One Season Wonders: FOX’s Firefly Is the Holy Grail of Canceled Shows

In the years before streaming, extremely niche TV shows faced uphill battles against cancellation. As a result, TV history is littered with the corpses of shows struck down before their time. In One Season Wonders, Ken Lowe revisits one of the unique, promising scripted shows struck down before they had a chance to shine.

I’m not saying this to brag or be superior: I could not stand Joss Whedon shows way before his public disgrace and the critical flops that seem to finally have soured Hollywood on him. I didn’t like him in the same way I didn’t particularly like Aaron Sorkin—the patter is too clever by half, and it’s so damn pleased with itself about it (while also taking a second to score one off the female characters, always, even when it’s labored).

So, I reflexively did not want to watch Firefly when it kind of, sort of, almost aired on FOX in 2002. FOX was more than happy to help me pass on it, of course: they aired the show perplexingly out of order, gave it a less-than-desirable time slot, and canned it before they had even gotten through the entire episode order. Several of the episodes only aired later on a cable network as an afterthought.

You must understand, though, that if we’re talking about one season wonders, we can’t really start with any other show. Firefly is the epitome of a show people were not able to let go of, and the fact that it returned at one point for a theatrical feature film in 2005 places it as one of the first examples of a show returning from the grave—something that happens much more often now, when streaming services are clawing all over each other to fill out their libraries.

If Firefly had aired 10 years ago instead of 22, it’s not hard to believe that it might have been resurrected in some form or another in the years since its cancellation—or that it never would’ve been canceled in the first place. But it feels like it happened long enough ago that showrunner/co-creator Whedon’s fall from grace hasn’t really elicited much in the way of a critical reevaluation of it—at least not in depth.

But here’s the thing: I did, eventually, slap in the DVD and give this one a try. And for a while, I was a guy who was annoyingly indignant about the show being canceled. Twenty years removed, the show’s problems are more apparent than ever, but it also was a smarter, more interesting show than most of what was on at that point. Since Cowboy Bebop becoming more readily available and The Expanse existing, a lot of what Firefly offers is available elsewhere, from shows that are, to be frank, better.

But I’ll be the contrarian again: even these days, I do kinda miss Firefly.

The Show

It’s 500 years in the future, and humanity has left the ruins of Earth to go out and colonize other habitable worlds. An authoritarian government of wealthy core worlds (city folk) has exerted dominance over the rim worlds (good hardworkin’ rural folk) and those who fought against this War of Core Aggression lost.

Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion, in the role that made him inescapable) was on the losing side of the war, and as we rejoin him six years later, find he is the leader of a ragtag crew of misfits whose morals are flexible enough to take jobs that involve illegal salvage or straight up theft (just as long as the targets deserve it). He and his crew limp through the cosmos in their Firefly-class cargo ship—no guns, no lasers, no teleporters, no universal translators, and never quite enough gas. The show takes a particular pleasure in being the exact opposite of Star Trek, right down to the living accommodations. When Mal needs to take a piss, he pulls a collapsible head out of the wall.

The show’s pilot (which was actually the last episode that originally aired, for reasons that defy explanation) establishes this with elegance. Mal quotes Beatles lyrics to call for a diversionary tactic, and early scenes establish that space, for a wonder, has no sound in it, unlike every other show and movie ever. Across the 14-episode run, the show’s technological shortcuts are believably gritty and limited in scope. The show is a Space Western in the most literal sense: folk on the frontier talk like they’re below the Mason-Dixon line, herd cattle, and ride around on horses more than they ever do in hover-craft.

All that is a compelling premise for a show that, in 2002, was catnip for nerds, but it’s the ensemble that made it all work. It’s worth calling them all out: Alan Tudyk’s pilot Wash, Gina Torres’ war hero Zoë, Adam Baldwin’s completely uncouth criminal Jayne, Jewel Staite’s vivacious engineer Kaylee, Morena Baccarin’s geisha-inspired sex worker Inara, Ron Glass’ preacher with a mysterious past Book, and Sean Maher and Summer Glau playing fugitive siblings Simon and River.

The cast’s dynamic is perfect in the way Star Trek: The Next Generation’s ensemble was perfect. For reference, the way you can tell the show’s writers and actors have succeeded at this is if you’re able to imagine the ways in which all the characters would freak out if a given scenario were to occur. Firefly is at least Frasier-levels of strong where its ensemble is concerned.

In its short run, the show set up recurring villains, teased deeper mysteries and reveals to come, and, inevitably, set up will-they-won’t-they tension between characters. There’s a rough charm to all of it, even if too many lines are just a bit too clever.

So why did they cancel it?

Firefly is one of a long list of casualties at the FOX network, which also went on to spike one of Whedon’s subsequent projects, Dollhouse. It seemed like the network had no idea how to market the show. “From the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is not the sort of thing you say to advertise Space Western. If you watch old promos of this thing, you feel like you’re about to have an epileptic seizure. The guys cutting these teasers together seemed to think throwing absolutely everything at the wall in the hope that something might entice people to tune in on a Friday night was the only way to go.

But you know what? It’s also because Mal is written as a dick, and in a lot of ways the show sometimes delights in its meanness. Mal is a jerk to Book because of the man’s religion, a jerk to Inara because he seems to disapprove of the fact she is a sex worker. (Why?? Mal is an outcast living on the margins!!! There are plenty of people he looks down on, but that’s because they’re dishonorable).

This dovetails with the ways the show can be uncomfortable to watch these days. The thing about Whedon’s stuff is that, after you’ve heard about the charges of hypocrisy leveled at him for claiming the mantle of a male feminist while treating women in his life poorly, and the stories of bad behavior toward cast members (particularly women), you can’t help but spot the subtle digs the guy slips into his work. Mal’s behavior toward Inara should get him blown out an airlock, but she just can’t resist the guy. Kaylee may be competent and indispensable, but she’s also a silly little girly girl. Zoë is a steely commando but goes to pieces over her husband, who is a wise-cracking strawberry blond guy. Naked feet—why is it always, always feet???—are freaking everywhere. I’m pretty sure Christina Hendricks (recurring villain Saffron) was actually topless on set when it was not necessary. What is with this show wanting everybody to throw in casual Chinese phrases and stamp kanji all over its world but there never, ever being an Asian character of note anywhere in it?

I dislike the That Guy vibe of the show because, I’ll just admit it, I was That Guy for a while: thinking I was so smart and charming and entitled. It is a miracle I didn’t watch this show until it was dead and my enlightenment had slowly begun. As it turns out, though, a lot of people really loved it, and they did so just as fandom was entering the real internet age. Forums, chatrooms, and soon enough social media would all become online spaces to lament the downfall of your niche show.

This accomplished two things: it made Firefly seem way more popular to Hollywood money men than the show actually was, so much so that they greenlit Serenity. The movie hit theaters in 2005 and flopped. It did because of the other thing online Firefly fandom accomplished: it made Firefly seem more popular than it was to the fandom, some of whom to this day believe it was canceled for being too good.

That’s one reason so many people are still talking about the show, but from my perspective, it’s not the sadness of the show being struck down before its prime that really resonates. The tragedy of Firefly nowadays, with two decades of hindsight, is not the fact it got canceled, it’s that the niche appeal that made it exciting and its sometimes downright pathological need to be antiheroic (Whedon’s need to be antiheroic, really, beyond anything particular to the show’s outlaws and outcasts) wouldn’t have held it back at all in the streaming era. This thing would be into season five already. In that sense, it’s a show that aired before its time. 

Best Episodes

There’s plenty of dross in this short season, but there are also times when the show really is extremely good. For the best slice of it, I recommend “Ariel,” “Out of Gas,” “Trash,” and “Objects in Space,” all episodes that showcase the strengths of the cast and the writing.

Shows to soothe the pain

Watch Cowboy Bebop for most of what Firefly does but better, plus some killer tracks and a planned, well-executed ending.

Watch The Expanse for a hard sci-fi take on space adventure.

Watch just the first season of The Mandalorian for the best explicitly Space Western TV show since Firefly.

Tune in next month as One Season Wonders gets biblical with NBC’s canceled oddity Kings.

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Kenneth Lowe is going to the special hell. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.

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