AHC: Keep Firefly Flying

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to keep the show Firefly from being cancelled by Fox, and keep it airing for all of Whedon's planned 7-year run. There are no limits on PODs, so you can mess around with the cast, etc, but you must keep the show recognizable to OTL's Firefly.

Go!

Nielsen Media Research is never formed.

Leads to no nonsense of 25,000 homes determining what shows air and what don't.

Leads to Fox executives not being idiots about Firefly.

Leads to longer run.

Tallest Skil said:

Nielsen Media Research is never formed.

Leads to no nonsense of 25,000 homes determining what shows air and what don't.

Leads to Fox executives not being idiots about Firefly.

Leads to longer run.

Click to expand...

That's a bit far-reaching, I think. It would affect far more than just Firefly, and could easily butterfly it away.

I was going to go with Teddy Roosevelt singe-handledly passing the 16th Amendment, also known as the Rule of Cool amendment, which allowed him to be President for Life, since no American was his rival until JFK ended WWII by beating Robot Hitler in a muay thai match. One of the many side effects of this was the Firefly remains unchallenged by FOX. Also, all pistols are .50 caliber, all airplanes are supersonic zepplins, and Harrison Ford has six Oscar wins - 3 for Han Solo and 3 for Indiana Jones.

In all seriousness, I think that if Fox actually aired the episodes in intended order, people it would've been less confusing to some and more accepted by the general public.

Whanztastic said:

I was going to go with Teddy Roosevelt singe-handledly passing the 16th Amendment, also known as the Rule of Cool amendment, which allowed him to be President for Life, since no American was his rival until JFK ended WWII by beating Robot Hitler in a muay thai match. One of the many side effects of this was the Firefly remains unchallenged by FOX. Also, all pistols are .50 caliber, all airplanes are supersonic zepplins, and Harrison Ford has six Oscar wins - 3 for Han Solo and 3 for Indiana Jones.

In all seriousness, I think that if Fox actually aired the episodes in intended order, people it would've been less confusing to some and more accepted by the general public.

Click to expand...

Congratulations.
You have just won one (1) internet. Use it wisely.

Wasn't part of the problem that Fox showed the episodes out of order?

Have them avoid doing this.

Personally, I would rather have ABC not cancel Jericho.

Playing the episodes earlier is a no brainer. However there was a lot of interference IIRC by FOX on the making on the show beyond just the order of the episodes, marketing, script rewrites. Basically they wanted to turn Firefly into a "pure" action comedy.

A good POD might be for Whedon to have a falling out with FOX due to their overt interference with Firefly. Let's say he refuses to rewrite the pilot or something. Firefly doesn't get picked up immediately in 2002. Whedon doesn't give up on Firefly however and soon enough there's a need for mid-season replacements.

UPN is the most likely target here. They are severely lacking in good shows and already have another Whedon show Buffy playing on Tuesday nights. In OTL Buffy was followed by a number of shows that got poor ratings and lost a lot of the former's viewers. In TTL Firefly is an unknown quality (not the abject disaster it was in OTL due to Fox's interference) and another Whedon show. UPN therefore picks it up for a temporary run of 10 episodes and it is scheduled to replace Haunted at running from 9-10 on Tuesday evenings.

TTL's Firefly is much better marketed and it is hoped that it can be a successor to Buffy. It's arrival on the scene in January 2003 sees it not only maintain Buffy's viewership but actually increase slightly. The first 2 part episode manages to gain a considerable number of viewers as it is shown twice. Firefly's numbers remain strong for the first half of it's 10 episode run at around 4 million viewers (not impossible given the competition). It quickly earns rave reviews and is renewed given enough episodes to fill out the 2002- 2003 season and a full slate of episodes in the 2003-2004 season.

The success of Firefly makes UPN reconsider it's Tuesday lineup, instead of switching to sitcoms, it remains a "Whedon night" as a Buffy spin off is picked up to replace Buffy in the timeslot preceding Firefly. Again Firefly does well enough and actually manages to pick up steam attracting a fairly large following. The success of Firefly prompts UPN to maintain it in their lineup until the network's dissolution in 2006.

Following the collapse of UPN (let's face it even a vamped up Firefly won't save the network) Firefly is shopped around to different networks including Sci-fi, who opts to pick it up for it's final 3 seasons (Whedon originally planned 7 seasons IIRC).

At the end of season 7 in 2009 all of Firefly's plot threads are tied up and the series comes to a conclusion much to the joy of sci-fi fans everywhere.

BTW a great resource for any TV AH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_network_television_schedules

Enter the Naysayer...

First let me say this, I love Firefly.

First I saw Serenity on DVD. And I thought, "this is pretty good, great actually. But who are all these people, why is everything happening so fast, I guess I better watch Firefly already for the backstory."

So I rented the series. And realized that once you've seen Firefly itself, Serenity is basically a bloody tourniquet on a corpse that has been brutally amputated.

Spoiler Warning! For anyone who has not seen Firefly, please stop reading and go see it! It's great! But below are all manner of plot resolutions briefly summarized that might tend to ruin it for you, so stop! Go! Watch! Come back with the same longing for six more years we share here!

But take a step back. The plot of Serenity, the movie, is pretty much a logical outcome of the situation that had already developed in the later episodes of the half-season already filmed. I believe some elements had already been laid down in the episodes that actually aired.

I have no idea how it looked to people watching TV--when Firefly was fitfully being broadcast, the TV remote in the household I lived in was in the hands of someone who never tuned into it. We also never ever saw Buffy, probably because we never had WB in our cable or satellite lineup. I only heard about all these Whedon shows years after they aired. My experience of all of these series is that of someone who sees the DVD versions, over a period of just a couple months for Buffy and just a half week or so for Firefly.

But anyway, if no other ep established that the Alliance's agents were onto some kind of connection between the ship Serenity and the whereabouts of River Tam, "Objects in Space" certainly did. True, Early was a bounty hunter and might have pieced together evidence the Alliance itself did not all have, and kept that to himself because he wanted the bounty and the glory. But the evidence was there. The crew had early on (the actual pilot episode seen by Fox viewers in fact, "The Train Job," so right from the get-go actually) alienated a powerful figure, Niska. In the real two-hour pilot that was not seen for months on the air, an Alliance agent had already tagged the Tams before they even boarded Serenity, and followed them aboard. The whole plot of "Bushwhacked" revolved around keeping the Tams hidden from an Alliance cruiser. But then the Tams get kidnapped by bush villagers in "Safe," only to observe River's peculiar abilities for themselves and react to them in a very alarmed and memorable way--then had an even more alarming and memorable experience when the ship comes to pluck the Tams back into their hands. A common sort of ship to be sure, but the villagers got a good look at Mal, Zoe, and Jayne. The trained sleuths of the Alliance probably could get a decent sketch of each of them. Eventually the Serenity crew pulls off a massive robbery of an Alliance facility, in the course of which the Tams are arrested and special agents come to take them away. A certain Firefly ship was in port during and left shortly after...Early of course alludes to this specifically. In "Our Mrs Reynolds" and "Trash," yet another loose cannon underworld figure is for a while an honored, and later tolerated, guest aboard the ship; she meets the Tams too.

So far, the main thing protecting the Tams (and the Serenity crew sheltering them) is the incompetence and greed of most agents of the Alliance. The Wilson-Shea "SNAFU principle" gives them refuge. But it is only reasonable to assume that somewhere within the black ops of the Alliance is someone like the Agent in the movie Serenity, someone who is both capable and dedicated.

How then could the Firefly Serenity, captained by one Malcolm Reynolds, ex Browncoat Sergeant, escape the more or less determined efforts of this dedicated core to recapture their asset--and punish all those who have stood in the way and delayed this outcome?

For the show to play out over even a few more seasons, either there would have had to have been no such clues left lying around to tag Serenity as even a possible refuge for the Tams...

...or perhaps it is political, even idelogical, infighting within the leadership core of Alliance itself that has been the real shelter for the Tams' flight? Perhaps someone up there in the ruling ranks wants River and Simon roaming around space under the impression they have escaped the leash?

But in that case, as other factions either try to advance their own agenda or (in the case of the movie's Agent at least) take the official line seriously and try to capture or at least kill River.

In short, the movie moved way too fast in part because they were actually cramming a year or two's plotline into two hours. But the brutal devastation the crew suffers--well, Whedon is in the habit of killing off beloved characters so had the show run longer we'd probably all have had our guts wrenched by those deaths and others.

Airing the REAL pilot first would be a good start. Actually IMO that would do it.

(Ahem: "Hi, my name is Gridley and I'm a Browncoat." "Hi, Gridley!")

In one of the books published with essays and such about the show was an excellent one (sadly can't remember the title or author), which pointed out that while The Train Job is a brilliant piece of writing for one weekend's no-warning work, and makes an acceptable episode in the context of the show, it is a lousy pilot episode.

I've exposed a number of people to Firefly over the years, ALWAYS with the intended pilot. Every singe one has been interested in seeing more.

Someday I would like to try an experiment: show 100 people who've never seen Firefly each The Train Job and the Serenity pilot episode. Poll them to see who's interested in more. Mail the results to Fox with a note that says "YOU MORONS!"

Fearless Leader said:

Playing the episodes earlier is a no brainer. However there was a lot of interference IIRC by FOX on the making on the show beyond just the order of the episodes, marketing, script rewrites. Basically they wanted to turn Firefly into a "pure" action comedy.

A good POD might be for Whedon to have a falling out with FOX due to their overt interference with Firefly. Let's say he refuses to rewrite the pilot or something. Firefly doesn't get picked up immediately in 2002. Whedon doesn't give up on Firefly however and soon enough there's a need for mid-season replacements.

UPN is the most likely target here. They are severely lacking in good shows and already have another Whedon show Buffy playing on Tuesday nights. In OTL Buffy was followed by a number of shows that got poor ratings and lost a lot of the former's viewers. In TTL Firefly is an unknown quality (not the abject disaster it was in OTL due to Fox's interference) and another Whedon show. UPN therefore picks it up for a temporary run of 10 episodes and it is scheduled to replace Haunted at running from 9-10 on Tuesday evenings.

TTL's Firefly is much better marketed and it is hoped that it can be a successor to Buffy. It's arrival on the scene in January 2003 sees it not only maintain Buffy's viewership but actually increase slightly. The first 2 part episode manages to gain a considerable number of viewers as it is shown twice. Firefly's numbers remain strong for the first half of it's 10 episode run at around 4 million viewers (not impossible given the competition). It quickly earns rave reviews and is renewed given enough episodes to fill out the 2002- 2003 season and a full slate of episodes in the 2003-2004 season.

The success of Firefly makes UPN reconsider it's Tuesday lineup, instead of switching to sitcoms, it remains a "Whedon night" as a Buffy spin off is picked up to replace Buffy in the timeslot preceding Firefly. Again Firefly does well enough and actually manages to pick up steam attracting a fairly large following. The success of Firefly prompts UPN to maintain it in their lineup until the network's dissolution in 2006.

Following the collapse of UPN (let's face it even a vamped up Firefly won't save the network) Firefly is shopped around to different networks including Sci-fi, who opts to pick it up for it's final 3 seasons (Whedon originally planned 7 seasons IIRC).

At the end of season 7 in 2009 all of Firefly's plot threads are tied up and the series comes to a conclusion much to the joy of sci-fi fans everywhere.

BTW a great resource for any TV AH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_network_television_schedules

Click to expand...

That's what I'm talking about. Good job!

imperialaquila said:

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to keep the show Firefly from being cancelled by Fox, and keep it airing for all of Whedon's planned 7-year run. There are no limits on PODs, so you can mess around with the cast, etc, but you must keep the show recognizable to OTL's Firefly.

Go!

Click to expand...

First, call the series something else. "Firefly" sounds like a nature documentary. Something like "Space Pirates" or something like that would do.
Second, put it on another night than Friday. Tuesday night right after American Idol would work.
Third, show the episodes in order.

MarkWhittington said:

First, call the series something else. "Firefly" sounds like a nature documentary. Something like "Space Pirates" or something like that would do.
Second, put it on another night than Friday. Tuesday night right after American Idol would work.
Third, show the episodes in order.

Click to expand...

Fourth, sell it to another network.

Don Lardo said:

First, sell it to another network.

Click to expand...

Fixed that for ya'.

I was going to say Fox kicks it off network to basic cable, FX or something, but forget it: Fearless Leader nailed it...and neatly created a PoD that would get me to actually watch UPN, which I would have considered ASB!

MarkWhittington said:

First, call the series something else. "Firefly" sounds like a nature documentary. Something like "Space Pirates" or something like that would do.
Second, put it on another night than Friday. Tuesday night right after American Idol would work.
Third, show the episodes in order.

Click to expand...

Personally I think they should have called it Frontier since it echoes both the stellar and western elements of the show in a single word. Although there had been a show with the same title in 1955, but it only ran for one season.

Fearless Leader said:

Playing the episodes earlier is a no brainer. However there was a lot of interference IIRC by FOX on the making on the show beyond just the order of the episodes, marketing, script rewrites. Basically they wanted to turn Firefly into a "pure" action comedy.

A good POD might be for Whedon to have a falling out with FOX due to their overt interference with Firefly. Let's say he refuses to rewrite the pilot or something. Firefly doesn't get picked up immediately in 2002. Whedon doesn't give up on Firefly however and soon enough there's a need for mid-season replacements.

UPN is the most likely target here. They are severely lacking in good shows and already have another Whedon show Buffy playing on Tuesday nights. In OTL Buffy was followed by a number of shows that got poor ratings and lost a lot of the former's viewers. In TTL Firefly is an unknown quality (not the abject disaster it was in OTL due to Fox's interference) and another Whedon show. UPN therefore picks it up for a temporary run of 10 episodes and it is scheduled to replace Haunted at running from 9-10 on Tuesday evenings.

TTL's Firefly is much better marketed and it is hoped that it can be a successor to Buffy. It's arrival on the scene in January 2003 sees it not only maintain Buffy's viewership but actually increase slightly. The first 2 part episode manages to gain a considerable number of viewers as it is shown twice. Firefly's numbers remain strong for the first half of it's 10 episode run at around 4 million viewers (not impossible given the competition). It quickly earns rave reviews and is renewed given enough episodes to fill out the 2002- 2003 season and a full slate of episodes in the 2003-2004 season.

The success of Firefly makes UPN reconsider it's Tuesday lineup, instead of switching to sitcoms, it remains a "Whedon night" as a Buffy spin off is picked up to replace Buffy in the timeslot preceding Firefly. Again Firefly does well enough and actually manages to pick up steam attracting a fairly large following. The success of Firefly prompts UPN to maintain it in their lineup until the network's dissolution in 2006.

Following the collapse of UPN (let's face it even a vamped up Firefly won't save the network) Firefly is shopped around to different networks including Sci-fi, who opts to pick it up for it's final 3 seasons (Whedon originally planned 7 seasons IIRC).

At the end of season 7 in 2009 all of Firefly's plot threads are tied up and the series comes to a conclusion much to the joy of sci-fi fans everywhere.

BTW a great resource for any TV AH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_network_television_schedules

Click to expand...

I like the above scenario very much.

Shevek23 said:

First let me say this, I love Firefly.

...

How then could the Firefly Serenity, captained by one Malcolm Reynolds, ex Browncoat Sergeant, escape the more or less determined efforts of this dedicated core to recapture their asset--and punish all those who have stood in the way and delayed this outcome?

For the show to play out over even a few more seasons, either there would have had to have been no such clues left lying around to tag Serenity as even a possible refuge for the Tams...

...or perhaps it is political, even idelogical, infighting within the leadership core of Alliance itself that has been the real shelter for the Tams' flight? Perhaps someone up there in the ruling ranks wants River and Simon roaming around space under the impression they have escaped the leash?

But in that case, as other factions either try to advance their own agenda or (in the case of the movie's Agent at least) take the official line seriously and try to capture or at least kill River.

In short, the movie moved way too fast in part because they were actually cramming a year or two's plotline into two hours. But the brutal devastation the crew suffers--well, Whedon is in the habit of killing off beloved characters so had the show run longer we'd probably all have had our guts wrenched by those deaths and others.

Click to expand...

IIRC the events of Serenity were supposed to take place in Season Two. After that I think it was supposed to deal with the crew on the run from a vengeful Alliance and coping with their new-found fame. I'm sure there was a lot more to it, but that's all I remember.

Another interesting angle on the POD could be the following. Due to their success with character driven "edgy" and non-traditional science fiction a la Firefly, UPN might offer the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica a time slot!

Having two "edgy" science fiction shows on the docket might also influence Star Trek Enterprise as it might not "fit" with the rest of the shows leading it to become "grittier" than it was in OTL.

Fearless Leader said:

Another interesting angle on the POD could be the following. Due to their success with character driven "edgy" and non-traditional science fiction a la Firefly, UPN might offer the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica a time slot!

Having two "edgy" science fiction shows on the docket might also influence Star Trek Enterprise as it might not "fit" with the rest of the shows leading it to become "grittier" than it was in OTL.

Click to expand...

Well, if it makes Star Trek better, somehow, then that's even better!