The Trouble with Firefly

I know why Joss Whedon's Firefly didn't take off.

Whedon's got the rep of writing good TV stuff. He's known for dialogue and character building. He did that darn well with Buffy, which I saw three seasons of. His weakness? Story arcs. Buffy was new and novel enough to struggle through the times when Whedon's lack of an overarching plot covering a season or more threatened to sink it. (It might have even lost a bunch of viewers through the shaky fourth and fifth seasons.)

Firefly's got stuff going for it. The characters are meaty and tangible. Mal Reynolds is a great character, the spiritual successor to the original, non-neutered Han Solo. Jaybe Cobb is another great character, fatally flawed but still serviceable. The other characters are less textured but are still much more than cardboard.

The episodic stories are also decent. The Firefly crew gets into a situation, then they get out of it.

The problem is what keeps the viewers coming back? There is only one overarching story hook - what happened to River Tam. The problem is River doesn't get enough screen time. Halfway through the 14 episodes, she's got less screen time than Shepherd Book, who is the other sotry hook (the venerable "man with a secret past").

Compare this to Battlestar Galactice, which tends to have three or four overarching storylines going at the same time. It's always good to have loose ends all the time, so that people tune in to see them advanced or resolved. Hook them into the characters (good) or into the world (even better). BSG is all about the Cylon war and the search for Earth. But it's also about Adama struggling with his son and his command, and Roslin strugling with politics, and Tigh struggling with alcoholism, and Starbuck+Apollo struggling with themselves. Major plot hooks are dropped in, including the Caprica survivors and the Pegasus. And of course, there are the flesh Cylons.

Firefly has nothing going for it. The universe is Alliance controlled, but no one is actively chasing after Mal and his crew. They're nobodies. The people after Simon and River are afterthoughts, and appear as an episodic hook and not steadily as a theme. They crew is constantly broke, but that's hardly a come-on to tune in. "See how the Firefly crew earn money to keep flying!" Yeah, that'll reel 'em in.

So, no surprise that it got cancelled. No surprise that Serenity, which didn't help the fatal flaw at all but rather tied up the major story arc in a minor way, didn't make huge waves. In the end, the writing wasn't strong enough, and Whedon was unable to invest enough story into the series to keep it flying.