness did have an upside of sorts, as Whedon would later recall: he and his collaborators—including Tim Minear, stolen from Angel, and Ben Edlund (“a sensibility that’s so left of center” [Firefly: The Official Companion I 9])—“were on our toes every second, because we figured the one thing we had to fall back on was quality. That’s all we had. And quite frankly, the first episodes wouldn’t have been as strong, as frantic about trying to save it. . . .” To be sure, Whedon adds, such a situation is not and was not “the way I’d like to live my creative life” (Firefly: The Official Companion II 10).

Firefly’s origin myth involves an often-delayed London vacation in xxx with his wife Kai. Whedon’s plane book was Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974), a fictional account of the pivotal American Civil War Battle of Gettysburg, but he read it against the grain and found a different kind of inspiration—“That's the show I want to make!” the man with two shows already on the air would think (Nussbaum, “Must See”)—hatching an idea that would in a sense combine the influences of both Jeanine Basinger and Richard Slotkin. Basinger, after all, was an authority on war films, having authored The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (1986), so Whedon must have been familiar with the potential of such a book as Killer Angels, though what really fascinated him about Shaara’s work was “the minutiae of the soldiers' lives.” Whedon had hatched a second, more Slotkinesque goal as well: “I wanted to play with that classic notion of the frontier: not the people who made history, but the people history stepped on—the people for whom every act is the creation of civilization” (Nussbaum, “Must-See”). . . .

From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).

Visiting the set just before his new series aired, Whedon— described as “bouncing on the tips of his sneakers”—would confess to Felicity Nussbaum that “Every once in a while, I'll just look up and say, 'My spaceship!’” Serenity was not the only aspect of Firefly Whedon was ready to brag about: “And did I mention there's a whore?” (Nussbaum, “Must-See”). (That Inara would be more like a geisha than a Western prostitute was the idea of Whedon’s wife Kai [Serenity 11].)

From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).From David Lavery, Joss (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, 2011).

The Crew and Passengers of the Serenity

Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion)

Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion)

The Horrible CastThe Horrible Cast

Mal on Castle

Zoe Washburne (Gina Torres)

Hoban “Wash” Washburne (Alan Tudyk)

Kaylee Frye (Jewell Staite)

Jayne Cobb (Adam Baldwin)

Inara Serra (Morena Baccarin)

River Tam (Summer Glau)

Dr. Simon Tam (Sean Maher)

Shepherd Book (Ron Glass)

2005