5 Reasons Firefly Was Lucky to Get Cancelled

Before Browncoats appear at our offices with torches and pitchforks, let us just say that yes, we are huge, huge fans of “Firefly”. It’s one of the best TV series in recent years, and a testament to the skill of Joss Whedon.

But also that if it got past season one, it probably would have turned into a total disaster.

As nerds, we tend to cling to “What Might Have Been” simply because it’s in our nature: we love to ask “what if?!” The problem is we generally approach “What If” from the whole “What if this were totally awesome” standpoint instead of the more realistic “What if this had been hijacked by corporate interests” standpoint.

So here are five reasons “Firefly” stayed good by getting gone.

#5) Any Franchise That Stays On Long Enough Chokes

Ask a Star Wars fan how they feel about the prequels. Or a Star Trek fan how they feel about “Voyager” or “Enterprise”. Or a Buffy fan how they feel about the last two seasons, or about half the episodes of “Angel”, or the new “seasons” currently running in the comics.

Sustaining any type of story over two, ten, twenty years takes time and effort, and nobody is at 100% for that entire span of time. “Firefly” delivered us a complete story that “Serenity” capped off. Imagine how you’d feel if it was still on the air, after Joss Whedon had left, Simon and Kaylee had a tragic miscarriage, and River hooked up with Jayne.

#4) If It Had Been A Success, It Would Have Been Taken Away From The Browncoats, Pronto

Major corporations are not in the television business to make us happy: they’re in it for money. And if they get even a whiff of a possibility of money, they step in, and they step in fast.

Nobody in television production will admit it, but the goal of any SF series that hits the air is to get a rabid fan base that keeps buying official merchandise and then to start killing everything that makes the show distinctive, because that makes it more appealing to the mainstream and huge conglomerates know that once you have their love, nerds will cling to a franchise forever. The dream is a series that keeps producing hits and caters enough to the mainstream to pull in that big summer money while having a huge contingent of rabid fans who buy every trinket you can officially license.

It’s the only reason “Serenity” got made: Universal thought they had another “Star Trek”. And, really, ask a Trekkie, one who grew up with it, one who loves it: watching a studio systematically dismantle everything you’ve ever loved about a movie or TV show hurts in a way that it really shouldn’t. “X raped my childhood” is a cliche at this point, and we can’t freeze our beloved franchises in amber…but did you really want to see “Firefly: The Next Generation” with Mal as an Alliance Commander? Because Universal would do it, if the money was there.

#3) All the Plotlines Got Wrapped Up

Yes, there were a few loose threads: Shepherd Book’s past, for example. But the show dropped more than enough clues to tie those up in a satisfying way. Simon and Kaylee get together, Jayne finds happiness with Vera, and most importantly, the central plotline of the series has been resolved.

Imagine a second movie where it’s just an hour-and-a-half long version of “The Train Job.” Fun it may be, but it would probably lack the resonance and depth of the show.

#2) We Were Spared the Mainstream Trying to Understand It

Nothing is more painful than a cult show being dragged into the mainstream.

It’s a little baffling, in America, that the microsecond a spaceship appears in a TV show, it’s no longer a story people enjoy but some sort of weird televisual bug that needs to be carefully dissected and put on display. We obsess over sports and Oprah: how is this any different?

Yet it is. Look no further than the desperate flailing over “Battlestar Galactica” or “Game of Thrones” to justify it as something “not just for nerds.” And frankly, to not have to read some Reader’s Digest piece about how Mal is something all the kids groove on these days is probably worth its weight in gold.

#1) It United Fandom For Once

One of the most depressing results of the Internet has been the balkanization of nerds. Sure, before, nerds argued about stuff, but once you got in the Internet, and received the GIFT, things got ugly and got ugly fast. It’s easy to forget that there was a time when showing up to a convention meant all the stuff got mixed together, instead of being rigidly separated (except, of course, for the dealer’s tables). Now, it’s all regimented: I was at a convention recently where they even put DC and Marvel stuff on different sides of the hall.

But “Firefly”, a few hypocritical incidents of whining aside (watching rabid fans of another show whine about other rabid fans is always funny), is largely a place where people can unite. Not everybody loves it, and some people dislike it, but by and large, we’re spared “Yeah, but the later seasons really sucked”. It’s something we can mostly agree on.

And that might be the most valuable of all.

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