Updates are being added at the bottom. Click here to go directly to them if you’ve already read the original post.
This is not your typical “bring back Firefly” post. But something irritated me — or, frustrated, really — about recent remarks by Nathan Fillion when asked what he would do if FOX suddenly wanted to resurrect the series.
Yes. Yes. I would examine very closely Fox’s reasoning — I’m a little gun-shy. If I got $300 million from the California Lottery, the first thing I would do is buy the rights to Firefly, make it on my own, and distribute it on the Internet.
What frustrates me about this is the notion that it takes $300 million to tell good stories, or that the only way to tell good Firefly stories would be to mimic the television series.
It would take substantially less than $300 million to make a low-budget web series along the lines of Session 416, a five-part web series which Joss Whedon and Summer Glau made way back in the summer of 2005 to promote Serenity. There are plenty of Firefly stories one could tell on a similar budget.
We’re talking here about a show created by a man who went on to change the landscape of original production for the web with Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and yet everyone seems to think the only choices for Firefly are a revived television show or comic books?
(Not to mention that last year saw the arrival of Browncoats: Redemption, a fan-made film set in the Firefly universe with proceeds going to charity.)
In the wake of Nathan’s comments, two Firefly writers — first Jose Molina and then Jane Espenson — chimed in to say they’d be on board if such a miracle project ever happened. But my very serious question to all concerned is the title of this post.
Why wait?
Take it to the web, in low-budget form, or get even more creative. Fillion himself sometimes performs with The Thrilling Adventure Hour (“a staged production in the style of old-time radio”), so why not create an original Firefly audio drama?
Everyone wants more Firefly. But everyone seems married to the fact that should be a television series or nothing (or comic books). Everyone seems to think it’s dependent upon FOX wanting to make more TV. But what if Nathan, Jose, Jane, and Joss himself pitched 20th Century Fox the notion of much smaller endeavors? What if we told smaller stories (the Alliance’s final interrogation of Mal after Serenity Valley; Wash’s flight school application interview; Badger’s business diary) that nonetheless could be terribly compelling parts of the Firefly verse?
Nathan, Jose, Jane… these are people who know full well that colleagues such as Felicia Day and even Joss himself realized that with the web you don’t need to wait, and you don’t need to do it huge.
Next year is the tenth anniversary of Firefly. Maybe it’s time to stop waiting for television to rescue the Browncoats from exile, and time for the creative powers that be — if they really do want to tell more stories — to make it happen on their own.
Update (Friday, February 18th, 2011)
Over on Twitter, Jose Molina responded, “Why revisit something great only to make a lesser product?” It’s an answer that depresses me, because I think it reveals something unfortunate about the Firefly fandom, both on the creative side and the audience side, that I hadn’t noticed before.
We’re dangerously close here to fetishizing both the show and the medium of television. Session 416 didn’t cheapen or make lesser the Firefly universe simply because it had no budget. The stories Molina himself and other Firefly writers contributed to the most recent companion book to the series weren’t lesser products simply because they weren’t on television, or even visual.
Realistically, “all or nothing” when it comes to Firefly will only ever yield the latter. And while tilting at windmills (note: definitely not an endorsement) certainly is sexier than real ideas, I think it’d reflect better upon the fandom to take any discussion seriously rather than engage in masturbatory pretenses to being mighty.
No one needs to be on television with a budget of $2 million or more per episode. Escape the fetish. Just go tell good stories.