Firefly Reconsidered: Why Firefly Isn't "Hall of Fame" Great

[Ryujin]

LOL True story. When I was much younger I worked at a video store that Walter Koenig frequented to rent videos. We would talk a bit and then he'd go on his way. A bit later I discovered, having run into him a few times, that he also shopped at my local grocery store. Fast forward a few years and I was walking through Burbank, CA and Walter comes walking down the sidewalk. When he reached me he paused, looked at me and said, "I know you." I got recognized by a movie star!

I love stories like that

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I realize the thread has moved past this, but I want to resurrect this issue of sticking the landing.

I feel like the harsh realities of TV make it unfair to lean too heavily on how a show ends. You have to get real lucky to have the kind of advance warning needed to put together a true ending, and so many of the best shows aren't ratings hits, and are always wondering when they'll get the axe. Plus, by the time a show ends it might have different showrunners, major cast changes, etc. And also some shows, particularly in the pre-serial era, just sort of end, because there was no central thruline anyway. Cheers had a very cool final scene, but if the show had ended 10 episodes earlier, who'd have cared?

TV shows are too different from movies or novels to really put the same weight on endings, I think. What if the charitable thing to do is to just gauge them based on the overall impact they have on you? For example, I thought the X-Files was the greatest show on TV for a while there (not that TV was particularly great at the time), and once the leads were gone but the show was just shambling along anyway, I was gone and that was fine. Even the ho-hum/bad movies were sort of ancillary to me, and I avoided the revival seasons like my life depended on it.

For someone else, the movies or those last seasons might have retroactively snuffed out any affection for the X-Files. I'm not saying you should always give bad endings or follow-ups a pass. Just that you never know when Deadwood or Rubicon or My So-Called Life or tons of other great shows are going to get cancelled, and that shouldn't automatically knock them out of any halls of fame. If Friday Night Lights had ended a couple seasons earlier I'd still think it's a masterpiece.

I managed to talk about a lot of non-SF shows there, maybe since I think most SF shows aren't all that great. I'm just saying that the upcoming final season of the Expanse could somehow be the dumbest thing possible and I'd still rank it higher than just about anything in the genre (on TV).

 

[payn]

Television is being written more in mind with endings now. With episodic TV you didnt need to worry about the ending until you needed to worry about the ending. Serial by its nature leads to an ending so one needs to be thought of from the beginning. Unless, of course, a series is cursed with super ratings, then the writers are forced to carry on and on and on...

 

[Stalker0]

You have to get real lucky to have the kind of advance warning needed to put together a true ending, and so many of the best shows aren't ratings hits, and are always wondering when they'll get the axe.

My counter to this, as when I watch the last season of many shows (and these are known last seasons), I am always astounded by how much time is often wasted. They will just be putzing along for episode after episode and then suddenly try to cram in all this plot into like 4-5 episodes (or hell sometimes 2-3). I will use "The 100" as a recent example....a show that was so "not CW" on the CW that I've been a fan for a long time.

The had an entire season to end that show, and it felt like they didn't really start ending until like the last 3 episodes, and so of course completely botched it (that was an ending for the bad ending gallery if I ever saw one). They could have tied one plotline after another, episode by episode, finished the plot with an episode left, and did a nice epilogue to show how all the characters (which is the thing most of the audience actually care about) wind up.

The other big offender are the "mystery box" type shows.... LOST being the predominant example. There was nothing "rushed" about lost, the writers simply threw out this mystery and just didn't really know how to end it well.


I get that good endings are a skill....but that is part of why they are a key separator for "hall of fame" works..... if your whole product doesn't work, I may still enjoy it.....but you aren't getting into the same Hall as shows that nailed it from beginning to end.

 

[Umbran]

I get that good endings are a skill....

I think that much of the point that they are at least as much about luck as they are skill.

Corporate decisions are only vaguely related to the quality of a show - there's studio politics and other drivers that are beyond the control of the show, such that many shows can't stick the landing, because they aren't given the opportunity to craft a good ending.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Wait, I have a question that's still, I think, related to the OP (apologies if I missed a similar prompt earlier in the thread):

Halls of fame notwithstanding, what are your favorite gone-too-soon SF/fantasy shows?

I'd go with Ultraviolet. I haven't rewatched it in years but it absolutely blew me away. Along with tons of great ideas and a tone that's still pretty unique in genre TV, it provided a nice early glimpse of Idris Elba being the goddamn best.

 

[billd91]

Wait, I have a question that's still, I think, related to the OP (apologies if I missed a similar prompt earlier in the thread):

Halls of fame notwithstanding, what are your favorite gone-too-soon SF/fantasy shows?

I'd go with Ultraviolet. I haven't rewatched it in years but it absolutely blew me away. Along with tons of great ideas and a tone that's still pretty unique in genre TV, it provided a nice early glimpse of Idris Elba being the goddamn best.

I Am Not OK With This.

I Am Not Okay with This (TV Series 2020) ⭐ 7.5 | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

20m | TV-MA

www.imdb.com

 

[dragoner]

double post

 

[dragoner]

Halls of fame notwithstanding, what are your favorite gone-too-soon SF/fantasy shows?

Dark Matter - Dark Matter (TV Series 2015–2017) - IMDb

 

[MarkB]

Yeah, the Monster of the Week X-Files episodes are by far what people liked/remembered. Clyde Buckman's Final Repose is better than the entire dull meta plot combined. It's a lesson many game masters could learn from... let adventures stand alone in a longer campaign.

I don't think there's anything wrong with laying down some breadcrumbs for a longer-scale plot, or even with just throwing them out there without having yet thought through how or if you'll make use of them.

But what absolutely does piss me off is when, as was the case with The X-Files and even moreso with Lost, the showrunners are very much asking the audience to play along and try to gather those clues in the hope of figuring out what's going on. Setting up a mystery is one thing, but trying to sell it as a mystery the audience can solve, when even the writers don't know the solution, is just deceptive marketing, and a very cynical way to try to keep viewers on the hook.