Rachel and I were originally planning on going away for our holiday break, but mournfully decided to simply save the money and take a vacation to our apartment. In some strange bifurcation of the cosmos, I managed to convince Rachel to watch Firefly with me. The first few episodes took a valiant effort on her part to get through, but much to my surprise and delight, she ended up leading us through the rest of the series and its de facto finale, Serenity. Neither one of us was expecting her to fancy it as much as she did.
To me, seeing the show’s characters again was like visiting old friends, and I got sad all over again when the adventure concluded. Interestingly, Rachel told me that it was the theme song that initially put her off to the show. As soon as she heard the opening phrases she thought, “This is stupid.” If she hadn’t persisted for my sake, she would have completely written it off.
After basking in the testament to her love for me (awww), I began to wonder how many others had a similar objection. The show was very character-driven, so if a potential viewer had ditched the show at the beginning thanks to the song, they would likely have had a difficult time connecting to the characters at a later stage.
Dollhouse recently got handed a similar fate. I suppose that if these kinds of shows can’t grab an audience right from the beginning, they’re doomed. All the more reason to ditch network TV.
2 responses to “Firefly, A Test of Love”
I found the first episode a challenge to begin with, due to stilted production value near the beginning (establishing scene at Serenity Valley, explosions were.. pink?). I was happy with the song, but the reveal at the end of the song of a bunch of horses … … in SPACE … struck me as terribly contrived. Then the badly edited cut to Inara with her client just confused me, I couldn’t tell which character she was or how we got here. Then she gets randomly insulted. 🙁 So at that point I was on the fence.
Luckily, that happens to be an exhaustive list of flaws for the entire series. xD Wash playing Dinosaur and the Crybaby scene, along with the romantic treatment of events in space (no sound, but the visuals set you up so you are deafened by what you can’t hear: eat that, Kubrick!) and unsteady-cam in space shots were the quick, immersive elements I needed to stay on long enough to see the character development.
My wife, luckily, was also hooked on Ep 1 :3
Glad to hear your wife stuck it out with you. Unfortunately for the show I think the grievances you cited turned a lot of people off early on, never to return.