Firefly's Cast Knew The Cult Sci-Fi Series Was Doomed From The Start

• Television
• Science Fiction Shows

No one-season show has garnered a more passionate cult following than Joss Whedon's 2002 series "Firefly." The only other short-lived shows that even come close are "Police Squad!," "My So-Called Life," "Freaks and Geeks," or "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr." Something about Whedon's trademark wit, the show's sci-fi-meets-Western aesthetic, and the ensemble of misfit characters allowed "Firefly" to dip into popular culture and stay there forever. When allegations of toxicity came out against Whedon, some of his former fans turned away from "Firefly," but there are still many who carry a torch for the series. It only lasted for 14 episodes, and was granted a feature film, 2005's "Serenity," but it struggled throughout its brief life. Many "Firefly" fans might tell you stories of how they tried to write enough letters to save the series, or even revive it years after the fact. (Here's what we know about why "Firefly" was canceled.)

The show was never revived. Indeed, many of the "Firefly" cast members felt that their series was doomed from the start. Everything Fox did to the series indicated that it wasn't popular, and that the network wasn't going to do anything to help it. They saw the writing on the wall and knew that "Firefly" was definitely going to die a quick death. 

Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk, and Jewel Staite all spoke about their experiences with "Firefly" in a 2017 retrospective with The Hollywood Reporter. They played, respectively, the hot-headed mercenary Jayne, the affable pilot Wash, and the feisty engineer Kaylee. They all knew that "Firefly" was, at best, an underdog on the Fox calendar, and they would have to fight against some of the network's more popular shows at the time, notably "John Doe" and "Fastlane," which debuted in the same year.

Firefly debuted in a bad time slot

The premise of "Firefly" was large and ambitious. It's set in the year 2517, and takes place in a gigantic star system far from Earth. This star system has hundreds of habitable moons, and a lot of them became the site of tiny, low-tech boomtowns that resembled the Old West. The culture of "Firefly" was partly derived from old Hollywood Westerns, and partly from an amalgamated pan-Asian culture. Chinese words were frequently spoken.

The system was overseen by an oppressive and officious empire called the Alliance, which was basking in its recent victory over a scrappy uprising of Independents. The parallels between Independents and Civil War Confederates are very clear. The show's lead character, Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), was a former Independent, and now makes his living smuggling supplies around the system on his scrappy, overworked vessel, the Serenity. We once ranked every main character on "Firefly," but the large ensemble also included a superpowered girl, her beleaguered brother, a priest, and a sex worker. 

Adam Baldwin noted that "Firefly" was a tough sell all around, and it had to compete with other shows that Fox seemingly had more faith in. At the end of the day, "Firefly" was dumped in the worst possible time slot, which almost assured that no one would watch it. He said:

"[O]ur pilot was two hours, which didn't help us. Two-hour episodes are tough when it comes to holding audience attention spans. Meanwhile, 'American Idol' was the big kahuna that sucked up all the oxygen publicity-wise. That left us as The Little Show That Could at 8 p.m. on Fridays. We were fighting a battle from the get-go."

That wasn't a good sign.

Fox kept pre-empting Firefly

Alan Tudyk noted that Fox kept teasing them. He noted that they were on the cusp of being canceled all the time, but Fox would then pay for just three more episodes. Even then, "Firefly" was hard to find. "They kept preempting us for baseball and then some Adam Sandler movie," Tudyk said, "which got better ratings than we were getting!" More than anything, though, Tudyk knew things were bleak when he realized that Fox wasn't even bothering to feed the cast. He continued: 

"This was a terrible sign right from the start: Fox made us pay for our lunches. We'd have to go to the commissary to buy it and that wasn't worked into the schedule, so we had to make it over there and eat in costume sometimes. Which was very weird. I've never had that experience again on anything else I've done." 

Jewel Staite remarked that "Firefly" was "the underdog," not guaranteed to succeed from the start. She also said that "Firefly" was the sixth show she had starred in, and that the executives never came to the set. That was also a bad sign. Yet another was when she saw the premiere party for one of Fox's other shows:

"I had a pretty good feeling that we were going to be canceled. I remember driving home from work one night along Sunset Boulevard and one of Fox's other new shows, 'Fastlane,' was having this huge premiere party with a red carpet and press and everything. I just drove by it, like, 'Cool ... I better start packing.' But hey, they don't have 'Fastlane' conventions now, do they?" 

For the record, "Fastlane" was also canceled after its first season. It also has no movie and no cult. It's clear who the winner is here. "Firefly" is now finding its audience on Disney+.