![]() ![]() ![]() That's how it should have worked with "Firefly." The show finally did find its audience when it was released on DVD in late 2003, and Whedon, who had never given up on the show and its extraordinarily well-matched cast, sought ways to spin its posthumous success into another project. (Dickens biographer Edgar Johnson recounts how "waiting crowds at a New York pier shouted to an incoming vessel, 'Is Little Nell dead?'") Fans of Whedon's shows are the modern-day equivalents of those readers who so long ago got hooked on Dickens, people who would wait on American docks for the next installments of his newspaper serials to arrive on these Godforsaken shores. Whedon prefers to reel us in gently, first setting the scene and then, week by week, drawing us into a web of complex character relationships that become a kind of home for us. ![]() They don't always grab you with the first episode - they're not made that way. That's probably the worst thing you could do to a Whedon show, considering that he builds his narratives with the dramatic precision of 19th century novels. "Firefly" was seen by almost no one when it aired, partly because even those who desperately wanted to watch it - namely, the many fans Whedon had earned with his previous series - couldn't even find it when they turned on their TVs at the appointed time: The episodes were shown in fits and starts, several of them having been preempted by the World Series. They pulled the plug on "Firefly" after airing only 10 of the 14 episodes Whedon and his cast had completed - and broadcasting them out of sequence. That's an ancient narrative strategy, and one that Whedon had clearly mastered with his earlier series, the magnificent "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and its less resonant but still deeply enjoyable spinoff, "Angel." But apparently, this newfangled mode of storytelling intimidated Fox executives. The "Firefly" episodes burn slowly at first, but their emotional heat intensifies as you learn to live, and breathe, with the show's characters. ![]() The idea isn't just that civilization as we know it has largely disappeared, but that people have been so buffeted by hardship that they've had to start practically from scratch. Many of these planets are hardscrabble frontiers whose citizens still ride horses, use old-time firearms, and even, occasionally, wear sunbonnets. More Sam Peckinpah than "Star Trek," this isn't a shiny, sleek vision of the future: For one thing, the various planets in this new world have been recently divided by a brutal civil war, and the winning side - the Alliance - is now trying to gather all the outlying hoi polloi planets under its rule. Their story unfolds in a future world - the 26th century, to be exact - in which humans have left an uninhabitable earth to populate a new-old, way-out-there solar system. There's only one problem with "Serenity": It's not "Firefly," the TV show that first gave these characters, and this story, life in autumn 2002 on the Fox network.īoth "Firefly" (which is available on DVD) and this new movie incarnation of it detail the adventures and tribulations of a loner-rebel named Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and the ragtag crew of his space vessel, Serenity. Joss Whedon's feature-film debut, the science-fiction western "Serenity," is beautifully made, written with more wit and intelligence than we get from most contemporary movies of any genre, and features an ensemble of actors whose rhythms are almost supernaturally in tune. ![]()
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