The Failed Pilot Project Case File #3: Firefly

With special guest episode “The Train Job”

“Let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job, and then I get paid.

Go run your little world.”

-Mal

“Time for some thrilling heroics.”

-Jayne

I know some might find in odd that I chose to include “Serenity”, the two-hour pilot for Firefly, in my discussion of ‘failed’ pilots, because by many accounts, the Firefly pilot didn’t fail. It made it onto the DVD box set, and most of the show’s fans experienced as the first episode of the series. The episode even made it on the air during the show’s original run, completely unedited - albeit about three months too late. And therein lays the rub to the whole thing. FOX, who had several misgiving over “Serenity”, asked Joss Whedon and executive producer Tim Minear to give them a whole new introductory episode that would place a much larger focus on the job-of-the-week and format as well as ‘fix’ some of the network’s concerns. Thus, after a weekend writing session, Whedon and Minear came out with “The Train Job”, and episode that tries to walk the line between pilot-y exposition and a job-of-the-week story, as if Whedon and Minear were holding out hope that the pilot might still be aired first, or because they knew that the pilot would make it to DVD. Either way, “The Train Job”, despite being a solid episode to start on, seems to have hampered Whedon and Co., and kept Firefly from being as great as it could have been.

Whedon has always had a problem with pilot episodes, and the beginning of his series in general. Ask any fan of his work, and they’ll tell you that the pilots Buffy, Angel, and Dollhouse all had their share of problems, and it wasn’t until several episodes into the first season that these shows found their unique voice, and that it wouldn’t be until the second season (and possibly later for Angel) that the shows would achieve their claims to greatness. Yet Firefly is different, mostly because “Serenity” is by far the best pilot/introductory episode that Whedon has ever made. The characters and their relationships come out fully fleshed, their back stories intact, and the show seemed as if it knew what kind of stories it was going to tell: exciting, unexpected, full of morally ambiguous characters, and like nothing else that was currently airing on network television. And given that, at least according to the DVD special features, Whedon was still mulling ideas for this show over in his mind when the studio forced it out of him prematurely, it’s amazing that we got the quality pilot that we did.

Networks are often queasy about two-hour pilots, and such fears aren’t totally unwarranted. Though many creators may have a point when they say they need the whole two hours to properly setup a series, it often breaks down where the first hour is almost all setup, and the second hour is mostly payoff, and that first hour can remain a bit of a slog to get through. Structurally speaking, “Serenity” is no different than most double-bill pilots, given how the show’s midway point (and episode break for syndication airings) falls directly in line with the reveal of River in the box. Yet what makes “Serenity” so much better than other pilots – and what makes Firefly as a whole work so well while maintaining the risky case-of-the-week format – is the tone, which is far more low key than those of Whedon’s previous shows, and manages shifts from comedy to drama with the greatest of ease (due in large part to Nathan Fillion’s quick, wry delivery). That first hour is no slouch in the exposition department either, deftly filling the series backstory, as well as that of the crew, with only a few instances of info-dumping. (The second hour goes a long way to filling in the backstories for the new arrivals of Simon, River, and Book, though these aren’t nearly as detailed as they are for the crew.) There are even, as Whedon points out in the episode commentary, plenty of shots that established how the ship is laid out and how each part connects to the other, a nice way to get the audience comfortable with what will be the show’s main set.

But none of that relays what may the best thing about “Serenity” and that’s the complexity of the story that it’s telling. Juggling three different plotlines at once – the Reavers, the discovery of River and Simon’s attempts to flee the law, Mal and his crew’s attempts to offload their latest cargo – all while laying in the exposition, and it leads to 90 minutes the feel dense without being busy, and manages to stack the three stories so that the double length episode avoids excessive dragging. And apart from the storytelling, the pilot also gives us a great deal moral ambiguity, from the argument Mal had with his crew about whether or not he would kill Simon, to him pranking Simon into thinking that Kaylee was dead, to the fact that he shot the lawman in cold blood both out of frustration over the hairy ordeal with Patience and the fact that he need to escape the Reavers. Also in the mix is the fact that Jayne would betray Mal if the price is right (one of the few things from the pilot that does come up again), Wash and Zoe’s marriage problems (which were never handled as well as they were here), and Book’s moral anguish over joining up with this crew (something that was just jettisoned after the pilot), and you have of cast full of morally ambiguous and divergent individuals, and show that seemed primed to play off of that.

But then the network notes started flying in. They didn’t like how closed off Mal was, nor did they like Whedon’s long term plan to open him up. (In fact, several of the Mal scenes were reshot to soften him up a bit more, and the network even required that it be made explicit that Mal had the chip on his shoulder due to the war.) They didn’t like the scene where Mal and his crew got screwed over by Badger, preferring instead for the leads to be unambiguously heroic and triumphant. They didn’t want the episode presented in wide screen. They didn’t care for the quiet establishing shots of the ship sprinkled throughout the episode. They even apparently missed the core concept of the show, and complained about the more obvious western motifs the Whedon used.

I’ll admit that “Serenity” isn’t perfect; the Patience plot isn’t nearly as exciting as the other two, the last scene with Mal and Simon drags for me, and try as I might, I can never find Mal’s prank to be all that funny – instead I just find it mean. Yet despite its faults, “Serenity” is still a wonderful pilot, and a great episode to introduce the series with (even if it had been broken up into two airings, a la Lost), and I believe that the network almost irrevocably wrecked the series trajectory by ordering the next, more simplistic episode, “The Train Job.”

There are quite a few criticisms to be lodged at the episode to be sure.  First and foremost is that the attempts at exposition here (since this was meant to be the new first episode) feel forced and awkward if you have seen the pilot, and for the audience that didn’t, they miss a good portion of the backstory and even the stuff that’s there isn’t nearly as nuanced. The switch to the single storyline of a train heist – while admittedly quite fun and exciting in the normal Whedon style – leaves this episode feeling a bit lifeless by comparison, and fails to incorporate every character as fully as it should.  

But the most troubling aspect for me is that the tone – such a great, subtle thing in the pilot – becomes far more simplified, punchier even. The episode is filled with far more quips. Jayne’s buffoonery, which Whedon played down in the pilot, is amped back up. The Mal/Inara romance becomes much more obvious. The villain and his henchman fit into that “larger than life” role that goes against the pilot’s subtlety. And the crew, who were quite morally grey in the pilot, come out far more clearly on the side of good with the all-too-convenient “Robin Hood moment” that closes out the main plot. (The series would try to return to a much darker tone in the third episode “Bushwhacked”, but much like the pilot, that episode’s airdate was pushed back towards the end.) In short, this episode seems to play far more into the FOX ethos that Whedon seemed so determined to avoid, an assertion that only seems bolstered by the tone-deaf promos the network ran for the show.

It is of course hard to know what in this episode is the product of network notes, what drawbacks were caused by the shortened writing deadline, and what in here is a purely creative decision. In the commentary for this episode, Whedon and Minear cop to broadening Jayne’s characterization, writing in the cartoony villain, punching up the romantic tension between Mal and Inara, and giving the episode a clear moral ending, both due to time restraints of the hour that required such narrative shorthand as well as network pressure, and it’s quite clear that they’re not happy with the compromises they had to make to get this show on the air.

But what’s not cleared up by the commentary are the questions over the change in tone. The humor is far more prevalent here, and it doesn’t feel quite as natural as it did in the pilot. Now, the pilot itself is funnier than anything Whedon had done previously, and it really feels – along with the complicated plot and dynamic direction that he gives the episode – as if he is trying to break away from the television format that he had done the past nine combined seasons with Buffy and Angel. So while the more overt humor might bug me just a bit, “The Train Job” still seems to fit in with Whedon’s original vision for the show, and I can let that slide. But the simple job-of-the-week format, at least as expressed in this second episode, still rings too much like Whedon’s previous two works, as if Whedon back slid into this mode during the writing process because he knew that’s the kind of story that the network would accept, and not something complex like the pilot. Now, given that this format does constitute the background of his work, there’s no reason to doubt that he might have told a story like this left to his own devices, and I of course recognize that the show quickly found a way out of this format week-in-week-out to where most of the structure of each episode truly feels different from one to the other. But I still can’t let go of the relative simplicity of “The Train Job”, and the negative impact I feel it has on the series.

Now let me be clear: “The Train Job” is a good episode of television, and Firefly, as it stands, is a great television series, worthy of all the adoration people foster upon it. And I certainly wouldn’t want to live in world where I never got to experience “Out of Gas”, “Ariel”, “The Message”, and “Objects in Space”. (In a move that will probably have me crucified by most of the shows fans, I could take or leave “Jaynestown”.)

But here, in essence, is what bugs me about the quality drop-off between “Serenity” and “The Train Job”: Firefly could have an entirely different and quite possibly better series than it was. There weren’t that many character-based dramas filling the airwaves back in 2002, at least not to the extent that they are today. The Shield had just premiered that past March, and we were still a few years away from hailing basic cable as the new place for smart, scripted series. But I can’t shake the feeling that if Firefly had been allowed to stay the show that it was in “Serenity” – this smart, emotional, character-based drama that explores the differing moral of nine people out in the lawlessness of space – that maybe, just maybe, network television might have held onto the creative upper hand for a few more years, and we might today be talking about how Firefly was a creative forerunner to shows like Mad Men or Sons of Anarchy. (Of course, the show probably still would have been cancelled by FOX regardless of the final version, but let’s just all agree that this show was never right for this network.) For as much as we talk about the greatness of Firefly, I always talk in tandem about the wasted potential of the show, both because it was so quickly cancelled – because if we hold that Whedon shows only really get good in the second season, imagine where Firefly could have gone – and because Whedon’s original vision was squashed down by the network. And that is the part of Firefly’s history that I find the most tragic.

Next Week: The possibly too weird, possibly too dark, nevertheless rejected pilot for Dollhouse.

This post is part of the Failed Pilot Project. For more information about the reasoning behind this project, click here. Then check out the past post over the unseen pilots for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.