[COLUMN] Maybe We Don't Need a Firefly Revival | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

It was announced yesterday that Walt Disney would be reviving the short-lived science-fiction television series Firefly as an animated series featuring the original cast.

This is an interesting development. Created by Joss Whedon at the height of his powers, during the final season of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and the penultimate season of Angel, Firefly was a space western following Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and his unlikely crew of misfits aboard their ship, Serenity. The show consists of one two-hour pilot and then a half-season order of thirteen episodes, but it was cancelled by Fox after only eleven of the fourteen aired.

The show was well-regarded, spawning a vocal fan campaign to resurrect it. Viewers appealed to UPN to pick it up, which failed. However, the support for Firefly did manage to convince Universal to agree to produce a feature film, Serenity. That film, which released in September 2005 and was well-received, was a financial disappointment. As such, it seemed like Firefly was dead. It seemed destined to remain a well-loved curio in the “gone before its time” annals of television history.

Culture seemed to move on. Joss Whedon went on to produce shows like Dollhouse and The Nevers, which failed to recapture the zeitgeist in the way Buffy, the Vampire Slayer had. He went on to direct The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, with the latter having an extremely troubled production. Whedon became a source of controversy when a number of his past collaborators spoke about his abusive behavior, which his interviews did little to help and seems to have stalled his career.

The cast have done well for themselves in the intervening years. Fillion headlined Castle and The Rookie. Alan Tudyk has enjoyed a prolific motion capture and voice acting career in films and worked on shows like Resident Alien. Morena Baccarin has enjoyed a steady stream of work, including a regular role on Homeland and a recurring role in Gotham, alongside the steady role of the love interest Vanessa in the Deadpool trilogy. The show has a legacy, despite its brief run.

The resurrection of Firefly in some ways feels inevitable. Following their purchase of Fox, the Walt Disney Corporation has begun strip-mining the company’s library of intellectual property for parts. Obviously, they are planning to fold the X-Men franchise into their larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, a project that began in earnest with Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and carried through Ms. Marvel and Deadpool & Wolverine.

While it initially seemed that they might be destined for streaming, the Alien and Predator franchises have demonstrated their value to Disney as theatrical and cable properties, with recent releases like Alien: Romulus, Alien: Earth and Predator: Badlands. However, it does seem like the rest of the Fox library is destined to be grist for the streaming service mill, given that Disney have recently determined that their live action Marvel and Star Wars properties are too valuable for that role.

This trend is already in effect. Ryan Coogler is working on an X-Files reboot. Chloé Zhao was working on a Buffy, the Vampire Slayer reboot, but it was cancelled over the weekend. There is a Malcolm in the Middle reboot coming. All of these projects are (or were) aimed at the company’s streaming output rather than at cable television, linear television or theatrical distribution. The idea is to plug the gaps left by the pivoting of projects like Freakier Friday or Lilo & Stitch back to theatres.

There is something exhaustingly cynical in all of this, in the ruthless and unending exploitation of any intellectual property – no matter how fringe or marginal. I try not to write these pieces in the first person, but given the arguments that I am about to make, it is worth stressing that I make them as a big fan of Firefly, as somebody who thinks that the show never got the respect that it deserved, and that it was cancelled far too early by a network that did not understand what it had.

Maybe it’s okay for things to end. Maybe it’s good for properties to run their course. Maybe it’s ideal for television shows to wrap up. Not everything needs to be constantly recycled and regurgitated, rehashed and replayed, to cash in on nostalgia by pandering to those fans who loved it. Maybe it is enough for these objects to stand as complete monuments, even those projects that ended too soon. Maybe it’s for novelists and comic book writers to expand or develop at the margins.

This is a broader comment about the state of pop culture, which is haunted by unending zombie franchises that just keep shuffling awkwardly around. On a long enough curve, everything gets a reboot, a revival, a prequel, a remake or some strange resurrection. More often than not, this resurrection becomes uncanny. This is in part because the talent have either aged or changed from where they were when the property hit, but also because the audience has as well.

It is a cliché, but it is true: you can’t go home again and you can’t step in the same river twice. There is something disconcerting in contemporary culture’s inability to recognize this simple fact of life, and to chase the simulacra of nostalgic childhood memory down these strange rabbit holes. Is it any wonder that we have computer-generated young Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) or that Disney is licensing its brands and property to allow users to generate endless artificial content?

There are a few reasons why Firefly specifically is a bad fit for this sort of revival, both within the text and outside of it. The show already has a pretty great ending. Serenity is a pretty decent conclusion to the story, and it notably includes some fairly definitive endings for Wash (Tudyk) and Book (Ron Glass). There is simply no need to pick the franchise up again. Then again, given that Serenity was produced by Universal, Disney has their reasons for wanting to steer viewers away from it.

There are bigger reasons outside the text itself. The biggest one is Joss Whedon. This gets into complicated and thorny territory, particularly in an era that seems built around simplistic moral absolutes where the first impulse on hearing that an artist has done bad things is to reflexively decry their entire body of work as bad. It’s an understandable reaction, as it avoids having to delve into uncomfortable contradictions if bad people make bad art and good people make good art.

Whedon has certainly made bad art. His hack job replacing Zack Snyder on Justice League resulted in a film that arguably prefigured the larger direction of those sorts of blockbusters in the worst possible ways. Dollhouse has not aged particularly well. Age of Ultron is a fascinating mess of a movie that is over-stuffed and awkwardly paced. Whedon is not quite the nerd god that he was proclaimed to be at the height of his powers.

However, Whedon is also a generationally important artist. And while one can certainly read some uncomfortable connections into his body of work, the truth is that a lot of what made Buffy, the Vampire Slayer such a success was down to Whedon’s artistic sensibility. As comforting as it might be to be able to cleave Whedon from the work, the truth is that the two are inexorably intertwined. It is something to struggle with when processing that work.

The same is true of Firefly. Whedon is credited on the scripts of five of the fourteen episodes, and he directed the pilot, the first episode after the pilot and the finale. He also wrote and directed Serenity. The show is suffused with his personality and his interests. This is not a uniformly good thing. There are certainly aspects of characters like River Tam (Summer Glau) which fall into some of the clichés of Whedon’s writing. However, Whedon is inseparable from the project.

So, there are two options when resurrecting Firefly. The first is to bring back Whedon, which is obviously unconscionable. There is a reason why Whedon should not be working, and certainly why he should not be placed in an active show running position. The other option is to bring the show back without Whedon, which is the path that the revival has chosen, although it does have his “blessing.” This a bad choice for different reasons, reducing the show to an imitation of Whedon.

Presumably, Whedon is still going to get paid for Firefly. He is going to earn money off a participation deal, and likely collect a fee for the use of characters and concepts that he created. There is a valid ethical question there about rewarding an abusive artist while they are alive. For example, DC has made a general commitment not to republish collected editions of works by writer Gerard Jones while he remains alive to avoid putting money in his pocket.

More broadly, there is a sense that Firefly is a show of its time. Though set in the future, it is a western. Pointedly, it is a post-civil war western, where the crew of the Serenity fought on the losing side. Although never foregrounded in the narrative, it is effectively a romantic “Lost Cause” fiction in science-fiction trappings, playing into that fantasy of the Confederate States of America as an oppressed victim of Northern expansion in a way that downplays the real factors involved.

This wasn’t that big a deal in the original context of Firefly. It was not a huge deal at the time for Whedon to, for example, introduce a bounty hunter (Richard Brooks) played by an African-American performer who shared a name with Confederate General (and “Bad Old Man”) Jubal Early. These days, however, culture is perhaps a bit more finely attuned to the appropriation and use of Confederate iconography in popular American culture.

None of this is to criticize Firefly, by the way. The show was, as all art is, a product of its time. The issue is that the strip-mining of pop culture history for nostalgia, the “cultural fracking” of trying to wring every last cent of value from existing intellectual property, is often ill-equipped to deal with that very simple and very straightforward reality. It is no longer 2002, and the challenge in bringing back something like Firefly is that acknowledging that reality would mean changing it fundamentally.

It is exhausting and draining. Firefly got an ending. It was a premature ending, but Serenity offered a more satisfying conclusion than many long-running shows could hope for. It seems reckless to throw that all away, trying to turn back the clock more than two decades.