Joss Whedon: The Biography (43 page)

“We knew we were in real trouble before the show debuted,” Chris Buchanan says. Fox sent them a promo reel of the spots they’d cut for the show, and the first opened with Smashmouth’s hit song “Walkin’ on the Sun.” They first thought that the promo was for
Fastlane
, Fox’s highly stylized police action drama. “Then all of a sudden it was like ‘
Firefly
, the cosmic hooker and a whacked out space cowboy.’” Buchanan recalls, horrified. “My mouth just dropped open. When the marketing guy called back to ask what they thought, I said, ‘Well, it’s really great, but that’s not what our show is.’ I don’t remember exactly what he said to me, but it was along the lines of ‘Our job is just to get people to watch it, and then they’ll figure out what it is, and they’ll stay.’” Buchanan replied, “So you’re selling them this goofy comedy thing, and then they’re gonna get
Firefly
.”

Sure, there’s funny in
Firefly
, but it’s not a wacky space comedy. (Just as
Buffy
wasn’t a wacky horror comedy either; in its attempt to appeal to
Buffy
viewers, Fox had misunderstood that show as well.) While Joss’s fans were excited and ready to turn out for the premiere, the promos were so off base that anyone else who might have been interested in what the
show actually had to offer was turned off, while those who liked the show that Fox was promoting would be greatly disappointed by the real thing.

At times, Joss’s new show seemed to be considered the bastard stepchild even within Mutant Enemy. While his other two productions were successful, long-running series,
Firefly
was the little show that couldn’t. And yet “we got the best people from those other two shows,” Nathan Fillion recalls—something the people on those shows didn’t always appreciate. “They’re looking at us going, ‘What’s happening? What’s
Firefly
got that we don’t got? You’re taking our best guy? C’mon!’”

As the other Mutant Enemy casts may have suspected,
Firefly
had quickly found a special place in Joss’s heart. He was passionate about the universe he’d created and—even though he’d impressed upon the actors that they were all replaceable—about the cast he’d assembled. “I never worked with an ensemble that meshed like that,” he recalled. He’d never felt so sure right from the pilot how a show was going to work. “It was Camelot. It was the best experience of my career.”

His actors were just as enamored with the experience. “I’ve always pulled at least one friend out of everything I’ve done. With
Firefly
, I think I pulled about thirty-five friends out of that thing,” Fillion says. “Not just cast, but writers and producers and crew. People I still call and people I still chat with. People I still hang out with,” Fillion says. “Joss did this great job of saying, ‘You’re going to be great at interpreting these words and you’re going to be great to have around.’ I made so many good friends. That was ten years ago and I’m still close to these people. I still love these people.”

The feelings of cast and crew are perfectly embodied in the episode “Out of Gas,” which aired on Fox on October 25, 2002. It was a “bottle episode,” filmed entirely on existing sets to spare the show the time and expense of location shoots. The plot is simple:
Serenity
has stalled in space and is running out of oxygen thanks to a broken part, compelling the crew to abandon ship. As the captain, Mal stays behind to meet another group of smugglers, purchase a new part, and make the repair. Wash sets a red recall button on the ship’s helm, instructing Mal to press it when it is safe for the crew to return. Unfortunately, Mal gets shot and almost bleeds out before he can hit the button. His crewmates return anyway, coming back home to their captain.

Written by Tim Minear, “Out of Gas” is
Firefly
’s origin tale, with flashbacks that explain how each person came to be part of the
Serenity
crew. The last image of the episode is the moment when Mal sees
Serenity
for the first time. That moment is shot with all the love-struck anticipation of “seeing this beautiful woman across a crowded room,” Minear said. “That was Joss and us saying, ‘We fell in love with this thing too.’ There was already a sense that it was slipping away from us at that point. And the sense of that is in that episode.”

In November 2002, Fox buoyed hope for the series by ordering two more scripts into production. Four days later, the network preempted the show yet again, this time for an Adam Sandler movie. It was clear that the series was in a precarious position. Its creators reached out to their online fans for help.

If you watch just about any show on television today, you’ll see an ad with a Twitter hashtag encouraging fans to discuss the episode they just watched online. It’s strange to think that just a decade ago, Mutant Enemy’s Chris Buchanan had to struggle with Fox’s marketing department to shore up
Firefly
’s online presence. “I went to Fox very early on in the process and said, ‘What’s going on with the Internet? We need to get the site up—it’s got to be multimedia, and we need a lot of video.’” Fox felt that he was jumping too far ahead too quickly, considering the series hadn’t even premiered yet, but Buchanan pushed back, asking why they would wait.

“
USA Today
did an article about Internet and television, like how influential the Internet was for TV,” he remembers. “I was quoted saying something like, ‘I actually think that the Internet communities are going to be able to make or break a show.’ They kind of hung me out there like the optimist of ‘This Internet thing’s gonna work.’ Fox, to their credit, said, ‘OK, if you want to. Yeah, great, knock yourself out. Go and get this thing rolling.’ They let us put a lot of video and stuff up before the show aired, which was not done at the time.”

The official message board was poorly designed and wasn’t terribly user-friendly, but it quickly became a central location for people to express their love for the series, pore over the episodes, and discuss the characters. Another common topic: the ratings. In recent years,
television viewers had become savvier, checking the Nielsen ratings after each airing to see how their favorite shows were faring. For
Firefly
, it wasn’t looking good.

Another place to follow all things
Firefly
was the new fan site
Whedonesque.com
, a sort of clearinghouse where people could share news and updates about anything Joss Whedon–related. Caroline van Oosten de Boer and Milo Vermeulen had launched the site in June, and it quickly became a source of breaking Joss news, CNN style. The simple text site linked to articles and videos about Joss’s projects new and old, as well as projects from other Whedonverse writers, actors, and crew. Once someone was in a Mutant Enemy project, he or she was brought into the fold and soon learned that acceptance came with a passionate and supportive fan base. “Without Whedonesque, Joss wouldn’t even know what was going on in his own life,” Kai says. “He goes there to find out what’s going on with his friends. Whedonesque is like his Day-Timer [appointment book].” For
Firefly
fans, Whedonesque was the place to read everything from cast interviews to ratings breakdowns to the latest on the fan movement to “save” the show.

By November, several cast members were posting messages directly to fans on the official
Firefly
site, while Kai reached out to the webmaster at another fan site,
JossWhedon.net
, asking for help in getting the word out about the show. Soon after, a fan-led campaign called “Firefly: Immediate Assistance” mobilized, and an army of fans calling themselves Browncoats after the show’s rebel resistance organized to plead for
Firefly
’s continuation. They sent postcards to news outlets asking journalists to cover
Firefly
in their columns, raised funds for the placement of a fullpage ad in
Variety
, and organized viewing parties throughout the United States. Mutant Enemy kept in touch with the fan organizers and even provided the hosts of viewing parties with publicity photos and a copy of Nathan Fillion’s recipe for seven-layer bean dip.

On December 9, the
Variety
ad ran, featuring the headline Y
OU
K
EEP
F
LYING,
W
E’LL
K
EEP
W
ATCHING.
Joss posted his thanks on the fan site
Buffistas.org
:

I’m only posty for a moment to say … (starts to cry …) I promised myself I wouldn’t cry … That Variety ad … I have the coolest fans ever. So classy, so passionate (the ad AND the fans), I must be doing something right. Or paying Tim to do something right.

Unfortunately, despite the passion of the series’ creators and fans, the campaign hadn’t convinced many other viewers to tune in to Fox on Friday night. By mid-December 2002,
Firefly
was averaging 4.7 million viewers per episode—more than even the highest-rated episodes of
Buffy
and
Angel
but a dud by Fox standards at the time; the series was expected to pull in almost triple that amount. With three of its fourteen episodes still unaired and two of them still in production,
Firefly
was canceled.

The official news of the cancellation came on Thursday, December 12, 2002, while they were filming the episode “The Message.” In it, a former soldier (Jonathan Woodward) who served with Mal and Zoe in the war with the Alliance has his corpse sent to them with the request that they bring him home. The taped message that he includes with his body recalls an oft-quoted mantra of their unit but breaks off early: “When you can’t run anymore, you crawl, and when you can’t do that …” Mal and Zoe silently acknowledge the missing ending to the line and, always loyal to their men, decide to honor his request.

“We were on the bridge shooting,” Tim Minear says, “and Joss showed up on the set and he pulled me aside and he’s like, ‘They just canceled the show.’” Joss then asked if he should announce it while everyone was gathered or wait until shooting was done. Minear said to tell them immediately and they’d all wrap for the day.

“I’ve never seen him so mad,” Adam Baldwin recalls. “He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t have good news. They pulled the plug and this is the last episode. And I wanted you all to know immediately.’” After Joss informed his cast and crew, nobody felt like working, so they all went to Fillion’s house to get drunk and drown their broken hearts.

“It was right before we were going to break for hiatus and go home to our families for the holidays,” Jewel Staite recalls. “We all had a good feeling that we were the underdog that year, but it always felt like our impending cancellation was just looming over our heads, and I think we were all waiting for some sort of shoe to drop. It was still devastating, though. Kind of like when you jump off a diving board, and instead of going headfirst in the pool, you twist your body the wrong way and hit the water with your belly instead. It felt like that.”

But they still had to finish production on the remaining episodes. The next day everybody was hung over, and the first thing they had to shoot was a scene in which Mal, Zoe, and Inara sit around the dining room table laughing hysterically as Mal tells funny war stories about their comrade. “We’ve just been canceled and they have to pretend like they’re having a laugh,” Minear remembers. Ultimately, Joss and his cast and crew decided that joking around was exactly what the situation called for. They were going to have the best time they possibly could have, and then it would be over. “We would screw things up, you know—like, not get something right—and the joke was always ‘What are they gonna do, cancel us?’” says Morena Baccarin.