Fandom Diary: 30 Days of TV meme - Day 1
I so much enjoyed reading gamerchick's 30 Days of TV meme that I decided to do my own. There's no way I'll make a post every day - I can barely make a post a month!! - so this will be 30 non-consecutive days, for sure.
Day 01- A show that should have never been canceled.
...because determining should depends on whose metric you're using. The fans? The studio producing the show? Since this is sort of a fandom meme, I'm going to be fannish in my answer and ignore things like production costs and other things (besides ratings, which I believe mean very little). So what show do I, personally, as a fan, think never should have been canceled?
You totally saw that coming, didn't you?
I gave a lot of thought to this question. There have been so many shows that were never given a fair shake. Twin Peaks springs to mind, although Lynch's abandonment of the series drove that cancellation more than anything else. Carnivale. Dollhouse. Veronica Mars. The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Etc. But Firefly is the only canceled show which cancellation still makes my stomach sink with disappointment, burned by the knowledge that all we have to look forward to now is maybe a comic, now and then. When it could have been so much more.
What was fascinating about Firefly to me was how many story threads had been potentially interwoven, tightly packed into that one little ship. There wasn't much space for crew members to be "off camera" or out of pocket doing other things. This crew was much more tightly stuck together than the crew of, say, Deep Space 9, or other science fiction shows, and added to that was the very clear indication that each crew member had a thread of history spooling out behind him or her. Some more than others; Wash and Kaylee had fairly straightforward histories, while Inara, River, and Book were more mysterious, and the rest hovered somewhere in between. Nine intricate story threads, stretching out and touching other stories and histories - and now it is left to the fans to speculate, to write and rewrite what might have been.
My friend Bruce was telling me the other day that he still occasionally has a co-worker or family member say to him, "Hey! I just started watching this show called Firefly - have you seen it?" He always laughs a little bit. Bruce was the one who turned me on to Firefly during its original run on Fox. We were living in the same house, and after the first couple of episodes, Friday became "Firefly Night". We'd order a pizza, or one of us would make dinner, and we'd sit down and watch it.
I remember watching, awed, at the fan movement on the internet after the show was canceled. I wasn't involved in fandom then, but I did hang around on the fireflyfans.net forums, wrote a little bit of fanfic, signed petitions, bought the dvds, etc. There was (and still is) a Houston Browncoats chapter, but I didn't have the time to make it to meetings. Still, Firefly and its fans were probably what first sparked my interest in what fandom could accomplish.
After Bruce got his dvd set (and by that time, I had a dorm apartment and he had moved out of the house), we designated Tuesdays as our Firefly-watching days, and for about a month or six weeks of Tuesdays, we watched through the series.
When I met my husband in 2004, I bought another set of dvds as a gift, and made him watch them with me. We went together to the first Texas Shindig. I got tickets for David, Bruce, my friend Michael, and me to go see one of the sneak preview showings of Serenity. But I had to give up my ticket because I had an out-of-town wedding to go to. So the guys got to go meet Summer Glau without me. :P They brought me back swag, which was OK, but they also had to spend the next several months being careful not to spoil me.
We saw the movie on opening night, with lots of people in costumes, in a theater packed to the ceiling with fans. Everyone sang to the opening song. We let out hoots when we saw our characters on screen once again. It was an awesome experience.
As for the movie... I didn't hate it. I didn't love it, either. I still don't know how I feel about it, and even though I have both dvd versions, I've never been able to re-watch it all the way through. There were moments of awesome - like Mal's final showdown with the Operative; River's nonchalant participation in a caper; River's subliminally-triggered kick-assery in the bar; Inara - everything Inara. But the movie had to wrap up things in just two short hours, and it somehow felt compressed, and some of it contrived (like Mr. Universe, like the idea that River was mostly OK once she threw up and got the Reavers out of her head.)
I've always wanted to create a Firefly alternate reality game. For the fans. For myself. Just to make one more window into that universe, to give another perspective, another look, a glance at what might have been. Maybe I will. At the very least, I'd like to write more fan fiction.
I still regret Firefly's cancellation like I've never regretted a show being canceled before. I think I'll always feel that burn. But it's somewhat alleviated by seeing Nathan Fillion every Monday night, now, being a feisty superstar writer who dresses up as a space cowboy on Halloween. <3
This entry was originally posted at http://elegantpi.dreamwidth.org/739893.html Comments:
Day 01- A show that should have never been canceled.
...because determining should depends on whose metric you're using. The fans? The studio producing the show? Since this is sort of a fandom meme, I'm going to be fannish in my answer and ignore things like production costs and other things (besides ratings, which I believe mean very little). So what show do I, personally, as a fan, think never should have been canceled?
You totally saw that coming, didn't you?
I gave a lot of thought to this question. There have been so many shows that were never given a fair shake. Twin Peaks springs to mind, although Lynch's abandonment of the series drove that cancellation more than anything else. Carnivale. Dollhouse. Veronica Mars. The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Etc. But Firefly is the only canceled show which cancellation still makes my stomach sink with disappointment, burned by the knowledge that all we have to look forward to now is maybe a comic, now and then. When it could have been so much more.
What was fascinating about Firefly to me was how many story threads had been potentially interwoven, tightly packed into that one little ship. There wasn't much space for crew members to be "off camera" or out of pocket doing other things. This crew was much more tightly stuck together than the crew of, say, Deep Space 9, or other science fiction shows, and added to that was the very clear indication that each crew member had a thread of history spooling out behind him or her. Some more than others; Wash and Kaylee had fairly straightforward histories, while Inara, River, and Book were more mysterious, and the rest hovered somewhere in between. Nine intricate story threads, stretching out and touching other stories and histories - and now it is left to the fans to speculate, to write and rewrite what might have been.
My friend Bruce was telling me the other day that he still occasionally has a co-worker or family member say to him, "Hey! I just started watching this show called Firefly - have you seen it?" He always laughs a little bit. Bruce was the one who turned me on to Firefly during its original run on Fox. We were living in the same house, and after the first couple of episodes, Friday became "Firefly Night". We'd order a pizza, or one of us would make dinner, and we'd sit down and watch it.
I remember watching, awed, at the fan movement on the internet after the show was canceled. I wasn't involved in fandom then, but I did hang around on the fireflyfans.net forums, wrote a little bit of fanfic, signed petitions, bought the dvds, etc. There was (and still is) a Houston Browncoats chapter, but I didn't have the time to make it to meetings. Still, Firefly and its fans were probably what first sparked my interest in what fandom could accomplish.
After Bruce got his dvd set (and by that time, I had a dorm apartment and he had moved out of the house), we designated Tuesdays as our Firefly-watching days, and for about a month or six weeks of Tuesdays, we watched through the series.
When I met my husband in 2004, I bought another set of dvds as a gift, and made him watch them with me. We went together to the first Texas Shindig. I got tickets for David, Bruce, my friend Michael, and me to go see one of the sneak preview showings of Serenity. But I had to give up my ticket because I had an out-of-town wedding to go to. So the guys got to go meet Summer Glau without me. :P They brought me back swag, which was OK, but they also had to spend the next several months being careful not to spoil me.
We saw the movie on opening night, with lots of people in costumes, in a theater packed to the ceiling with fans. Everyone sang to the opening song. We let out hoots when we saw our characters on screen once again. It was an awesome experience.
As for the movie... I didn't hate it. I didn't love it, either. I still don't know how I feel about it, and even though I have both dvd versions, I've never been able to re-watch it all the way through. There were moments of awesome - like Mal's final showdown with the Operative; River's nonchalant participation in a caper; River's subliminally-triggered kick-assery in the bar; Inara - everything Inara. But the movie had to wrap up things in just two short hours, and it somehow felt compressed, and some of it contrived (like Mr. Universe, like the idea that River was mostly OK once she threw up and got the Reavers out of her head.)
I've always wanted to create a Firefly alternate reality game. For the fans. For myself. Just to make one more window into that universe, to give another perspective, another look, a glance at what might have been. Maybe I will. At the very least, I'd like to write more fan fiction.
I still regret Firefly's cancellation like I've never regretted a show being canceled before. I think I'll always feel that burn. But it's somewhat alleviated by seeing Nathan Fillion every Monday night, now, being a feisty superstar writer who dresses up as a space cowboy on Halloween. <3
This entry was originally posted at http://elegantpi.dreamwidth.org/739893.html Comments: