johng Blog

This week I started watching two shows I had never seen before but had always heard a lot about. Neither, as far as I am aware, aired in the UK and both were cancelled early even though they had loyal followings.

The first, Firefly, is the now famous ‘western scifi’ series from the creator of Buffy that got cancelled in it’s first season by Fox mainly due to poor scheduling and lack of promotion. Showing the pilot episode that sets up all the characters and back story half way through the season is the kind of poor scheduling I am talking about. No I am not making that up. So the DVD release has given it a new lease of life with purchasers actually being able to watch the episodes in the order that makes sense to the story, how innovative.

And it pays off. It’s a great show with some really excellent writing and characterisation that really shines through if you can get over the initial bizarreness of setting a wild west series in space. Or is it a scifi show in the wild west? Either way after a few episodes that is long forgotten and everything just seems right and makes sense.

Even more amazing than stories told on the show is that of Firefly’s revival on DVD and on the big screen. Unbeknownst to Fox, Firefly had garnered a cult following and the DVDs flew off the shelves as soon as they were released, giving Fox the slap in the face that it certainly deserved for slaughtering this potential hit series. Out of this success incredibly a movie was born which is due to be released later this year, with another two more rumoured to be on their way in the future.

So now that Firefly is officially ‘back’ there couldn’t be a better time to pick it up and enjoy the show as it was meant to be shown before the Serenity movie is released in September.

I will talk about the other TV series I discovered soon.