Nathan Fillion almost wasn't cast as Malcolm Reynolds? Could the series
actually come back? Each episode cost HOW much?
Stay tuned to find out the untold truth of the short-lived classic series Firefly.
Firefly is a science-fiction show, concerning the space-set adventures of a band of rogues,
but it just as much keeps alive the tropes of Westerns. According to "Joss Whedon:
The Biography" by Amy Pascale, the nugget of what would become Firefly came to creator Joss
Whedon during a vacation to London. To read on the trip, he brought along the 1974 Pulitzer
Prize-winning "The Killer Angels," a historical novel about the hardscrabble lives of soldiers
fighting in the Civil War's Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. As part of a deal with the Fox network,
he had to submit a new show soon, and the book inspired him. Whedon said about the show -
"I wanted to play with that classic notion of the frontier.
Not the people who made history, but the people history stepped on."
But Whedon also wanted to make a show set in space,
offering, quote, "gritty realism that wasn't an Alien ripoff," and
which didn't look like so many other lesser made-for-TV sci-fi projects.
Whedon mashed all that together and it became Firefly, the final touch coming when he expanded
the character list from just a handful to a full cast of nine — just like in John Ford's classic
1939 Western Stagecoach, which followed seven strangers as they traversed the American frontier.
After supporting roles in Saving Private Ryan and Blast from the Past, and a big part in the '90s
ABC sitcom Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place, Nathan Fillion became a pop culture icon because
of his time on Firefly. He's so intertwined with the role of Captain Mal Reynolds for so
many people that it's something of a surprise that the part was written with another actor in mind.
At a 2014 Comic-Con, Nicholas Brendon, best known as Xander on Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
said that his boss, creator Joss Whedon, approached him in his trailer and offered
him the role of a spacecraft captain in the new show he was writing. Whedon planned on starting
the show after "Buffy" wrapped production in 2003, but then Fox wanted the show six months earlier
than originally planned, meaning Brendon couldn't do Firefly because his old job remained ongoing.
According to Whedon's biography, Neil Patrick Harris auditioned for
the role of Simon Tam and Rebecca Gayheart shot scenes as Companion
Inara before leaving the series and being replaced by Morena Baccarin.
While it would eventually be hailed as one of the best shows of the 2000s and ranked among TV's
all-time greatest science-fiction works, Firefly was phenomenally unpopular when it debuted on
Fox's primetime schedule in the fall of 2002. It was officially listed as the 125th most-watched
show out of 156 shows in the 2002-2003 season, although Fox didn't do the series any favors.
Of 14 produced episodes, only 11 aired, and when they did broadcast, they were presented out of
order. Firefly aired on Fox on Friday nights in a time slot where shows often died from neglect,
and it's clear that the network didn't know what to make of the show or how to market it.
According to Insider, executives thought the show was too dark, but also wanted more gunplay,
and lamented that no romance was possible between Captain Mal Reynolds and crew
member Zoe Washburne on account of how the latter was married to pilot Wash.
"What if we just told Mal we need a couple days 'stead of asking him?"
"He's the captain Wash."
"Right - I'm just the husband."
It seems as if the few viewers Firefly actually attracted during its ill-fated
original run on Fox in 2002 became devoted fans of
the show who dedicated themselves to making sure the series continued on.
Accurately predicting that the show probably wasn't going to stick around for long without
some kind of intervention, viewers connected via message boards, email forwards, and the fansite
Immediate Assistance to save Firefly before it was even officially canceled.
Between October and December 2002, Firefly fans mailed thousands of postcards both to
Fox and the show's sponsors to thank them for airing a show of such merit and quality.
But Fox couldn't be swayed from its decision to discontinue Firefly in late 2002. Undeterred,
creator Joss Whedon shopped the show around, but no other channel had any interest in scooping
up Firefly. Three years later, robust DVD box set sales in the range of 500,000 convinced Universal
Pictures to spend $40 million on a Firefly sequel movie — Serenity hit theaters in fall 2005.
"We can't die Bendis. And you know why? Because we are so very
pretty. We are just too pretty for God to let us die."
With such an open-ended concept, Firefly could have generated dozens of episodes over many years.
Unfortunately, it was canceled halfway through its first and only season,
leaving many potential and pitched episodes left permanently on the "what if?" pile.
During a cast panel at 2012's New York Comic-Con, cast member Nathan Fillion
remembered costar Alan Tudyk's voluminous and detailed episode ideas, explaining -
"He had a great one where there were some criminals who engage in illegal dogfights,
and there was a planet where one side of the planet was perpetual night.
They had these big, feral dogs there."
"Dead or Alive" would've been the 15th episode of Firefly, and its script was completely written,
but ultimately unused, except for some parts pushed into the episode "The Message."
It involves a factory bombing near where the Serenity crew attends a fair, and the
suspect is an old friend of Mal and Zoe. A future episode also would've explained Inara's syringe
that makes an enigmatic appearance in the first episode of "Firefly." According to writer and
producer Tim Minear in the 2012 TV special "Browncoats Unite," it was a "magic syringe" that,
upon injection, killed instantly anyone that assaulted Inara. The Companion was set
to endure a kidnapping that would end in the deaths of her assailants, a gang of Reavers.
TV shows cost a lot of money to make, particularly ones set in the future,
where the action takes place primarily on a spaceship and on a new planet each episode.
Firefly was thus an expensive series, with each episode racking up about $2 million in
production costs, according to Slashdot. But even with that high of a budget, the show's crew still
had to find ways to scrimp, save, and scale back in order to make the show they wanted to make.
For example, according to Recycled Movie Costumes, enemy Alliance soldiers on Firefly wore the same
armored uniforms used in Starship Troopers and on an episode of Power Rangers. And as Firefly
is at its heart a Western, the show finds Captain Mal Reynolds on various planets, riding a horse.
According to Fillion on Twitter, the production used the same horse every time.
Michael K. Johnson writes in "Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos" that
Firefly reused props from another Fox revisionist Western, and two of the
guns used were leftovers from the early '90s show "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr."
Firefly is named after its central setting: a "firefly-class" spaceship named "Serenity."
A lot of thought and effort went into making sure it was the perfect ship for
the series and the characters who inhabited it. Production designer Carey Meyer told MTV
News about his discussions with Joss Whedon regarding the ship, saying -
"He wanted each of those spaces to have a distinct identity,
so that you always knew where you were, no matter where you were in the ship."
After the show ended production during the 2002-2003 season,
it was all disassembled rather quickly with Meyer saying -
"It's very difficult to hold on to that sort of thing."
He went on to say that the wood used for the ship's set was recycled into
his next gig as production manager on the short-lived CBS drama "Vegas."
About six years after the demise of Firefly, Nathan Fillion found his next big project with
ABC's Castle, portraying the title character, a mystery novelist who helps the NYPD solve
crimes as research. While Castle would run for eight seasons and make Fillion very famous,
Firefly was never far from his heart, as he told Entertainment Weekly in 2011:
"It was my favorite job ever. What wasn't great about it?"
Nor were Fillion's Firefly co-stars out of his life forever.
A full half of Fillion's shipmates popped up on Castle over the course of its run.
Further, Castle is loaded with references, big and small, to Fillion's previous series.
For example, in the 2009 Halloween episode "Vampire Weekend," Castle
tries on his costume — a long brown coat, much like the one he wore as Captain Mal.
"What exactly are you supposed to be?"
"Space cowboy."
"Ok, A - there are no cows in space. B - Didn't you wear that like, five years ago?"
A moment where Castle takes down an assailant with a single gunshot
mirrors a similar sequence in "Firefly" when Jayne shoots an armed attacker in the
leg while aiming for the attacker's head, which Castle also admits to.
In the safe, Alliance-controlled Central planets or core worlds in the Firefly universe,
Reavers are akin to the boogeyman; those that hang around in less friendly environments know
that they're real, dangerous, and terrifying. Reavers are cannibalistic pirates, brutalizing
their victims in any number of ways before stealing their cargo, rarely leaving survivors.
They're a recurring menace in the sole season of Firefly and the spinoff Serenity movie.
At a panel at WonderCon 2005, creator Joss Whedon explained that he came up with the
Reavers as a parallel to the perceived villains of old Western movies and fiction, saying -
"Every story needs a monster. In the stories of the Old West, it was the Apaches."
In Western movies, white settlers were usually the so-called good guys and the Apache were demonized
as the de facto bad guys. Whedon didn't want the rivalry to have anything to do with race,
however, preferring to imply that the Reavers became the way they are because,
"Anyone who goes out into space and goes mad can become a monster."
In March 2011, Firefly received some new attention when the Science Channel acquired
rebroadcast rights to the sci-fi series and began airing reruns of all 14 episodes.
In an interview relating to that news, and asked by Entertainment Weekly if he'd return to Firefly,
Fillion replied in the affirmative, saying -
"If I got $300 million from the California Lottery, the first thing I would do is
buy the rights to Firefly, make it on my own, and distribute it on the internet."
Legions of Firefly fans took Fillion at his word and teamed up to actually
acquire the rights to the show and hand them over in the hopes that production
of new episodes could begin. The website HelpNathanBuyFirefly.com was established,
and about 70,000 fans pledged to donate money to the cause. This project ultimately didn't
pan out — rights-holder 20th Century Fox just wasn't looking to sell, no matter the price.
The popularity of Firefly has only grown since its cancellation in 2002, and there just might
be a market for a revival of the series. At the 2020 Television Critics Association press tour,
Fox's president of entertainment Michael Thorn floated the idea, telling TheWrap -
"The macro answer is, any time we look at one of our classic titles,
if there's a way to reinvent it for today so it's as resonant now as the original was,
and is, to the fans, we're wide open."
He added that a few years prior, during the reboot craze that brought the likes of Twin Peaks,
Roseanne, and The X-Files back to TV, a Firefly continuation was considered but he also revealed -
"But we had The Orville on the air and it didn't make sense for us to have,
as a broadcast network who is very targeted, to have two space franchises on our air."
Firefly executive producer Tim Minear further mentioned
that he and creator Joss Whedon discussed a reboot, saying -
"We have talked about different permutations and how that might work. [...] I would love
to see, like, an eight- or 10-episode limited adventure in that universe."
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