Firefly
2002 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Joss Whedon
DramaActionAdventureScience FictionFantasy
In the year 2517, the universe is a vast frontier where lawlessness reigns and adventure awaits! Join Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his ragtag crew aboard the spaceship Serenity as they navigate the fringes of society, battling the oppressive Alliance and facing off against ruthless bounty hunters.
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225 comments on Hacker News
Well George Lucas did borrow a lot of stuff from samurai films (The Hidden Fortress being the main one), so that is a return to its roots. Personally, I think that Firefly did the cowboys in space a lot better, but maybe that's due to better writing. I did enjoy the Mandalorian, but it's a bit too shallow.
I hope they pick up on the thing in the last episode of Firefly, where River hears everyone's thoughts except for one person.
There was someone else on the ship like River.
I have both Blu-ray and DVDs and I've found its the content that determines which is good enough. Kids in care not one bit about image quality. Obviously: people still like retro games, too. But then other movies, like anything by Villenueve or Nolan, or Baraka, really want to be on 4K Blu-ray. But kids movies on DVD are perfectly fine, and sitcoms like Community. (Personally I'd pay extra to NOT see Pierce in 4k).
I recently purchased the Firefly Blu-ray and it was an interesting case because it's image quality isn't that much better than the DVD (but definitely better) however it's sound quality was astonishingly better than the DVD. I imagine this has a lot to do with the source material, how it was mastered, etc. I still stream, but I like that I have a core collection that will never disappear without warning, or be edited behind my back (which happens all the time, without notice, especially on YouTube and on Amazon Prime).
I watched "Lower Decks" episode just to see how they portrayed Deep Space 9, how actors pick their old roles. While they did good job, visuals were giving me this feeling it's a distant memory that fades away. Weird thing to say but same thing happen when I pick that "Babylon 5: The Road Home" - it's like the show you were watching but it's not the same.
And I risk saying that perhaps media that become iconic shouldn't be touched no matter what happened during production or screening. Because if you start fiddling around it even in a good faith that charm may be gone forever.
"Firefly/Serenity" for me is from same shelf as DS9 or rebooted BSG - a closed story that doesn't need any continuation. These titles got rather bitter than sweet ending; there are questions and that's good. Not everything has to be wrapped up with a picturesque idyllic scenery, where everyone "lived happily ever after".
But at the same time, I don't mind if they roll animated "Firefly". And I give them my thumbs up, will be happy if they manage to success but I don't have big expectations either.
Firefly has a rabid fan base, but it's not very large. The movie did... okay. Enough to pay for itself, but not enough to interest anyone in making more content in that universe.
When the show was first released it was cancelled after half a season because it was expensive to make and couldn't compete in the ratings with slap-dash, almost free to produce "reality TV".
Interesting that all those you specifically named aired on Fox, which is where Firefly aired.
Other science fiction shows Fox killed after not more than one season were The Lone Gunman, Harsh Realm, Minority Report, Second Chance, and John Doe.
Others did make it past the first season but not past the second, such as Dark Angel and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Even shows that make it longer often have trouble on Fox. Futurama for example was put in terrible time slots that often got preempted by sports which made it hard to grow its audience, and most of the time the creators had no idea if the current season was going to be their last. They had to keep trying to write season finales that would also be good series finales if they got cancelled between seasons.
They also do this to shows in other genres. Lucifer for example got cancelled after 3 seasons, with season 3 having ended on the biggest possible cliffhanger there could be for that show. That was very annoying.
My rule has now been for a long time that I will not watch any new scripted series on Fox that has any kind of ongoing story. If there are enough good reviews and word of mouth to make me want to watch it I'll wait until complete seasons are available on streaming, and then only if there exists some N such that if I watch to episode N and stop there won't be any cliffhangers or important ongoing story arcs open.
They’re just going to lean hard into women protagonists and make it over the top feminist content that 99% of men won’t enjoy, kind of like what they did with the new Star Wars. It’s basically chixsploitation films with no gravitas that get forgotten a few months after they are released.
The original firefly played their female characters so well.
I'm a little nervous about this affecting it negatively. Back when Buffy and Firefly were on the air, they felt so unique due to the dialogue style. But now that'll just seem like every single generic superhero movie. Hopefully it can buck that feeling somehow.
> Lets be real - Firefly was very good. But the reason it holds "magic" status as far as series goes is mostly because of its rarity, and the final movie where a major likable character was killed off, with everyone wishing for a sequel.
Strongly disagree. The Firefly series was always exceptional. I watched it on DVD around the time it came out (maybe just after it was cancelled) and waited for the movie. The movie was actually a net negative, in my opinion, for killing off Wash (Tudyk), who was essential to the chemistry they had going.
I actually think the movie killing him off (and to a lesser extent, killing Book) hurt the momentum for further movies or other follow-ups.
> If they would have done Season 2,3, and so on, it wouldn't be held in such a high regard as it is now.
It's always possible that it could have gone off the rails. But the original Star Trek only ran for three seasons and spawned countless other shows and movies. I think if it had gone for two more seasons with the same cast, crew it, and general quality level it could potentially have been another Star Trek.
Lets be real - Firefly was very good. But the reason it holds "magic" status as far as series goes is mostly because of its rarity, and the final movie where a major likable character was killed off, with everyone wishing for a sequel.
Its same with anything really - car enthusiasts obsess over limited runs of older cars because they are rare, not because they are good, and people were lining up at McDonalds when they re-released Szechuan sauce (which is literally soy sauce and ketchup).
If they would have done Season 2,3, and so on, it wouldn't be held in such a high regard as it is now.
Okay so a little bit of out of universe trivia on Dollhouse: It was planned for 5 seasons. With the risk of cancellation, the second season and the two Epitaph episodes were a severely compressed telling of 4 seasons of plans. And, personally I think it worked well. Something similar happened to Babylon 5, Manifest, Jericho (IIRC), Firefly (Serenity was the original ending that would have played out over multiple seasons), and the Escaflowne anime: the main plots towards the end got compressed to create a faster pace at the climax while ensuring the story could be finished (though I wasn't a fan of how Manifest ended).
My concern about original writers being involved in reboots is if they want to fill out the story they couldn't tell the first time around and end up with a more standard pacing that's less exciting, and end up getting cancelled before finishing. Then we end up with things like Tru Calling and Dark Matter, which had planned plots they couldn't finish.
While I'm definitely going to give this a chance, I'm not going to get my hopes up. Firefly was a perfect storm--it was the combination of Wheadon, Tim Minear, and the entire cast. Personally, I think the writing is what made Firefly work, and without Wheadon or Minear, I don't know if it will rise to the same level.
Moreover, I felt Serenity was a good conclusion to the original mythology (River, Alliance, etc.). If they introduce a new mythology arc, it might not quite have the same resonance. And if they just do a bunch of monster-of-the-week episodes, it won't be enough.
But I don't want to criticize what I haven't seen. They know way better than I do, and even if the only result of this is that the original actors have a lot of fun, then I'm all for it. They deserve to take a shot.
My wife used to fall for every Firefly season 2 hoax on social media in the past because she wished it to be true. It was very funny when I could come to her to announce there will be a season 2.
Mixed feelings about it being animated. The older I become, the more I have trouble relating to painted characters, no real clue why, so I couldn't even enjoy things I should have enjoyed like Arcane.
Also, of course, no Shepherd Book :-(
Anyway, I hope I'll like it. Really loved season 1.
Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.
Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.
Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.
And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.
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But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.
Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.
> weird VHS tape
I don't remember this episode of Firefly
Absolute cinema, Firefly showing how it's done.
Not just spacenazi nightmare, but basically any capitalism makes the whole idea dumb : watch the tv show For All Mankind. They go right into space unions vs nation state space agencies, pretty interesting actually.
But it would be a nightmare for anyone but musk himself, who wants to go be a space slave for no benefits? There could never be freedom or individualistic incentives, its <1% chance to be like Firefly and >99% chance to be The Expanse
I'm somewhat this way, but more than somewhat when it comes to TV shows. I think something like 80% of my favorite shows were cancelled early. Firefly, Freaks & Geeks, Shadow & Bone, ...
Perhaps I should set up a Patreon where people can give me money to not watch things.
(Admittedly, this may be a mathematical artifact. Cancelled shows have less opportunity to decline in quality. At one point, The Dragon Prince was my all-time favorite show. I haven't even bothered to watch the last several seasons. It is even possible that the people cancelling the show are able to accurately predict that something is going to go downhill in the future, though I doubt it.)
That, or rewatching a pre-watched film for comfort. Not every movie needs to be new.
I rewatched Firefly on the whim the other week and now Malcom In The Middle because I own them on DVD.
Not available anywhere else digitally, at least with my subscription's.
A few examples:
* Slow, thoughtful, hard sci-fi that's well-written and well acted, with immersive (not campy) sets and effects. Enough of that to fill an evening a week.
* A spiritual successor to Firefly with the same production requirements and release schedule described above.
Even YouTube is bound by the same limitations as the AAA streaming platforms are—you can't sink money into something that's too niche, and right now doing things well costs buckets of money. So I'm sure there are a few fan films on YouTube adjacent to my interests, but their production value is going to be far below what it could be if things were made cheaper.
Nope, nope, nope.
Think about the Matrix series. The first Matrix film was iconic, the second was decent but sort of mid, the third was absolute drek and it taints the entire franchise as a result. I can't watch The Matrix any more without knowing how they fucked up the third film and without that slightly ruining the experience. The fourth I watched but I must admit that it hasn't really left any kind of impression on me.
Resolving at any cost is way worse than leaving something hanging.
I think it's why Firefly is so well regarded: it didn't last long enough to fall to enshittification. And when they did resolve it they only had a feature film's length to do it, so they had to focus and we got Serenity, which is excellent and how they resolved the origin of the Reavers is still a great piece of storytelling.
>> The number of things it apparently just cures is staggering.
It cures behavior, not directly disease. I see red flags. Firefly did a movie about a drug that interfered with people's motivations to do things.
Time is a great filter.
Was music in the '60s and '70s better than music today? Probably not.
If you were able to time travel back to then and listen at some random time to a radio tuned to a pop station you'd hear a lot of OK songs, a smaller number of good songs and bad songs, and a few great songs. Just like if you listened to some stream of a wide selection of recent music.
Is music from the '60s and '70s that you are likely to hear today better than most recent music? Probably.
Listen to an oldies stream and it likely is to just include those songs from then that were great or good, and it will be drawing from several years.
Same thing happens with TV. Old sitcoms like "Frasier" are as good as the best being produced today. Same with even older shows like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "I Love Lucy". But there were a heck of a lot of other sitcoms from the same times that are almost forgotten.
With sitcoms the old sitcoms we might still see are probably more likely to be great than the old music we still hear today, because old sitcoms have an additional filter to get past. You'll probably only see them today if they had enough episodes to be worth syndication.
They typically show one episode a day and they want to be able to go several months before wrapping around. Even with having more episodes per year back then than we typically have now (~32 then, ~24 now) the show would have to last at least 3 years to get enough episodes for syndication. Many a show that was great or near great and would have become great in season 2 or 3 has been killed by its network for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the show.
(I no longer watch anything on Fox other than sports and reality shows because of that. After "Firefly", "Futurama", "Terra Nova", and "Lucifer" I learned my lesson. I don't care how great people say a Fox show is now, I will either wait until Fox cancels it and watch it on streaming if people tell me that it got a proper series finale, or I might consider watching entire seasons before that but only if those seasons ended at points that would be good stopping points. "Terra Nova" and "Lucifer" ended on huge cliff hangers).
> I stick with h264 for the most part because h265 encoding requires far too much extra compute relative to the space savings. I can spend an hour compressing a file down to 1gb with h264, or I can spend 12 hours compressing the same file to 850mb with h265.
FWIW, as someone who is a complete layman on this topic but has spent much of the past 6 months converting age-old videos to h265...
i have a pi5 where i queue up old videos into a RAM disk, it converts them to h265, and moves them back to the machine which uploaded them. It can take up to 2 days to compress any given video (depending mostly on the input format - old AVIs tend to compress in a few hours), but the space savings is _much_ higher than what you're reporting. The average size of my h265-encodes is anywhere from 1/3rd to 1/2 of the original, and 1/4th of the original is not terribly uncommon. That said: the input formats vary wildly, with possibly only a minority fraction being h264.
i've tried the same thing using a pi4 but it needs roughly 4-5x as long as the pi5. An 8-core intel-based laptop can do it in some 25% of the time of the pi5 but pulls a lot more electricity while doing so. So my otherwise idle pi5 gets the assignment.
My Firefly collection (14 tv episodes plus the movie) dropped from 8gb to 2.1gb. My Bob Ross collection (141 videos) went from 38gb to 7.4gb. 128 Futurama episodes/movies was cut from roughly 50gb to 21gb.
i was once asked why i didn't choose AV1 and the answer is simple: when i googled along the lines of "how to get the best video compression with ffmpeg" the most common answer was h265. Whether that's correct or not, i can't say, but it works for me and i've freed up the better part of a terabyte of space with it.
I'll throw out one I expect I'll get lots of disagreement over. Firefly (the series, not the movie) seemed pretty "soft sci-fi" to me. They could have changed the setting to people in a Winnebago towing a trailer going from city to city on Earth and nothing would really have changed in at least the first 7 episodes.
> I made the claim that they aren't "you." These are very different things.
I understand what you're claiming, as I pointed out under this understanding your current existence is already terrifying. Not just when you fall asleep, but even moment by moment the underpinning compute substrate is repaired and replaced and yet it feels as though this is an ongoing experience, there's no reason Yorkie experiences this any differently even though intellectually she knows the transformation was more... substantial.
It's just Trigger's Broom / the Ship of Theseus, this isn't even a new idea.
> the writers place a lot of not so subtle hints as to the idea that it isn't.
Like the hint where Charlie Brooker specifically said that no it's the Happily Ever After ending ? Maybe he wasn't patting his head like you knew he would be if he was addressing True Fans like you ? Didn't give the secret sign ?
I thought I already spelled this out well enough, that somebody will insist that the heroes are villains, that the bad guys are the good guys and so on. Sometimes they have a point, but more often they just didn't see what was in front of them. I am kinda tangentially interested in the Slash scene (e.g. I know people involved in AO3) and the Slash communities are the same - sometimes you're like sure, this was barely subtext in the movie/ TV show/ novel, in a braver world the writers would have had them kiss on camera, but other times it's like "Where did this even come from? Were you watching the same show?" - and sometimes that's deliberate contrariness but other times it really isn't.
It's not as though I don't have my own divergences from what writers believe about their own works - for example in my opinion Firefly was a TV show about the bad guys (people who lost a civil war and just decide that doesn't count) written by someone who doesn't understand that they're the bad guys. Obvious Whedon doesn't agree and I don't expect him to. Or for example Vinge insisted he doesn't know who/what Rabbit is in "Rainbows End" and in my opinion there's only one option which makes any sense.
But I guess I kinda asked for people to insist their wrong interpretations of San Junipero are the only correct one when I gave the example.
I'm not so sure. I'm not bored with my OS, or IDE, core parts of my day to day life. I'm not bored with YouTube.
If they are tools that provide value, it's not about entertainment. If I can learn better or do things better with their aid, I'll keep using them.
I'm much more interested in generating a 3blue1brown quality educational video than season two of firefly.
Quick, feed in season 1 of Firefly.
I sometimes wonder if B5 or Firefly would have got a better go in the current environment of multiple subscription/streaming channels where there is a lot more appetite for shows that are different.
B5 obviously would have come out different as they would not have rushed to fit the planned storyline into season 4.
> Bonus points if I can let the tool ingest season 1 or an OVA of said material where a season 2 is never going to come (looking at you "No Game, No Life")
At long last, _Firefly_ Season 2 is within our grasp!
AI Mett Porker (I see what you did there)
Maybe in my lifetime an AI could generate a few more seasons of Firefly (that got cancelled too soon)?
Another AI challenge would be to super-impose Harrison Ford onto Alec Baldwin in the movie Hunt for Red October. That would give nice continuity to the Jack Ryan character across the Tom Clancy movie series (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger)
Well said.
I enjoyed watching the best show of all time. (Of course I did!) Up until Firefly got canceled, anyway, which was enormously frustrating. But at least I got to keep the sense of mystery and the potential of big reveals.
Then they made Serenity. Which I enjoyed, don't get me wrong. But I had to do some mental gymnastics to treat it as something other than a continuation. I had to think of it as its own thing, and then I could be okay with treating it as a good movie.
But it wrapped up several loose ends up a wholly unsatisfying way. If that was what the original series was leading up to, then I could no longer care when re-watching or just thinking about the series. It wasn't so much wrapping up loose ends as snipping them off. It was a 90° turn into a different story. So I treated it that way, and it was really nice when my kids were old enough that we could watch the series together and accept that it terminated abruptly at the last created episode.
Wasn’t this the plot of the Firefly movie? It didn’t work out well for them.
And not every science fiction show has to be a sermon on later-day ethics and values in every single episode.
Looking at you, The Orville.
And not every science fiction show has to evolve into a horror/zombie series.
Looking at you, Firefly.
To me "canceled" is only bad when it's cut short like Firefly. Maisel had a good 5 years/seasons worth of run. Otherwise you can say "canceled" about every show that isn't running today...
If I could afford it in terms of money and time I would probably subscribe to all of them, I mean why not? To go see one movie costs about as much as a month of subscription to one streaming service. So subscribing to Netflix, Prime, Apple and HBO costs like going to see 4 movies per month, except you get more than 4 movies (I think a season of a good TV show easily worth multiple movies).
Glad to know there will be enough people trying to create more firefly episodes!
no more than fan-fiction, it would be a popularity contest.
"Firefly season 2 by rustyBones447 is the best one"
we're only a few years away from getting season 2 of firefly, as it would have looked in 2004
Something that Joss Whedon said in the commentary on Firefly and Serenity was that they deliberately took care to make the CGI bits a bit crappy - no perfect tracking shots of ships in space, but a bit of wild panning to catch the action, not quite getting everyone, a crash zoom out. The whole "cinema verité, cameraman caught on the back foot" thing. Even a lot of the "exterior mounted cameras" were done to look a bit wobbly and grainy, because it would be hard to shoot if it was real so you'd model it like you'd just sucker-mounted a VX2000 to the side of your ship and shot on DV as best you could.
It's surprising how it makes it more immersive than perfection.
Things like the new Marvel movies leave me a bit cold because there's no sense of "how did they do that", because the answer is always going to be "green screen and Blender".
I've had that same thought. How far away are we from true "video on demand"
- Show me the second season of Firefly, set after the events of Serenity - Remake Flash Gordon in the style of John Carpenter, with Roddy Piper as Flash - Create a 6 part mini-series, a modern day retelling of Seven Samurai, in 2050 Tokyo underworld, with Hiroyuki Sanada and Ken Watanabe - I'm too busy to read this obscure book from project gutenberg, make a movie of it for me - Here's a one-pager I wrote, give me a trailer for it with Keanu Reeves as the main star
Netflix is different from traditional broadcasting in that they always order an entire season. That makes the cancellations more dramatic because instead of a pilot or few episodes like in the past they instead keep performing a Firefly on their viewers over and over again.
I see it as the battle between the jocks and the nerds. As frankly from my few decades in the industry, who becomes upper middle management are all the people who you dislike (or they you) in high school. It's just them trying to justify their value to those that truly built or are deemed to be responsible to build out a product/company for the benefit of the shareholders/investors.
This is the sort of environment that leads to [non]great ideas like 'swarming' resources on current 'fad/trend' projects (Mythical Man Month) or rapid development of features at a pace beyond what it took to deliver the 1.0 product (tech-debt inhibiting growth causing tech-death) which causes them to just "reinvent/reboot" the idea with yet another different spin.
You are seeing it in movies where even the scope of time they perform it is getting shorter and shorter. It's not like people are remaking Cyrano De Bergerac despite it's time being due (Roxanne with Steve Martin is my last recall) but they have to retread ideas from my own adulthood yet skip over others - like why reboot DeGrassi and not BJ and the Bear let alone Knight Rider or any of the dozens of other tech influence tv series of our youth.
The reason I think is mostly due to fear. Fear of risking what they didn't like before for something they felt was awesome but not influence by - like Sex in the City or even Return of the Jedi.
If it weren't for the amount of time that has gone by, I wouldn't be surprised if within the next 10 years there isn't an attempt to reboot Firefly with the hope that it hooks as much as people pine for it to have stayed on today.
We're told that most decisions are due to the investors wanting return on money invested - but if the employees are a large holder of the company shares, doesn't that mean that if they collectively feel willing to risk a different tact that it should be abided? Now-a-days it seems that those who are vocal and can pull it off become "king"... like Twitter.
The milestones (from the source code):
//<10 seconds 'A single frame of a film': 100ms, 'It would take light to go around the Earth': 133ms, 'A blink of an eye': 400ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the moon': 1255ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 pit stop': 1820ms, 'The fastest 1/4 mile drag race time': 3580ms, 'The fastest Rubik\'s cube solve': 4221ms, 'The fastest 40-yard time at the NFL Combine': 4240ms, 'The fastest 1 liter beer chug': 4370ms, 'A skippable Youtube ad': 5000ms, 'A full bull ride': 8000ms, 'The fastest 100m sprint': 9580ms, //10 Seconds 'The Wright Brothers first flight': 12000ms, 'The fastest 200m sprint': 19190ms, 'The fastest 50m freestyle swim lap': 21300ms, 'The Westminster Kennel Club dog agility record': 28440ms, 'A typical television ad': 30000ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Daytona': 40364ms, 'The fastest 400m sprint': 43030ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Talladega': 44270ms, 'The fastest 100m freestyle swim lap': 47050ms, //1 Minute '"Just a minute"': 60000ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for NES': 294948ms, //5 Minutes 'An NHL penalty box time for fighting': 300000ms, 'The average duration of a typical sky dive': 330000ms, 'The average time for a drive-thru order': 356800ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $1 million': 402000ms, 'The fastest race car lap around the Nurburgring': 403300ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun': 500000ms, 'The time it takes a rocket ship to reach outer space': 510000ms, 'A typical marching band show': 515000ms, //10 Minutes 'The length of the first space walk': 600000ms, 'The longest a human has held their breath (non-oxygen assisted)': 695000ms, 'The average duration of popular Youtube videos': 702000ms, 'The time it takes an average human to walk 1km': 710000ms, 'The fastest 5K run': 757350ms, 'The average time to bake a pizza': 810000ms, '1% of the entire day': 864000ms, //15 Minutes 'A typical commute in the United States': 960000ms, 'The fastest superbike lap of the Isle of Man TT': 1002778ms, "MLK's \"I Have A Dream\" Speech": 1020000ms, 'An average baseball inning': 1200000ms, 'The song "2112" by Rush': 1233000ms, 'The first angels to appear in the movie "Angels in the Outfield" (1994)': 1275000ms, 'An episode of The Office, Seinfeld, or Rick & Morty': 1320000ms, 'The time it takes to drive the entire Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel': 1380000ms, 'The song "Octavarium" by Dream Theater': 1440000ms, 'A typical Super Bowl halftime show': 1500000ms, 'The fastest 10K run': 1584000ms, 'It takes for Bobby Boucher to get his first game snap in the movie "The Waterboy" (1998)': 1719000ms, //30 Minutes 'The average time to bake a cake': 1950000ms, 'The time it takes until the launch in the movie Apollo 13 (1995)': 2081000ms, 'It takes WALL-E to arrive at the Axiom in the movie "WALL-E" (2008)': 2164000ms, 'The shortest war in history (Anglo-Zanzibar War)': 2280000ms, 'It takes Harry Potter to arrive at Hogwarts in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone" (2001)': 2381000ms, 'The album "Thriller" by Michael Jackson': 2539000ms, 'The album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd': 2589000ms, 'An episode of Breaking Bad, House, or Firefly': 2640000ms, 'The boot camp sequence in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)': 2730000ms, 'The album "Abbey Road" by The Beatles': 2823000ms, 'It takes Simba to become an adult in the movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 2849000ms, '10% of a typical work day in the United States': 2880000ms, 'The album "Kid A" by Radiohead': 2996000ms, 'The time limit for the essay portion of the SATs': 3000000ms, 'The time it takes a standard ice cube to melt at room temperature': 3150000ms, '0.01% of an entire year': 3155692ms, 'The album "Fearless" by Taylor Swift': 3221000ms, 'The time it takes for the basketball game to start in the movie "Space Jam"': 3222000ms, 'An episode of Game of Thrones, True Detective, or The Sopranos': 3300000ms, 'It takes Harry and Lloyd arrive in Aspen in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)': 3394000ms, 'The album "Jagged Little Pill" by Alanis Morissette': 3443000ms, 'The fastest half-marathon': 3451000ms, //1 Hour 'An episode of Top Gear': 3600000ms, 'The inception of Robert Fischer begins in the movie "Inception" (2010)': 3847000ms, 'Riding the longest subway line in NYC from Queens to Inwood': 3900000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $10 million': 4017600ms, 'It takes before Sean Connery says "Welcome to the Rock" in the movie "The Rock" (1996)': 4022000ms, 'A flight from Syracuse to New York City': 4140000ms, '5% of the entire day': 4320000ms, 'The album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John': 4580000ms, 'The album "Scenes From A Memory" by Dream Theater': 4626000ms, 'The movie "Primer" (2004)': 4740000ms, 'It takes to fully charge a Tesla (at 440V)': 4788000ms, 'The ferry duration from Long Island, NY to New London, CT': 4800000ms, 'The movie "Toy Story" (1995)': 4860000ms, 'A drive from Syracuse, NY to Rochester, NY (87.5 miles)': 4920000ms, 'The movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 5280000ms, 'The longest State of the Union address': 5280000, //Duplicate time... //1.5 Hours 'The movie "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)': 5460000ms, 'The movie "Monsters, Inc." (2001)': 5520000ms, 'An average duration of a soccer game': 5700000ms, 'The movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992)': 5940000ms, 'The longest Innaugural address': 6300000ms, 'A drive from Orlando, FL to Tampa, FL (84.6 miles)': 6660000ms, 'An SR-71 flight from New York City to London': 6896400ms, 'The movie "Alien" (1979)': 7020000ms, //2 Hours //'25% of a typical work day in the United States': 7200000ms, 'The average duration of an NCAA basketball game': 7200000ms, 'The movie "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977)': 7260000ms, 'The fastest marathon time ever ran': 7299000ms, 'The time it takes to listen to every studio album by Nirvana': 7667000ms, 'The movie "Dogma" (1999)': 7680000ms, 'The average duration of an NBA basketball game': 7860000ms, 'The movie "The Matrix" (1999)': 8160000ms, 'The movie "Fight Club" (1999)': 8340000ms, 'The movie "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'The movie "Forrest Gump" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'A drive from New York City to Philadelphia (94.6 miles)': 8520000ms, '10% of the entire day': 8640000ms, 'The movie "Inception" (2010)': 8880000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)': 8940000ms, 'The movie "Pulp Fiction" (1994)': 9240000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 100,000 miles': 9360000ms, 'The movie "Avatar" (2009)': 9720000ms, 'The average duration of an NHL hockey game': 9750000ms, 'The movie "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)': 10140000ms, 'The movie "The Godfather" (1972)': 10500000ms, 'The movie "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)': 10680000ms, //3 Hours 'The average duration of an NFL football game': 10800000ms, 'The total time limit of the SATs': 10800000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Endgame" (2019)': 10860000ms, 'The average duration of an MLB baseball game': 11280000ms, 'The time it takes for a standard ice cube to freeze in a freezer': 11700000ms, 'The movie "Titanic" (1997)': 12600000ms, 'A drive from Boston to New York City (215.9 miles)': 13560000ms, 'Alex Honnold\'s free solo climb of El Capitan': 14160000ms, //4 Hours 'Half of a typical work day in the United States': 14400000ms, 'The flight time from New York City to Los Angeles': 19800000ms, 'The time limit of one session of the Bar exam': 21600000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 250,000 miles': 23400000ms, 'The fastest swimmer to cross the English Channel': 24900000ms, //>8 Hours 'A full typical work day in the United States': 28800000ms, '0.1% of an entire year': 31536000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $100 million': 40173000ms, 'The time it takes to assemble a car': 57600000ms, '1% of an entire year': 315360000ms, 'It takes for the Lōʻihi volcano to rise above the surface of the ocean becoming a new Hawaiian island': Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER //285,616 years
I don't understand why they don't now factor a TV movie or mini series to tie it all off, in the season's comissioning.
A Serenity to Firefly.
Even if one is shot every season that may be its last. Just left without post-production unless needed.
Everyone gets resolution, the show is presumably worth more in the catalogue and resale, and you've got people watching another couple of hours of content. No more "I'm not starting it, Netflix will kill it on a cliffhanger."
The shot footage can potentially be recycled for the next season anyway, or used to write out actors that don't return or whatever.
Would writing and shooting less than three hours of material, with no post-production, really cost that much more?
I'm the opposite. I prefer to wait until a whole series has finished and then watch the seasons that were decent, and screw the rest. I watched 2.5 seasons of ~Tits And Dragons~ Game Of Thrones, and honestly, that was 1.5 seasons too many. I'm also perfectly happy to rewatch Firefly knowing that they never finished it of with some bullshit final series or movie* that tried to tie it up with a bow, and ultimately fail.
*I know
Edit: awww, hn doesn't have strike through markdown support :(
Plenty of promising shows got cancelled after Season 1 back in the pre-streaming days too. Firefly is the quintessential example. The opposite can be worse though. Stargate SG-1 did not need 10 seasons. I think Abed had it right: 6 seasons and a movie is the ideal. Of course, once Donald Glover left, that show became a tired repeat too.
I actually really liked the latest season of Stranger Things. Season 3 was the one that I really struggled with. Sure, I get that the kids are teenagers now, but why does that mean that the adults have to have dumb teenage drama too?
Brazil, The man from Earth, Moon, The fountain, Ad Astra, Donnie Darko, Ender's Game, Edge of tomorrow, Solaris (the old one), Westworld (70s), Metropolis (the japanese anime), Dark Star (trippy, 70s, great end), Firefly series and Serenity movie, Attack the block, Fifth Element, planet of the apes (the old one), ex machina, children of men
Huh? That's not elucidating anything; it's not even a cursory summary. Big dogs eat little dogs isn't help.
Let's start here: what's legal isn't always ethical and vice versa. Second, when legal vs ethical goes sideways, the state has force. Individual's don't. That's important too. Finally what about fear as a basic component of human nature.
I'll leave it this way. Firefly the TV series played this up nice:
- escorts + paid sex was legal even a status card
- theft wasn't esp against the "man"
Mal wasn't having any of that because law enforcer wasn't legit as he saw it. Now what?
Firefly was a mistake,
in that the corporate machine made a mistake in not extracting all that it could from it in follow-up seasons, movies, sequels, etc.
You know how good a movie is by how many sequels it took to kill it.
I've got a theory that the TV show Firefly is appreciated today because it got cancelled before it was popular; they quit when they were ahead and before popularity ruined it. But most Firefly fans seem to hate my theory.
The jump to 1080p from 480p is very, very noticeable— I own Firefly on both DVD and Blu-Ray, and I accidentally watched a few minutes of an episode on the DVD version before being like.... wait, what? and then realizing what had happened and switching discs.
However, IMO the jump from 1080p to 4K is way more marginal. It's definitely better, but it's just not that much better than what your TV's built in upscaler can do, nevermind some future AI-powered DLSS-type upscaler.
Rant continued...
---
It's the same problem everywhere I look: UX assumptions. Predetermined flow. Defaults. My ultimate arch-villain.
Every time I think about this, I fantasize about the perfect user experience: one with zero assumptions. A modular UI, totally factored away from data and functions. That's what shells got right in the first place! What if we did that with GUI?
Take a moment and think about your favorite shell utilities. What do they look like? What do they do? What input do they need? How do they flow? Here we are, at home, in the REPL. But what if we stepped out, right through the fourth wall, and looked at it? What if we took that output and forked it into a file, or another utility? That's where the shell was born. Can it be bourne again again?
Emacs tried. It took the flow, and put it into a text buffer. That let us do some non-linear flow. Emacs also recreated some utilities in lisp, so that they could interface with more complicated structures, and react to different events like hooks. Over time, some structure emerged, but it was too organic. Using Emacs today means wading through traditions every bit as deep as the shell itself. Like a fine aged whiskey, it soothes us into a drunken haze.
The hangover leaves me desperate for clarity. Turn off the stimulus. Give me a blank slate. An empty canvas. You've got a default startup sequence? Drop it. Got a welcome screen? Drop it. Default scratch buffer? Drop it. Default keybinds? Drop. It. I want nothing. I don't care how broken that makes it!
In Episode 2 of Firefly, Mal speculates about where the mysterious Reavers came from: "They got out to the edge of the galaxy, to that place of nothin' and that's what they became." I'm not afraid: Give me the void, and let me get to work. I am the user. I am God!
When I start my text editor, I want nothing there but what I configured. It's not that scary of a concept when you think about it: "defined" doesn't have to be from scratch. What I really envision is a choice of options. Like libraries or plugins that you drop into the top of your config file. Someone made a Vi-clone mode you like? Put it in your config. Someone made a Sublime text clone mode you like? Put it in your config. Someone made a Windows Vista clone with a half-broken MS notepad that you like? I don't give a fuck about your personal preferences, put it in your config!
No one needs to know what your interface looks like, or what your keys are mapped to. They just need to give you two simple things: input and output.
Want to edit text? Import the text editing mod, then map a part of your windowing system to the text renderer (output), and map some keybindings (input) to the text-editing functions.
Want to rebase a git tree? Import the interactive git editor mod, then map a part of your windowing system to the interactive git UI renderer (output), and map some keybindings (input) to the interactive git functions.
Want to play Tetris? Import the Tetris-clone mod, then map a part of your windowing system to the tetris clone renderer (output), and map some keybindings (input) to the game movement functions.
Want a web browser? Import the Firefox-fork for voidmacs mod, then map a part of your windowing system to the voidfox renderer (output), and map some keybindings/mouse events (input) to it.
Want a tiling window manager? Import the i3-for-voidmacs mod, then map your windowing system to a tile of windowing system instances (output), and map some keybindings (input) to the window split, move, and close functions.
Want a Vim-like modal interface? Put your regular basic text-editing keybindings in a new namespace called "insert mode" (plus a key to go back to normal-mode), and make some new "normal mode" keybinds. Put all of that in a mod, and import that into your config. Done. Works everywhere.
Want an Alexa/Siri/GoogleHome/Bixby/Jarvis assistant to bitch at? Import the mod, then set the default speaker and whatever other mod input functions you want integrated (output), configure the wake word hook to "HAL 9000" (input), and tell it to sudo make me a sandwich.
---
Confused yet? I've been ranting for a while now.
Basically, I want an Emacs, but one where modules/packages never define their user interface. Or maybe a module/package defines a user interface, but that's all it does. Never both.
That way, modules/packages are guaranteed to be composable. Like neatly factored out functions, you can stack them together. You can weave them into whatever convoluted tapestry your heart desires. And you never have to undo any configuration. Because undoing configuration is pain.
As soon as a module/package defines functionality and user interface, it ties a knot. That is not allowed. Only the user can do that. Otherwise, at some point, the user is going to have to go around untying knots all over the place.
I could keep ranting forever, but I'm starting to worry about the character limit on HN... So I bid thee good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight.
Westerns have been reincarnated a bit here and there. The Mandalorian is a really good western for instance. Firefly as well, some years back. Westworld too. Some of the other Star Wars stuff is pretty western too, the non-main Disney movies.
Compare it to the first to episodes of Game of Thrones, House of Dragon, Breaking Bad, Firefly or any number other good shows.
Its also not really a good slow burn either. If you want to see that done expertly check out True Detective Season 1. That story draws you in.
And this episodes were very long and all the story lines are slow.
- A Story: Galadriel wanders around without doing much in the first episodes and swims around not doing much in the second episode. She has basically 1 expression, her motivation is the most basic revenge story plot ever and its totally clear that she is right and everybody else is dumb. The scene of going to Valinor standing on boat in full armor looked dumb and it was totally clear she would not go, but I guess show runners wanted to drop a couple million on special effect.
- B Story: Hartfoots mostly slice of life and some interaction with a mysterious wizard that amount to nothing so far. Kind of cute but not interesting and totally different tone then everything else. Including with slap stick humor.
- C Story: Basic Elf-Human love story with neither of the characters being very interesting and they have little chemistry. Also evil is rising, but I don't really care about those characters so I don't really care, for now its just random orcs. Nothing to connect to, no large conflict or the other characters. This is even worse then the love-story the added to the hobbit.
- D Story: Elron goes to the dwarfs and we get lots of exposition about (mostly nonsensical) backstory that is required for the current plot to make sense and some character setups for the dwarfs. Honestly maybe the most interesting part of the first 2 episodes, but not actually that interesting.
The tournament/birth sequence in the first episode of House of Dragon had more interesting character moments, character development, story progression then all of the Rings of Power had in the first 2h.
Or compare it with the story that happen in the first 2h of Lord of the Rings (~10h) total vs Rings of Power (10h).
I don't understand the anti-Netflix hate. If you don't like their catalog, you have lots of options.
Password sharing is the rampant default. It's not just grandma in the home or your daughter at college. It's your friends, your exes, your old housemates. Netflix has been, IMO, remarkably chill about this for a very long time. Y'all are talking like they are audaciously stealing something you believe that you are owed.
I think that what got lost along the way is that Netflix forgot what their real product innovation was: long-tail convenience. Whether being able to order from a massive catalog of DVDs or stream things in hi-def without having to worry about torrents or FTP servers, Netflix really changed the way we access media.
They've also played a massive role in popularizing alternative comedy to the masses. Same with documentaries, to a different degree.
I do think they've made some questionable content production decisions. It's highly likely that if they'd stuck to financing comedy specials, documentaries and bringing back shows like Arrested Development and Firefly, they might not have scared Disney, Amazon, HBO and Hulu into competing with them. Their greed made it impossible for the incumbents to not compete.
It's from Serenity, the film continuation of Firefly.
The translation of the Chinese is roughly "I want to darken my ears and heart and become a stone."
Scroll about halfway down on this page to find some info: https://fireflychinese.kevinsullivansite.net/title/serenitynovel.html
One thing I really want to see in my lifetime is an "AI" I can feed episodes of a TV show and have it generate more episodes. Like a second season of Firefly or Gravity. Or re-create the finale of Battlestar Galactica and give that show the ending it deserved.
Kudos, was about to post that and saw you got there first.
For those who don't know, the Pax is G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate. It's a fictional chemical compound created by the Union of Allied Planets to pacify populations. Tested on Miranda, it had the effect of pacifying 99% of the population, but 1% turned into psychotic rage machines. All of this is from the Serenity movie set in the Firefly universe. I loved watching the Firefly TV series, and the movie.
I like it so far. I also just started the Picard series season 1 and I am enjoying that as well! That one reminds me somewhat of Firefly. I am loving these ST series.
If there aren't more than 2 seasons worth of episodes, I don't watch it.* It doesn't guarantee a conclusion, but it cuts down on that sense of abandonment when a great show gets chopped too early.
*exceptions for shows, mainly anime, where a season is a self contained story. And Firefly, cause it's Firefly.
MyAnimeList has a pretty good navigation list IMO. For example on https://myanimelist.net/anime/25777/Shingeki_no_Kyojin_Season_2 there is prequel, sequel, other (spinoffs and specials), and "alternate version" (condensed movie summary or remake). Maybe the naming could be better but those relationship types are the basic set for any kind of serialized media. Note that the media type is not fixed, e.g. the sequel to the last (TV) episode of Firefly is Serenity (a movie).
Now it's true that some shows aren't really designed to be serialized, e.g. for the Fate series there is a complicated mess of a graph (https://i.redd.it/6fz5fzz6sfv11.png) and most relationships will have to be encoded as "other", but since it's so messy, almost any watch order is reasonable, so there isn't much structure lost.
+1 for Firefly. At least they kind of finished it with the movie. I'll always be a browncoat.
I think that at somepoint Google will find itself in a position TV stations found themselves in around 2008-ish; TV stations had created the habbit of cancelling everything that wasn't an instant hit in it's first season. In turn this became a self-fulfilling prophecy because people wouldn't watch the first season. They didn't want to be left out in the cold with some season 1 cliffhanger which was never resolved because the series never got renewed for a second season.
...AND YES I'M STILL PISSED ABOUT FIREFLY!
And that is where we learned not to trust TV shows in the beginning, but at least TV stations can only carry so many shows.
Firefly fan forever.
Yeah. You can try to compare the mass of quality material in one vs the other and I can see why Trek would win that faceoff. But the universe of Wars is just more relatable and this sort of kneejerk biases that way.
• Gritty vs clean
• Thieves and scoundrels vs naval officers
• Genuine clothing vs color coded uniforms
• Misfits save the world from pervasive evil vs bold leaders discovering some weird new thing
• Magic vs Science
• Jumping into a gun turret and swinging it around at your enemy vs “Mr. Worf, target their ships!”
• Swordfights and maulings vs redshirts getting blown up.
I think each of them has its own milieu that it speaks to more, but the internet is for sure gonna pick Star Wars over Star Trek if they just are asked “X or Y?”. Star Wars still has a cool factor while Star Trek still has a dorky factor.
And a lot of that factor comes back to the fact that Trek is better known as syndicated TV. The constraint is that the episodes may be shown in random order, and so every episode or every two episodes, the state of the crew and the ships needs to be returned back to the baseline. The dorkiness comes in part from that aspect where the system gets returned back to where it was.
That's not all of it because Deadliest Catch also has the same aspect where every Deadliest Catch episode is basically the same thing, hah. Firefly kind of can be viewed as the attempt to take Star Wars’ grittiness and somehow make it syndicatable, “we finish the job and you see us a month later seeking out the next job.”
Cancelling is what happens to TV shows when they stop airing or being produced.
That was the meaning before “cancel culture” and was the intent of the parent.
I didn’t at all read it the way you did, maybe I’m older than you and I’ve seen more shows cancelled. (Firefly, for a famous enough example)
Firefly is a show about the bad guys, written by somebody who doesn't realise they're the bad guys.
I watched it because I played the awful board game. "This game is awful" I said but the guy who'd bought it insisted it was great because it was so like the TV show. Watched the show, checks out, they've precisely imitated the show's "I don't deserve to suffer the inevitable consequences of my own actions. I am the protagonist in my story so the rules shouldn't apply to me" attitude.
> The customers will tell Amazon they never received the items. Amazon will replace them free.
Why does this remind me of that old Firefly episode where they steal the medicine from the Alliance hospital. They justify that "the Alliance will have it replaced by the end of the day".
My other Four:
o Firefly - no brainer. Brilliant. o Battlestar Galactica - Has some issues mid-late course, but still pretty end-end enthralling. o Dark (I keep re-watching this over and over every few months. I have many notebook pages full of analysis. Seriously good SciFi for the most part.) o Altered Carbon (mostly Season 1 - but Season 2 was okay)
Big Recommendation:
Not really science fiction (even bigger themes explored) but far superior in terms of overall quality of work/screen writing, and has a similar "concept" that a lot of supposed science fiction shows have - "The Leftovers" - Which I put on my list of the 5 most brilliant things on Television (Sopranos/The Wire/Deadwood/Breaking Bad being the other 4).
I'll give a honorable mention to stuff I loved but I can't totally recommends:
o Travelers - I'm a sucker for a good Time Travel Show. o Foundation - Pretty - I watch it, but I totally would never recommend it. o Fringe - Wow - was totally into this. Definitely an acquired taste though. o Raised By Wolves - Interested in where it's going. Could entirely suck eventually I guess. o Black Mirror - Hit and miss, though hits often enough that I keep coming back to it. o WestWorld - I mean, we all watched it. Season 1 was *awesome* if you watched it in realtime and didn't read all the internet commentary when the aha moment hit you. Season 2 was pretty good as well IMHO. Season 3 was just dreck where the screen writing tanked *but* it paid an *awesome* homage to the very last of the Foundation Novels to bring it all home.
There are some objective-ish criteria we can apply: plot structure, themes, language and dialog complexity etc.
There are also more subjective criteria which can nonetheless employed like character development and character complexity in general, plot lines and plot wholes, number of literary and narrative devices employed etc.
Mandalorian is a simple linear narrative with an episodic structure with a rather thin plot, little to no character development, and the only "arc" serving as the single motivation for the plot to advance.
This especially evident in Season 2 Episode 7, where they tried to cram a series worth of a character's redemption arc and world building into a single episode.
This doesn't make Mandalorian bad. It's a very enjoyable well executed show with surprisingly few really weak points. This also doesn't make Mandalorian great, or amazing.
In 14 episodes Firefly had more character development, better dialog, working jokes and better acting than 16 episodes of Mandalorian.
As to boring drivel, that's my view of Rogue One: thin plot full of plot holes. The only narrative structure in the entire film is "15 minutes of static talking heads followed by rather uninspired and badly edited CGI action"
As put succinctly by the character Malcolm Reynolds on the tv show Firefly: "'Bout 50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don't take kindly to being eliminated."
I'm always amazed at how many people watch movies/TV like Blade Runner, Black Mirror, Terminator, Altered Carbon, Her, Ex Machina, Firefly, Cowbow Bebop, etc and think "Yeah, that looks like a future I want." Dystopian Sci-Fi is a warning, not a blueprint. Even the utopian Sci-Fis often reference a struggled past in transitioning to their societies. And a lot of these problems have to deal with surveillance or an adjacent technology (like Minority Report or the more realistic Psycho-Pass).
Two n half men ran for 12 years and firefly got dropped after 10 episodes, lets blame Google for this.
This sounds like the same approach as Gigapixel AI from Topaz Labs.
I haven't tried Gigapixel but I have used Topaz' Video Enhance AI, which is phenomenal. I've been using it to upscale old TV shows which never got an HD remaster, to UHD.
Right now it's running through the first episode of Firefly, converting from 540p to 2160p (540p as the bluray rip was basically upscaled to 1080p from its original production, so I converted to 540p first in Handbrake with zero noticeable loss in quality since I used a near-lossless compression factor.. this provides better upscaling):
https://i.imgur.com/hcRYM5n.jpg
When it's done I'll run it through Flowframes for framerate interpolation. Then maybe another pass in Handbrake to figure out an optimal size for the end file.
Then I'll run through the rest of the season using the same settings I tested with this first episode.
Oh, do! I also saw a few early episodes as a kid, but didn't really have a chance to get what they were trying to do; it wasn't until years later, when I had a chance to watch the full series straight through thanks to a friend's carefully made VHS tapes, that any of what I was seeing really made sense to me. Nothing since then has even come close to replacing B5 at the head of my SF TV affections.
Reflecting on that experience, I think the major flaw of B5 is that, in structure and intent, it was twenty or more years ahead of its time. Given the handicaps under which the creators then had to labor, it's even more remarkable how much they accomplished - B5 might have been the very first example of what we today call the 'binge-worthy show', made on a shoestring in a time when syndication and time slots and missed episodes were still problems that a show could have. This show overcame them admirably - even so, I can't help but wish a little for the chance to see what the same people could've accomplished today, with the kind of resources available for something like Stranger Things.
That won't happen, of course, not least because the show is niche even by comparison with something like Firefly. For the same reason, even a Trek-style HD remaster is unlikely - a shame in its own right, since the then-revolutionary CGI space effects are by far the part of the show that's aged most badly, and a shame all over again because the creators were looking far enough ahead to shoot in 16:9 and 5.1 surround throughout, which would give an HD remaster the kind of payoff that, if we're being honest, the ones done for old Trek shows never really have.
In any case, it's a small miracle the show got made at all, and another that it ended up being so close to what JMS intended it to be. Anyone who can enjoy TNG or DS9 today can, I think, enjoy B5 at least as well, and on that basis I recommend it without the slightest reservation.
Friends was also shot on film, and cropped to 4:3 for broadcast. Like Firefly, Friends also had unintentional things (crew, microphones, un-dressed sets, etc) appear in the edges in 16:9. While most were probably edited out before the uncropped 1080 re-release; some unintended things remain, which I personally really like seeing.
Additionally, like Firefly's pure VFX, some footage in Friends also appears in SD in the HD release (seemingly either because the original film stock was lost, or it wasn't originally shot on film), with the zoomed 4:3 SD vs 16:9 HD sometimes changing mid-scene, and …that too I find a humbling reminder of the quality of yesteryear.
I think TV shows tend to be much more of a mixed bag. The Sopranos (1999), The Wire (2002), and Firefly (2002) were all shows at the forefront of the current renaissance in dramatic television— they were all shot on film, but it's interesting that Firefly for example was natively 16:9 and cropped to 4:3 for its original run, whereas The Wire's "conversion" to widescreen has been a matter of some more controversy, eg: https://www.techhive.com/article/2854439/hbo-remastered-the-wire-in-169-hd-and-it-was-a-lot-harder-than-youd-think.html
Another interesting aspect of Firefly is that the pure VFX scenes (eg spaceship exteriors) were rendered originally at 480p, so when you watch the Blu-ray version of the show, you can see a bit of an awkward transition where the shots of the actors are gloriously crisp, but the space scenes are clearly upscaled.
Here's the main bit:
---------------------
BOOM! Studios has announced a new Firefly spin-off comic book series, titled A Brand New Verse, that's set 20 years after the Serenity film and focuses on the new crew of the same ship, with a blood connection to the old one. Here's the official synopsis:
Set 20 years after the events of Firefly, Serenity soars the 'Verse once again with a new captain – Emma, the daughter of Wash and Zo !
The old crew of Serenity has gone their own way and now Emma is working to prove herself to Zo , alongside a new crew of castaways and misfits just trying to stay afloat.
But when Serenity takes a job from a familiar face, they discover that their new, living, breathing cargo is far more than they bargained for…and might bring them into conflict with Alliance once again!
Josh Lee Gordon (Firefly: Bad Company) and Fabiana Mascolo (Yasmeen) begin a new era for Joss Whedon's Firefly with First Appearances of an all new cast, new adventures and shocking new surprises!
I’m not sure if it’s hatred towards sex workers they aren’t likely going to have the Reavers either at least not in the same manner as the show yet alone the film.
Firefly was really dark with a lot of gore compared to most network shows of the time.
Serenity was probably closer to the level of “dark” JW wanted to have in the show mixed with a FU of some sorts to fans by killing so many of the main cast and basically killing any sequel possibility on either screen.
The issue Disney has is that Disney+ has no room for anything that isn’t kids friendly because it’s a babysitting as a service first.
The Mandalorian goes out it’s way to avoid graphic violence if it wasn’t such a money maker to Disney I don’t think they would’ve it slip into the TV-14 realm for the recent episodes before that it was pretty much TV-PG.
Under these circumstances it’s going to be very hard to have Inara on the show.
In fact I’m not sure how Fox even got away with a TV-14 rating for FF initially, Germany, Australia, NZ and quite a few other countries have rated it 16/18+.
My guess is that Fox got the show rated on the based on the pilot and with how the season progressed they would’ve definitely have had to re-rate the show if it wasn’t canceled.
Disney has a real problem on their hands right now they are in possession of so many IPs that they no longer can be kids only or even kids first across the board and they’ll likely have to segregate their streaming services to support that.
I would not be surprised if Disney would launch a spin-off brand for their more mature properties sort of like Fox and FX.
yeah I don't really trust anything in the article based on that statement: >“Movie theaters are done."
It sounds like just wishful thinking(regarding firefly), but I'd love to be proven wrong :) a firefly reboot would be great and many people have wanted this for a long time, the problem is its been way too long and alot of sci-fi fans may have forgotten or just don't know about it, the show was cancelled 18 years ago so most 20 somethings have no idea what it is.
"This shift in tone suggests the new version of Firefly might drop characters like Inara, who is basically a prostitute. Instead it’ll probably lean more into the fun and adventure aspect of the universe’s stories."
Jeepers, what a problematic paragraph. There was nothing basic about the character (who was also fun and adventurous) nor about the sex work portrayed in the series. An entire episode centred around it, telling the story of how unregulated is unprotected in sex work. That universe's take was refreshingly insightful and something modern societies could takes lessons from.
Hmm. Netflix may be shooting themselves in the foot a bit here, but frankly I much prefer "too many series are cancelled before hitting their stride" where the shortsighted decision is being made based only on viewership and budget, than the previous situation where cancelled shows never developed an audience due to being broadcast in a bad time slot, or because they were repeatedly bumped from their time slot[0] (eg. by sporting events going into overtime) with missed episodes never repeated, or by episodes being shown out of order[1].
At least now shows are cancelled based on their intrinsic viewership. Short-sighted cancelations are still an unfortunate problem, but this is still a huge improvement over the previous status quo.
A bit more concerning to me is that Netflix's "throw the spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks" approach is starting to lean a bit more in the direction of "same but different" clones of other shows with a twist to the setup, even for shows based on existing properties.
But, so it goes.
[0] eg. Dark Skies
[1] eg. Firefly, where the pilot wasn't broadcast until the end of the season.
I think you're significantly underestimating the amount of money that would need to be raised and overestimating the amount of people who would put their money where their mouth was and fund multiple seasons of these shows. Serenity, the Firefly movie, was sort of this, and it cost a lot for a two hour movie ($39M per Wikipedia) and didn't do a ton of extra revenue over that budget ($40.4M).
If there's something structurally preventing it, it's that the big studios and especially the "streaming as a loss leader" stuff players Amazon and Apple TV are making so many big-budget/high-production-value shows that audience expectations and standards are very high.
I watched Star Trek (TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise), The Expanse, Orville, Continuum, Altered Carbon S1, Farscape, Firefly, Travelers, Dark, and even Stargate Universe.
What do you recommend watching next?
I've played New Angeles which is the replacement for Battlestar Galactica using the Android setting instead of a licensed setting.
I hate traitor mechanics, and I'm not a big fan of the Android setting (Android itself I find not much fun) - but I found the mechanism in New Angeles acceptable. One player did indeed screw everybody else over, and it wasn't the most fun I've had in that amount of time, but I'd do it again some weekend I think.
The popular game I refuse to play is "Firefly: The Game". The friend who owns it says "Well it's flawed but it really captures the TV show". I hadn't enjoyed our first game of Firefly and hadn't seen the TV show, though I had seen the movie, so I watched the TV show. The next time I explained to him that he'd been correct. It exactly captures the TV show, in that the TV show's writer clearly doesn't understand that he's writing a story about the bad guys. Stories about bad guys can be fun. There don't even need to be good guys, there arguably aren't any good guys in "The Wire" for example - but the writer does need to be aware they're telling a story about bad guys. Firefly thinks these people are heroes. And so does the terrible board game.
> So...you're upset to see space opera played straight in your space opera?
No, I like space opera too. I'm upset that ST has become Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Space. (Don't get the wrong idea, I like Buffy too.)
> Have you forgotten entirely about S1 of TNG, or just chosen to ignore it?
You'll have to clue me in to what specifically you're referring to, I re-watched it last year but I don't want to guess at what you mean.
> DS9 is "not Roddenberry"
I agree. DS9 was, in part, created specifically to explore "not Roddenberry" directions in the ST universe.
There's a book, I can't find it at the moment, and I don't remember the title, but it's all excerpts from interviews with cast and crew. That's it. It's amazing.
Anyhow, I bring it up because, reading it, it became clear what, for me anyway, is the crucial defining aspect of ST that differentiates it from other sci-fi franchises: In ST, people in the future have gotten over their bullshit. They are emotionally mature, guided by reason and rationality and their higher values. That's the key difference (from say, Star Wars or Farscape or Firefly...) People in the future pretty much have their shit together.
Now this is something that some of the writers don't get. You find them complaining in their own words that Gene won't let them write an episode involving interpersonal drama between bridge crew. (Apparently this is really hard for some writers. No judgement intended.) It wasn't until after he died that Berman/Braga started to relax that.
Now to me, this is wrong (for ST) for two reasons:
First, it makes sense to me that these folks who fly around the galaxy in machines that can destroy worlds would have to be level-headed to use them w/o destroying themselves.
Second, and more importantly, that's a huge part of what made ST so endearing and appealing in the first place: the deep and abiding love that Kirk/Spock/McCoy (most obviously) and the rest of the crew (less obviously) feel for each other.
I mean, when Spock tells McCoy that he would also wish him to be present at his Pon farr, oh man, my eyes well up with tears.
When it comes down to it, the characters in the "real" ST (if I may) treat each other like members of a healthy family do, and that's wonderful to see (in any context, not just space operatic sci-fi.)
That's also the source of the "moral" superiority of Star Fleet: they actually are good guys. (And Vulcans don't lie.) You erode that and you've got Spaceballs.
> To be honest, I don't get the mockery angle at all. I mean, you're talking about a show whose first season not only has antimilitarism as a major through-line in the way Lorca's story plays out, but concludes with a war being ended by a couple of people having a conversation about why more fighting sucks for everyone, and implementing a clever technobabble-driven plan to bring about peace. There's a lot I don't love about Discovery - most of its second season, for a start - but come on, what could possibly be more Star Trek than that?
I've only seen ~4 minutes so I can't speak to the good things about the show, feeling mocked was my subjective response (I don't think the ST:D folks sat down and twirled their mustaches while contemplating how much they despise ST fans, hey?)
It was things like how the Klingons are space orcs; the Romulan guy looks like space Legolas the elf. The people wearing hoodies (why does everyone in space wear hoodies these days?) The gay guys are the only ones married? Why does the female lead have a masculine name? It seems like they're trying to tick the diversity boxes without actually rattling anybody's cages (and I say that as a SJW, pro-diversity.) The rolling spaceship is ridiculous, the flash illuminating the nebula was just idiotic. The whole thing feels superficial and lazy despite obviously being the result of a lot of hard work by a lot of skilled, talented people. Maybe they're just pandering to the tastes of a younger audience (with whom I am out of touch.)
Let me see if I can sum it up... Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones seem similar, yeah? But LotR is about Good vs. Evil whereas GoT is about aristocrats being really really shitty to each other. They are both entertaining, but I wouldn't let my kids watch the latter.
Cheers!
Business success isn't a function of technical/artistic quality in any field. There's a loose correlation sure, but there are hundreds or thousands of examples where poorly written/made books, TV shows, music, films, games etc also did really well commercially as well as the opposite. Many would say something like Firefly is better than something like Twilight, but one made millions of dollars and the other got cancelled in two seasons.
Knowing what to make and who to market it to will usually matter a lot more than how you build it.
My own resentment with superhero movies started with "The Avengers" (2012). Joss Whedon made the excellent space adventure Firefly and the even better "Dollhouse". Both series were intriguing, leaving you something to think about.
"Joker" was good however, and "Black Panther" was fun (there may be a few others I haven't seen).
The Marvel TV shows, obviously... ;)
More seriously I liked the big bang theory, the expanse, firefly, and dark matter. I haven't watched game of thrones yet.
No one is green-lighting a television show with the expectation of huge distribution agreements decades later.
This has actually been the state of tv licensing economics for decades, since I Love Lucy popularized reruns. That show has never been off the air since it first aired. Other long-running shows longer-lived than the proposed-20 year term include anytime soaps still on the air today, The Simpsons, Law & Order or its spinoffs, CSI, NCIS.
Indeed, potential longevity is one of the metrics by which shows are scored when determining whether to buy or renew them. Firefly, for example, had no potential for distribution when it came out and was unceremoniously cancelled at the turn of the century, but today would have likely lived many seasons on Amazon or Netflix.
Basically, a long-running franchise like Seinfeld is the TV equivalent of a FAANG-era tech unicorn. It's what every showrunner secretly hopes for.
As someone who has watched Firefly quite a few times, I don't recall this episode. The only thing that comes close is "Ariel", where they steal medical supplies off a core world hospital, but that's straight up theft.
I don't recall all the details of the film Serenity, but the plot described does not ring a bell. Are you sure it was Firefly you were thinking of?
Note: I have not read the comics, if it is one of them the plot appears.
Reminds me of the plot of one of the episodes of Firefly.
The crew discovers (via underground connections) that a food production facility has very lax security. In this universe, the vacuum-sealed nutrient packs require authenticity much like bars of gold.
Now, they could break in, steal a few pallets and sell it on the black market - but obviously, the theft would be noticed, and the serial numbers could be noted down as contraband etc..
What they actually do is convince the night shift that they are not needed, and convince the afternoon shift that the protagonists are actually the night crew. They then produce the nutrient packs themselves and simply walk out with them.
Since the night crew never showed up, there is no mismatch with their records, since they obviously didn't produce anything.
The biggest game changer for me with streaming is I watch less TV. Before streaming I either had to maintain a complex balance with my never large enough DVR or watch shows when the network decided (I'm looking at you Channel 9 in Australia putting Star Trek on at 11pm on Tuesday and Thursday nights). Before that I had VHS, so many VHS.
With streaming I watch maybe an hour or two at most, then I stop, confident I can pickup whenever (and increasingly wherever I want). I don't worry about my wife deleting my Star Trek for her Firefly.
Unlike DVDs we can catch up on an episode of a shared show while traveling.
Though I did get hooked on a Netflix show in the UK that isn't available in Australia, four weeks later I can't even remember the title.
Cliff-hangers long predate modern television, and seem to be endemic to any serialized content. The term itself dates back to the late 1800s, and it’s use has been derided in every medium from books to radio to film to television.
It also wasn’t a purely American thing. Go watch some of the old black-and-white Dr. Who episodes, for example; you’ll see some prime examples of cliffhanger- and recap-dominated television.
The exception seems to be late-20th-century television shows, where the syndication system meant that episodes might be dropped or reordered arbitrarily by the local station. This made it difficult to impossible to have any kind of changing circumstances like an overarching plot except at big events like season breaks. Star Trek: TNG is a good example here; the interpersonal relationships between characters don’t really evolve very much, and when they do it’s part of a season-break spanning two-part story. Those reliably had every character in danger at the break to provide the studio leverage during contract negotiations.
As the premium television channels started getting into producing their own shows, they didn’t have the problem of local affiliates reshuffling their schedule— their distribution model let shows have an overall plot, but they still add to be acceptable for viewers that expected to get a whole story each week. This gave us shows like Stargate SG-1 which still had very formulaic episodes, but also a continuity between them.
You also started to have the national networks assert more control over the local stations which led to some successful attempts at shows with both series- and episode-long plot structures, like Babylon 5 & the West Wing. Vestiges of the old system remained for quite a while, though, and is a large part of why Firefly was never commercially successful— it was produced with continuity from episode to episode in mind, but the network aired them in a seemingly random order instead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliffhanger
Its interesting when you read any science fiction or watch movies and TV e.g. Firefly, Blade Runner, Altered Carbon, Fifth Element etc.
In all of those there is this common theme of a major melding of Western and Chinese culture.
Will life imitate art in this case?
I remember after binge-watching Firefly, for the next 24 hours or so I unintentionally walked & drawled like Fillion.
If Firefly counts, Babylon 5's attempted successor Crusade counts more so. It supposedly had 5 years planned, and was also cruelly cancelled after a lot of network notes and drama including airing some episodes out-of-order/at weird times.
JMS at least didn't try to cram the remaining plot into a single film. Some of the plot is out there as unfilmed scripts and some made its way into book series, and most of it we may just never know at this point because WB doesn't care about Babylon 5.
Didn't Firefly have story arcs planned out, I don't know if there were five years worth.
Ouch, Joss Whedon tried to cram it into the film Serenity when Firefly got cancelled, I daresay there's far more detail I am not versed in.
I think content producers weren't going to give netflix a free lunch forever, so they had to start producing their own original content.
I dont own netflix, but I do think it's a great idea and a smart investment by them. One thing netflix does with this disruption-wise is the way they think about content.
companies like comcast (NBC) still got their heads in broadcast television style producing content, where-as netflix takes a lot of risks, and is ok if a show has a niche following, so long as they have something in their library for everyone.
edit: its sad, if content producers thought like this in the past, we'd have more episodes of firefly.
Yes, but only if you count Star Wars or other American-style production "action movie but in space" movies or series (like Stargate, Firefly, ...).
When you go into the things that don't get blockbuster movies, you end up with old-school scifi. Newer like The Expanse or Blindsight, older like The Culture or Hyperion, or proper old school stuff like
In general, piece of unwanted and unrequested advice - whenever you make a huge sweeping statement about complex topic with many examples (like "In western sci-fi, the story exists to make the reader feel good about themselves.") you are inevitably wrong.
that's my favorite gag from the Firefly tv show.
Simon: Are you Alliance?
Early: Am I a lion?
Simon: What?
Early: I don't think of myself as a lion. You might as well though, I have a mighty roar.
Simon: I said "Alliance."
Early: Oh, I thought...
Simon: No, I was...
Early: That's weird.
> I'm glad every scifi movie and TV show's sound designers decide to ignore reality and make it interesting.
Not every movie and TV show.
You are right though that that it wouldn't be the same.
R.I.P Firefly.
> For those not familiar with the series in question, there's a reason why, if you're going to choose a TV series to discuss permutations, you'd choose Haruhi.
An other good pick would be Firefly, famously aired in complete disorder by Fox: the broadcast order was (numbers referring to DVD/canonical) 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 1 (which is two parts) with the series cancelled before 11, 12 and 13 were aired.
Not only that, but other broadcasters opted to set up their own wacky broadcast order:
* in Mexico, MundoFOX took the Fox order but replaced 1 by 12
* in SA SABC3 used the Fox order but did broadcast 11, 12 and 13 as well (in that order, after 1)
* in Portugal SIC used the Fox order followed by 13, 11 and 12
* Australia almost followed the intended order but swapped 1 and 2
* NZ followed intended order until 10 then used 14, 13, 11, 12.
Squaresoft, the company that made Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears. After merging with Enix, their games just lost that magical touch they had.
Firefly TV series.
Comme des Garcons Kyoto perfume.
And, of course, I second the MacBook '14-15 revival! Touchbar begone!
Or from the final episode of Firefly:
Jayne: Well, I don't like the idea of someone hearin' what I'm thinkin'.
Inara Serra: No one likes the idea of hearing what you're thinking.
> Meanwhile I wonder how people have time to finish entire seasons of TV shows on netflix, given the modern trend of story-driven shows that assume you've actually seen all the previous episodes instead of pre-internet-era sitcoms that you could jump in and watch any 30-minute episode with little context. Twitch is more of a return to old-school TV in that regard.
Is this really true?
I know I watched random episodes (Malcolm/Seinfeld/Friends/etc..) and enjoyed it. But re-watching them in the proper order is magnitudes better and clearly the way it was supposed to be watched.
I wonder if the same is true for modern TV shows, e.g. the big bang theory - it can be watched and enjoyed by picking a random TV show. Even longer form, say Firefly/Dark Angel/Twin Peaks require you to watch it in order - yet they could be enjoyed on their own as well (you had basically no choice anyway..).
Firefly season 2
I have to agree so much.
I think the memories of what made Firefly so special ignore the reality that it's been 16 years.
Nathan Filion will be 50 in 3 years, he can no longer physically pull off the young uppity captain with a grudge against the system. The same goes for all the other actors - they've all grown up and matured since then.
So to account for that, time would've had to pass. I find I find it difficult to believe that the crew of Serenity would've been able to stick together for more than another year, two at the outside.
In the movie we'd already had Book and Inara leave, and given the events in the movie I can't see Zoe wanting to stick around much longer, despite her loyalty to Mal.
Given the wanted status of most of the rest of the crew, paying work would continue to be hard to find, and the ship was already running on fumes as it was. Any failures of any critical components would quickly see the ship grounded, and then Jayne would be gone if he hadn't already bailed.
Kaylee and Simon might have made it work for a while, but Simon was always too focused on his sister's well-being to the exclusion of everything else. With the government apparently no longer after River, he might have reached out to the rich father to return home.
Did Firefly had a logical end at the and of its single season? Is it worth watching?
It's a shame they never made a firefly film
I loved loved loved Firefly but Serenity killed that franchise for me. A dismally bad film.
I would trade 10 new seasons of The Expanse for a couple of more episodes of Firefly. Just saying.
Really? I saw season 1 and loved it. Then eventually found out there was a second one and was happy. Had no idead it got canceled too. I tried to see the first and second episode of expanse and didn't like it one bit. Dark matter pleased me plently. Made me remember a little of Firefly mixed with something else like stargate or something.
There was definitely some "hokey" acting in season 1&2, occasionally almost on the verge of self-parody. But at other times it was really good. A little choppy and inconsistent would probably be a better description?
But if you look back at shows like BSG or Firefly, they certainly weren't any better in terms of acting - I think we just have higher standards these days!
(By the way, if you didn't enjoy Season 1 (I did!), then you won't like Season 2 any better.)
> Season two, which returned more than a year later with a significant marketing push and a solid lead-in, was down 24 percent among total viewers and averaged 457,000 total viewers. That compares more to similar returns for Syfy's inexpensive co-productions like Dark Matter and Killjoys, than to the cabler's original scripted series like The Magicians and Happy.
I'm a huge fan of both The Expanse and The Magicians, but if the above quote is true I can see where they're coming from. The Magicians is a far more accessible show than The Expanse, and if I have to decide where to stick marketing dollars I'm going to go with the show with the larger audience.
Also, although I love The Expanse, it is not nearly as compelling as BSG or Firefly. When BSG came out 14 years ago it was really a singular experience in terms of cable TV. I would say something like Westworld follows more in the footsteps of BSG than The Expanse. And Firefly tapped into the same energy as Guardians of the Galaxy but 15 years too early.
Overall, very sad but not surprised. At least the TV show got me reading the books...
They did the same to Firefly and Farscape, cancled them too soon before they could develop the characters more and close up loose ends.
I like The Expanse and I will miss it.
I've been meaning to write my own scifi books to be turned into movies.
The Expanse was no Star Trek or Star Wars but it had a realistic feel to it.
I agree that it's inhumane to force people to either drop their social safety net or to sleep on the streets.
I think I might have phrased it as "it's impractical to force people to drop their social safety nets", or maybe "it's unrealistic to force..."
People need help. Not all the time, but at least sometimes for sure. If you can't afford to buy help then you either suffer or else lean on someone else. Asking people (who can't afford assistance) to move away from their friends and family isn't a realistic ask.
It's like they said in that episode of Firefly - "When you can't run, you crawl, and when you can't crawl - when you can't do that... You find someone to carry you."
I was just introduced to the Fluxx card-game system this weekend; it's a system with different variants, Zombies, Monsters, there's even a version for the TV show Firefly.
Looking at the cards generated they seem to resemble the style/format of Fluxx and I wonder if OP plays themselves. I for one find it to be really neat, and may even use it myself for my weekly table-top night.
The Black Mirror series is worth watching, although they seem to focus mostly on 'digital consciousness'. The USS Callister episode is not only gripping but very funny too. So many great episodes though - hard to pick a real standout although I would have to say if I had to San Junipero is one of the best things I have ever watched.
Then there's the really cheesy old "so bad it's good" stuff, for example: - When Worlds Collide (1951) - The People That Time Forgot (1977) - Swamp Thing (1982)
Have you seen the original War of the Worlds?
Then there is the Alien franchise, Aliens (Alien 2) being my personal favourite - Bill Paxton is sooo funny in that and of course it's directed by James Cameron. Some other great actors like Michael Biehn too.
Have you watched the series Firefly? Also the (related) movie Serenity.
There is soooo much great stuff out there!
There are a couple TV shows that every sci-fi fan should see: Firefly and more recently The Expanse.
> the fact that Whedon wrote the screenplay for "Alien: Resurrection" tells me that Whedon is not world-class
I think that's a bit unfair. Joss wrote the original screenplay, but it was butchered en route to the screen. He's still pretty narked about having a story credit: "There is always going to be a shitty Alien movie out there. A shitty Alien movie with my name on it."
I liked the original Avengers, and I think it did a great job handling a sprawling and convoluted brief (there's a 17-part breakdown out there if you're really keen [1]), but TV was his natural medium. Firefly, obviously, but there are moments in Buffy that I'd honestly defend as the best TV ever made.
Not going to argue about JJ Abrams, though. Possibly the most overrated director ever, with a perfect reverse-Midas track record when it comes to franchises.
[1] http://www.toddalcott.com/the-avengers-part-1.html
fingers crossed for firefly season 2
To anyone who loves Star Trek, Firefly, BSG etc: I want to highlight Blake's Seven for you as a really great series that's well worth a watch:
Imagine a gritty British version of the original Star Trek.
In this story, the federation are evil, and the crew aren't all that nice either, and basically just want to survive having lucked out on finding a ship at the right moment. They're forced into cooperation by necessity.
It's not about exploration or Tribbles, it's about a bunch of people just trying to stay alive and eventually organise a rebellion.
The primary antagonist (Servalan) is a) female b) fairly competent at her job
Two of the characters in the series are artificial intelligences.
The ending of the show is excellent.
There are audiobooks that tell further stories in the Blake-i-verse. Amazon has most/all of them. There seem to be quite a few episodes on Youtube (Blakes7Movies) if you're curious to watch.
If you like the genre of 'space warship crew on the run', you may also enjoy LEXX and The Expanse.
It's hard to believe that B7 hasn't been rebooted.
I look forward to new great firsts like this one. 15+ years ago TV and Movies were major status differences. Actors/Directors wouldn't besmirch themselves working on tv. It's been interesting seeing this flipflop. Netflix could be the first one to reach budgets that double, triple or more Game of Thrones or parallel on a per-minute basis Avatar and so on but in lengthier form. I had always imagined them bringing their A-game to a Star Wars TV series (maybe copping FireFly elements), and despite the Disney news which is overblown, I still think this could happen.
I agree, and I also couldn't get into it at first. It does come together later on though and I'm happy I kept watching.
That said, there's a difficult to describe lack of something in the show that keeps it from being great, and it bothers me that I can't put my finger on it. I loved Firefly and BSG and have watched most episodes at least twice (possibly even ten times in the case of Firefly), and yet I can't see myself rewatching The Expanse.
I love the books, devour them as soon as they come out, and I think the show has done a fine job adapting the story.
I'm happy that the show has survived the weakest part of the book series - Detective Miller - and gotten past the admitted cribbing from Firefly without looking derivative. The show has truly gotten stronger from every episode.
One change I would make is to subtitle the Belter dialogue. It's such a fun part of the books which in translation to an audio track ends up getting lost as a word-mash.
HOWEVER! As far as whether the show will survive: The show either needs more cash, or to allocate that cash in a more narrow, strategic, and modest way. It suffers the problem endemic to all under-budgeted TV sci-fi: the low budget always visibly bleeds in at the edges. "Yeah, that actor's really not the best fit for that part, and we could have made the plot easier to grasp with an additional scene, but with the money we save, we can afford some CGI for the rail gun!" Maybe it's just me, but I would rather watch an excellently executed sci-fi drama on an obviously artificial Dogville-like set than watch an "OK" space opera that has a nominally realistic looking space-ship brig which I won't remember anyway.
(Not to diss The Expanse's actors! - the majority are quite good, subtle, and growing on me with each episode.)
Action and special effects together are the number one self-defeating conceit of all sci-fi, especially television sci-fi. In order to please the action-craving audience (I guess?), they starve the heart and soul of the show: focusing on characters. What I love about Star Trek: TNG, one of my favorite shows of all time, is that in the Riker's Beard Era, it focused on the truth and depth of the characters through and through. That focus allows the audience to overlook the latent camp of the setting, and forgive the sometimes poor execution. As a result, TNG is still watchable today.
Special effects age. Characters are immortal.
I'm not saying it's mandatory to like Firefly, but if you haven't kept interested past episode 2 then you've missed the good stuff.
I understand why you'd stop there, IMHO the first two or three (or even four) episodes aren't actually all that great. It's definitely worth persevering though, they get markedly better and Episode 6 is an absolute corker.
You just have different taste. I can appreciate why people love Firefly. But I just can't stay interested past episode 2.
I'm a Firefly fan. I was dying to see Serenity when it came out. Just dying. If the studio had limited the box office to 100 tickets I would have acquired one. I would have rolled my grandmother for a ticket. And there were a lot of people just like me, in absolute numbers. A few thousand, at least. Those 100 tickets would have sold for thousands of dollars. By your logic that would have made Serenity the most sought after movie ever.
But there weren't enough people like me to make the movie's release successful by conventional measures. It barely broke even. There were enough die-hard fans to drive up the price of those theoretically limited 100 tickets, but most people aren't Firefly fans at all and didn't bother to buy tickets at the normal price.
i also loved firefly. the expanse is much more noir and the crew is getting to know each other throughout the first season, so it's not really similar. i can't really say it's like firefly, but it's at least as good - as in, i can't wait for the next episode.
I feel that you underestimate how large the world is. Niche art easily entertains millions.
Niche art in popular art forms, such as cult films and cult TV shows, easily reach tens of millions (eg Firefly). It's still totally niche compared to Star Wars, but I'm not sure that you can say in any way whatsoever that it loses power because "only" tens millions of people worldwide have seen it.
Forgot about that one... Not a movie, but besides the very well known TV shows (ST:TNG, BSG, Firefly, etc.) I can really recommend The Expanse.
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
The Buffy vs. Angel vs. Firefly discussion is a good one. Babylon 5, Veronica Mars, and the recent Battlestar Galactica also fit in. Ditto Dollhouse, Heroes, Alias and Lost.
I'd say:
-- It's just a detail, but recall that the first season of Buffy was actually just a half-season in length.
-- The first three seasons of Buffy had a very clear meta-metaphor. :) It posited monsters as being a good representation for what happens in actual high school life.
-- That aspect of the show hit its stride in the Buffy/Angel romance: Girl sleeps with guy and he turns into a monster.
-- Firefly was good, but nothing in it was as brilliant as, say, the best of Buffy.
-- A lot of shows started with a lot of monster-of-the-week/crisis-of-the-week and emphasized the ongoing story more later into the run. But most of the shows cited did at least some standalone stories all the way to the end. (Babylon 5 is one exception).
-- Firefly never got past that part of the show's evolution. This may be one reason it never matched Buffy's brilliance.
-- Not knowing whether or not a show will be renewed is a huge problem. If you're a fan of Buffy or Angel or Babylon 5, you're familiar with the consequences.
-- The writers' strike messed up multiple shows, or at least their audiences. I never went back to watching Battlestar Galactica post-strike.
-- Joss Whedon tried to oversee three shows at once. That didn't go well. Each of Buffy, Angel and Firefly deserved more of his attention.
-- Dollhouse didn't have real characters, the people running the place excepted. It was never going to work.
-- Some shows have a brilliant idea for an overarching story, in which the big story and the individual characters' experiences and arcs mesh beautifully. Then that story comes to a natural end, and the show is never quite as good again. Veronica Mars Season 1 is a great example. Ditto the first 1 1/2 or 2 seasons of Alias. Ditto Babylon 5 after things were wrapped up in Season 4.
-- I'd put Battlestar Galactica into the same group. The best part was the first season, as everybody builds a society on the fly )as it were) that can survive against terrible odds. The plots with the election and the defeat and the aftermath weren't as good. And the pseudo-mystical stuff toward the end was just weird.
I thought Firefly was incredibly average. If I were to list the best SciFi shows of all time I don't think it would even occur to me to put it on the list. I honestly can't even think of the plots of any of the episodes. There was one with a guy in a spacesuit, I think it was red? and there was one with cattle or sheep?
I don't have anything against it. I just don't really find it remarkable at all.
Fans of Firefly, on the other hand, are the absolute worst. I used to have a game and see how many days I could go without reading someone online randomly bringing up how terrible it was that Firefly was cancelled. I rarely made it past Tuesdays.
I wonder how much Firefly has benefited from being cancelled so early. I imagine if Heroes got cancelled after about 10-13 episodes, it'd be very well perceived right now. The subsequent writers' strike mess and not being able to handle an evolving story messed that show up quite a bit. So many shows, even really well done ones, taper off at a point due to various production issues (Babylon 5 comes to mind).
I've watched Buffy, Angel, and Firefly several times all the way through (Firefly the most often, by far). Certainly, some of the magic of Buffy is gone when watching it as a middle aged man (I was an adult when watching it the first time, but just barely), but it's still enjoyable.
It was definitely a show that got better in the later seasons, but it was always funny and fun pop horror/fantasy, and the cast was excellent (except Michelle Trachtenberg's Dawn, who was just annoying). I think maybe Whedon's greatest talent back then was picking a good cast with great chemistry, which may be why Dollhouse failed so miserably, for me. So much of that cast was just wooden and utterly forgettable (I almost said "unlikable", but I can't remember anyone from the show other than Amy Acker and Eliza Dushku, so I can't even say I disliked the cast). Now that he's working with huge names, and the cast is already mostly set in stone, I'm not inclined to go see his films. I watched the first Avengers and remember it being funny, but not really anything else about it. The second was a snore.
Anyway, Angel was maybe more adult-friendly; at least it was intended to be, since no one could pretend David Boreanaz was young enough to be messing around with high school girls anymore. Though Buffy was always funnier.
But, Firefly is the best of them all. Surprisingly so, since all other Whedon shows are widely regarded as being best after they've had a season or so to find their rhythm. It seems reasonable to assume Firefly would have actually gotten better; the film hints at that potential. Though Serenity was rushed, it was still excellent, and would have made a top-notch series of episodes for the show if it'd been presented in that form.
Yeah I also had the odd acquaintance that did the same, ironically 99.9% of my other friends who claim to be "fans" and that Firefly is the "best thing ever" never bothered.
I don't think most of them even waited for it to come out on DVD but most likely pirated it and maybe bought it once it hit the bargain bin.
Various excuses have been used from "I don't want to see an episode in the theater" to "I don't want to give Fox money" but it doesn't really matter, people didn't came out to see it, and even the DVD sales unlike Firefly were pretty weak.
Anecdotally your friend that went to see it 6 times is also likely the reason why Firefly gets more votes cast on IMDB than The X-Files or Seinfeld.
The closest successor to Firefly, Dark Matter (minus the cowboy thing) only just made it to season 2 but is now renewed for season 3 by reducing production costs and selling older seasons to Netflix.
The new way people are watching TV is on-demand rather than on-air which is dramatically cutting ad-based income for traditional networks. If networks can partner or sell to streaming companies like Netflix it might help long tail shows like Firefly to survive in the future. Another great Syfy show, The Expanse, will hopefully survive that way whereas back in 2003 it would have been axed by now.
The article doesn't go out on that limb and try to say what anyone should have done.
Firefly had decent ratings when it first aired, so a lot of people were really confused that they canceled it. Those people apparently failed to understand television as a business, as in addition to those decent ratings, it was also expensive to produce, far more expensive than was justified by the decent viewership it was getting (there's a lot of shows now spending millions of dollars per episode on big name stars, but they have a lot more viewers than Firefly was getting...).
They did it with Serenity and it didn't work out that well, barely covered the production budget.
Nathan is way too old these days, it would be fun to see but I don't think it could ever live to the expectations of the fan base.
This is one of the problems with cult pop culture items, a lot of the following is based on the fact that the fanbase produced just as much content as there was originally if not more, and what the imagine is "perfect" but also very individual and the illusion of perfection would shatter when some one tries to make into something tangible.
Firefly is probably the best example of "never meet your heroes", it was an epic show, but part of it's epicness is what we've all imagined it could be if it only had X more episodes or years to go.
I don't think that Firefly is a show for nerds, I don't do 90% of the stuff that are considered "nerdy". I'm not into comics, I'm not into anime, I enjoy good scifi and fantasy because they are good not because of the genre.
Firefly is one of my favorite shows, but I can also see it's many flaws, and I honestly don't know if a 5-6 season Firefly would've been even as remotely good as the "Firefly" that fans imagine.
Firefly was very entertaining as a show and it set up a universe that allowed people's imagination to run wild with fan theories and fanfiction, but it doesn't mean that the show would ended up being half as good as the short preview we had.
The airing of the show was abysmal the episodes aired out of order and created a mess it was mishandled on every step but I can nearly guarantee you that if it would've went on the end result would've been considerably worse than the would be show the fans imagine in their heads.
Firefly is your highschool crush that you never had a chance of dating, it been put onto such a high pedestal that I could never live up to it's expectations, and when the fan base did get another chance with Serenity it flopped.
Serenity wasn't a bad movie, it was pretty well in line with the show in terms of quality of writing and performance, and the budget was considerably better but after years of imagination people just didn't came to watch it.
They got a movie that made 25M domestically (The DVD sales of Firefly made more), and about 14-15M world wide, it barely covered it's budget it made like 300K over the production costs which means that it most likely ended up losing money.
If Serenity would've been a huge success Fox would've greenlit additional movies (it's been 11 years since it came out so don't cry about spoilers) or even a renewal or spin off of the TV show even tho several characters died in the film.
But the fans pissed all over it, so I would have to say it's a good show but we all have a major selection bias because of our cultural bias, your mom might like the show but I can guarantee you her tastes are probably closer to yours that you might think since at least some part of your own cultural bias came from your parents.
And again I absolutly love Firefly, and I chuckle at the Firefly references and jokes in Castle (another show that was dragged way past it's lifespan) I do find the whole western/space opera theme extremely cool (one of the few animes I not only love but can actually bring myself to watch is CowBoy BeBop), but I'm not sold that it would've been a perfect show and a hit if it would've been let to run a full season or more.
I actually found the Western element of Firefly sufficiently overdone to cause my willing suspension of disbelief filter problems. I think there was one episode involving transporting cattle between planets for example. Probably one of the things that I least liked about the series.
Internet ranking for cult shows/movies is problematic, these shows have an extremely loyal fan base which ties the origins of the word fan to it's root fanatic quite often.
While these are great shows, the ranking don't necessarily mean much, it just means that there were more fans willing to give the show a good rating, and more likely than not on probably more than a few accounts.
It's hard to compare IMDB ratings properly when shows like America's Got Talent or the Voice only have 5000-7000 votes with a pretty shitty score while clearly being considerably more popular with the mass audience. Shows like GoT are an outlier with over 1M votes cast, while even highly acclaimed TV sci fi shows like Star Trek TNG have only about 60K votes.
Firefly is the "best tv show that got canceled ever" just like Kim Jong Un is Time's internet person of the year, mostly anonymous internet voting and highly loyal and fanatic fan base can easily skew statistics.
I love Firefly I would loved to have seen it live to be 5-6 seasons old, but every time I see people talk about it like it was the "greatest mistake" in modern television programming I can't really take them seriously.
I suspect that any boost gained by early cancellation would also have been gained by more episodes, and time for word of mouth to popularize it... unless Fox pulled more slow death dickery.
I can't really speak to Buffy and Angel, but with regards to Firefly and Dollhouse... The indication is that Whedon wouldn't so much fuck it up, but requirements by Fox would force him to fuck it up. Compare "Train Job" to the original first episode of Firefly. Compare early episodes of Dollhouse to later ones, particularly the encore episode.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I obsessed over Buffy (which I consider a guilty pleasure as I wasn't the target demographic of teenage-at-the-time girls), and enjoyed Angel to a lesser degree. Firefly absolutely blew me away, and was a starting point for several of its actors who have become successful in the years since. I've followed those actors into the shows they went on to do, with the exception of Nathan Fillion in Castle, which I found too cheesy for my taste.
But Dollhouse...the cast was great, the story was intriguing even if a little derivative, but somehow the show fell flat for me. I found myself struggling to watch it and gave up about 10 episodes in. I still have the first season DVD on my Amazon wish list but it's been on there since December 2010 and I still haven't brought myself to buy it, despite its price dropping below $10 several times in the past.
Maybe one day I'll pick it up and try again, but there's so much good TV out today and so little spare time to watch, I may never get around to it.
Who knows? Maybe if Firefly hadn't been cancelled, its audience might have evaporated, or Joss Whedon might have run out of ideas for new episodes (as unlikely as that sounds). We just can't know.
I think Firefly was absolutely terrific and the people at Fox were perfect morons not to see what they were destroying, but none of this is science and we can't possibly know what might have happened in an alternate future. For contrast, there's the "Matrix" sequels to show what can happen when projects aren't terminated when their sell-by date arrives.
Firefly+Serenity could be a pretty great ~20 episode series.
If it followed TV success, it would have 50-100 forgettable episodes to go with 20 good ones.
I think this applies to an awful lot of stuff on TV. The economics of it mean that buying season 5 is a better choice than taking a risk on something new. I think better stories would get told if series were generally shorter.
> Yep. TV's are not great at conveying radio plays. But, that's all people could think of to do with them initially. Turns out they are better for content like Game of Thrones.
I get what you're saying, but I think that's a rather terrible way to contrast radioplays and content made for TV. The experience of watching "Game of Thrones" isn't that different from listening to the BBC radioplay of "Lord of the Rings"[r]. I think "The Wire" or "Generation Kill" might be better examples of things that I think work better on TV, than I can imagine them doing on the radio. Or maybe "The Expanse" or even "Firefly".
Doesn't mean I don't like "Game of Thrones", I love the adaptation - but with its many characters and demanding storyline (even for those of us that have read the books) - I don't know. Somehow, while it is a beautiful production, I think it could've worked with a similar script for radio.
[l] Apparently the original series, in its 13 episode format isn't available to download/buy - if I understand it correctly the following Amazon link is to the remaster: https://www.amazon.com/Lord-Rings-Fellowship-Ring-Dramatised/dp/B000VTQAVS/ See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_%281981_radio_series%29#Re-release_in_2002
A search did turn up this: https://soundcloud.com/inkmore/sets/lord-of-the-rings-radio
Which I assume should probably be taken down due to copyright infringement.
That's one way to solve edge cases I suppose.
If your assassins tell you to watch Firefly they can finish their work before Season 2. It shows there are good people everywhere.
> I spent 20 minutes trying to find this reference and could not find anything convincingly close enough. It is a sci-fi reference or something that happened in our world? The only thing I could find was FireFly related.
It is a scifi/firefly reference. Spoilers ahead for the Serenity movie.
Miranda is a planet on a far far "edge" of the Verse (the "known universe" in Firefly) and considered fictional before the events of Serenity as the Alliance had basically struck it from records (and it was deep in "Reaver space" where people of the Verse don't go without a serious death wish). An Alliance research program was tried there: G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate ("Pax") had been found to reduce aggression, and on Miranda it was tried on a large scale, spread throughout the planet via the air processors system.
The compound pacified 99.9% of the population so much they basically stopped all drive. They stopped working, talking, feeding, moving and ultimately leaving.
The remaining 0.1% blew a gasket and went the exact opposite becoming ultra-violent self-mutilating merciless and fearless animalistic — but not stupid — monsters: the reavers, which have plagued the Verse since.
Excellent. The theory is that, for most people in the US (perhaps elsewhere?), one's reading / movie watching / tv watching tend to be clustered into specific time periods.
When Friends or Firefly were on, for example, I was watching a lot of TV (like you) because at that stage of my life I was settling into a long-term relationship (early twenties) and we found those to be mutually enjoyable things to watch. Movie watching tends to fall off around the time people start having kids. So far, on my friends-and-family (kids and grandparents alike) polls, it's pretty accurate.
Thanks again for answering :) I may just post my quick and dirty hack when I'm through playing with it.
The Black Mirror is an interesting case. It's got 7 episodes over 3 years and is exactly the kind of show Netflix wants so there going to produce another 12.
Honestly, I think really demonstrates a failing of TV and not a success. Like how firefly got 1/2 a season @ 14 episodes.
I, for one, am optimistic. Even though the JJ Abrams reboot movies sucked, he's not the only one who can do the work. There are hordes of people in Hollywood who grew up on Star Trek, love it properly, and want to bring back the spirit of exploration and optimism and the ensemble cast work that make the older series so compelling. I think the world needs a new Star Trek - one that isn't just shiny effects, but holds true to the sense of hope and courage that I loved and still love. And I know it can be done.
On the plus side, the quality of ensemble-cast science fiction tv writing has exploded over the past 15-20 years, starting with how Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer built season and multi-season story arcs that depended on character growth. I would love to see the sort of rich, passionate writing that made Firefly, Walking Dead, and other shows so effective applied to Star Trek!
And I'm a little biased toward the development of web-only series - some friends of mine are doing Cartoon Network's first web-only series, and I'm really hoping it succeeds spectacularly and points a new direction for CN. Fixed timeslots in general are a dated way of doing shows now. Timeshifting is the norm.
So yeah, hope for a bright future. And screw the Prime Directive.
Shows are expensive to make period it just depends what is your "catch", drama's can be also very expensive to make especially historical ones Broadwalk empire has nearly the same budget as GOT, Rome (the HBO & BBC one) was the most expensive show ever made besides friends which had a budget of over 10M$ per episode because much of the cast was being paid over 1M per episode.
It's not always the budget it's also the production Firefly managed to make very good use of VFX with relatively "small" budget, BSG didn't had an explosive budget either, Star Gate had also a relatively small budget with the VFX heavy episodes having less than 400,000$ effects budget they just used it rather well.
On the other hand you can have very high budget shows looking like B-movie quality, Terra Nova, Falling Skies and Fox's attempts at scifi Almost Human (which was a freaking amazing show and Fox exec's need to pay in blood) and their current Minority Report shows are very expensive but have very low quality looking effects.
And if you want the best example of how budget can easily be misused well then Agents of Shield had a 14M budget for the pilot and even the per episode budget was considerably lower it was still pretty damn high and they still managed to completely cock it up both in the visuals and the story/plot departments.
IF they'll build a solid production team hopefully there are some folks at Paramount Television that worked on previous shows and are still either alive and or working in TV production and give them budget and creative freedom to work then we might get a good product, if this is going to be brand managed like AOS then it's going to be completely bonkers.
AOS is tethered to the cinematic Marvel's universe and it's it's biggest flaw, it's plot is completely dictated by the movies and it spoiled Cap 2 for me and just became a running joke.
Agent Carter was considerably better because it was set back enough in the past that they can do anything without having to tie it in with the movies.
And this is my biggest must have for this show, either put it in the original canon, reboot it again, or throw it so far away from the movies that it couldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole or don't make it at all.
Well I was hooked on Dare Devil, The IT Crowd, House of Cards and Firefly on the first episode, but these shows pander to me beyond just plot, I'm sure you can detect the theme for most of them. I'm sure there is a key point for most shows that most who watch up to that point end up watching the whole thing. BSG I remember took 10-12 episodes before I really got into it, and I only went that far because people wouldn't shut up about how good it was. There are also shows I really liked but either dragged on or I just lost interest in or was just frustrated by the characters (The Killing, Buffy, etc)
Nope, no attempt at bandwidth controls from my end. My wife is watching some kind of HD stream from her home country, I'm watching netflix or youtube and web surfing, and have 3 torrents pulling down from archive.org right now at around 1-2Mb/s.
I'm sure there's some kind of fallback to SD from Netflix, their webpage claims I need 5Mb/s to get 720p, and 25Mb/s for "Ultra HD" (whatever that is and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting that for old episodes of Firefly) leaving me with somewhere between 25-45Mb/s. I'm pretty sure my wife isn't gobbling all that up with whatever it is she's watching. Web browsing is much lighter.
So all told, worst case I'm looking at
- 6Mb/s torrents
- 5Mb/s Netflix
- let's say 5Mb/s for my wife's video
- some fraction of 1Mb/s for our collective web surfing
Maybe 17-20Mb/s?
Amazingly, with all that going on, if I go do a speed test, it still showed me around 40/50 so I'm definitely under that.
Hey cool thanks, that's great! I haven't seen many of those, but I liked Firefly, BSG, GoT, and VM S1-2 (haven't seen S3). I've seen Buffy S1 and the musical episode, I probably should revisit it.
My top recommendations would be Twin Peaks, My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, Sports Night, and Arrested Development. I like a lot of shows that get cancelled "early".
The "myth arc" episodes of the X-Files are worth it, but don't try to sit through all 9 seasons. Recently, Better Call Saul is awesome for the emotional depth and film noir aspects, and the previous Breaking Bad to which it's a prequel is still a masterpiece even though I find the premise implausible. The Walking Dead is seriously addictive too.
Firefly is great, albeit short.
I was forced to watch Buffy, but while the first season makes you cringe, it is pretty good. Not as stellar as people claim, but really good. I think Joss Whedans masterpiece wasn't Buffy, it was Toy Story. But do watch the musical episode "Once More, With Feeling"!
Babylon 5, of course, if you can tolerate the (even for the time) bad CGI.
I've just watched DS9 from beginning to end, something I had wanted to do for 15 years now. Hasn't aged well, and I hadn't seen it in English before. Avery Brooks' overpronunciation is painful, but it is the best Star Trek series by far.
Friends was something I've enjoyed as a teen, and later as an adult. It was a totally different experience as an adult. I think that's worth a lot, to have a depth that appeals differently to you in different stages of your life.
Modern Family was way better than expected.
ALF is a bit painful to watch nowadays, it also hasn't aged well.
Golden Girls are probably still great, The Cosby Show definitely is!
Boston Legal is fun, fun, fun! Hey, why shouldn't Nantucket be allowed to habe its own nuclear weapons? But do watch all the newer Star Trek series before BL, so you can appreciate the ST heavy cast.
Dallas! Oh my. Incredible how old Victoria Principal is today.
ER was great, but I haven't seen much of the last seasons. I also liked Chicago Hope, but it clearly lost.
The 2004 Battlestar Galactica. Probably the most modern TV series of its time, great themes and issues, pretty current, fantastic buildup to the big finale and then... disappointment.
Game of Thrones, if only for the shock value ;-)
And at last, the Tv series I've probably enjoyed most in the last few years: the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. But make sure you can stomach it, the season finales are sickeningly evil (especially season 2).
> 1. The shift from cheaply produced, low quality content, to higher quality "must see" shows.
I think that the kind of direct analytics that Netflix has is making something obvious to execs that never was before. "must see" is a HIGHLY subjective term and there's a long tail.
In other words if you're just looking at aggregates the really popular, cheap to produce shows are the clear winners. Reality TV.
But if you look at segments or demographics, it might become clear that the Firefly/X files/Dr Who demo demands at least one good nerdy/sci fi show at any given time and lacking that, they will cancel their subscription.
Similarly any other particular demo that you want to look at might demand content that fits thematically lest they too start looking elsewhere to spend their entertainment dollars.
In a weird way it's sort-of gratifying that Netflix is storing so much viewing data because I think it will eventually become clear (if it's not already) that "niche" shows really are mainstream for certain groups of people and absolutely worth making.
Ah, this model works very well for that use case, and you should definitely read this: http://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/joss-whedon-on-kickstarter-and-firefly#.ybAg0R8EmX
It is easier to do a feature film and a whole TV series, because while your props, costumes, sets etc. can be reused and things do speed up a bit with familiarity you're still looking at spending maybe $200,000/week in salaries and overhead. Drop me a line if you really want to know more about the production side. I'm thinking of writing up an e-book or something, partly in anticipation of the SEC opening up proper investment-style crowdfunding and partly to put together cash money for a film I want to do.
On smaller films, yes and no. What you'll see is more of a bimodal distribution - the big megastar films like the Avengers or anything with an A-list cast (eg 2 big stars and a few small ones) are not going away - those people know what they are doing in terms of story, production, marketing and so on and the people that work on them are the cream of the industry. Even when the results feel forced (eg some of the Star Wars prequels) they still make their money back many many times over.
And there will still be lots of small budget films, partly because it's more accessible due to technology, partly because people need some way to get onto the industry ladder, and partly because it's addictive. But times are tough budgetarily; to quote on industry exec overheard at the last Sundance, 'what used to be a $10m film is now $5m, what used to be $5m is now $3m, $1m is the new $3m....').
It's important to remember that costs don't scale linearly, but they go up in fits and starts, depending on which guilds and unions the production company has signed contracts with. So if I'm doing my first feature film, I can pay some writer a few thousand for a screenplay, or better, write it myself. But if I want a budget above a certain size I'd be better off with a Writer's Guild of America member (not least to tempt investors, who don't actually know from reading a script and a budget whether a film is going to be any good), and the minimum price for a WGA to turn in a feature script is $92,000. That's even if you write it yourself, eg Quentin Tarantino gets paid to write the script, direct the film, and produce the movie (as he should, because each of those is a full-time job in its own way). So when you make films in the tens or hundreds of thousands budget range, it's OK to ask people to work for free or pay minimum wage and buy worker's comp insurance, but once your budget is over a million your crew costs jump substantially because now the unions want a piece. And while I'm not that big a fan of unions it's mainly because they bring a lot of extra administrative bullshit and some obstructive work rules. The jump in expenses because of extra pay is just what people deserve, because of the inherently unsteady nature of the work, the very long hours and elevated physical risks, and the fact that virtually everyone in the industry does a huge amount of work for free or stupid cheap.
The basic problem from internet distribution, legal and illegal, is not so much the actual downloads in many cases as the fact that it makes revenue very unpredictable for producers and investors, and so the lower end of the market faces constant economic pressure because investors are understandably wary. I expect this to stabilize a bit as Netflix, Amazon, and others start doing more global buys, and equity crowdfunding is finally allowed to take place. But the practical reality for people in the industry has been that internet distribution and the culture of working for free that goes with it have broken a lot of the lower rungs on the ladder. I expect to see demographics within the film industry skew a bit older over the next decade because of this.
I was refering to what you call "unfashionable old TV show". Specifically I was hoping somehow to use this model to resurrect firefly...
That said if that model cannot sustain huge movies like we see them today, that may mean we end up with smaller movies.
Rock Band. Watching nerdy TV shows/movies with strong female characters (firefly, DS9, Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
Though the best way is probably to find female attendees and ask them what they want, or invite them to be part of the planning and to choose activities.
I don't normally go on "pop culture rants", but as an ex-whedon fan, he's the worst of the bunch for me, and I'd be more than happy to see his work relegated in favor of more unique IP. I can't deny the "technical quality" of his work, but eventually you watch enough sci-fi and realize that while of course everyone pulls heavily from their predecessors, Whedon takes the kitchen sink. Dollhouse was the breaking point for me, both in terms of it being a weak, less predictive imitation of RuR, and the fact that at the end of the day, he has a pattern. He has good actors for that pattern, but you see them enough times and seeing them more times isn't really adding to anything.
There's a lot of noise about mourning the death of sci-fi/cinema etc, but the gems have always been the outliers. Metropolis and later Dark City, Delicatessen/City of Lost Children, Firefly(yes, I'll give him that one, outlaw star has some things to say, but that plot trope was already as old as the Romans.), Primer, Dark Mirror, I'm rambling at this point and this is totally going to spawn another sci fi binge, but my takeaway is that there's been a reasonable stream of surprisingly good sci fi that has popped up in unpredictable places over the years, even into the torrent era. I have some faith it will continue to bubble to the top. My theory is that the only reason good sci fi seems so rare now is that it has become so swamped by bad sci fi as it has begun to fill the mainstream.
My nerdy peer group say they want e.g. better sci fi & fantasy and worship Joss Whedon. They also solidly torrented Firefly, Dollhouse, etc. Then they got bitter that Whedon can't get TV series made any more.
The Firefly series got enough support (in the form of written letters - this was pre-kickstarter) to be made into movie after a comically botched distribution through normal channels (The first seasons episodes were aired out of order in random time slots on Fox. It never had a weekly time that was consistent. This was the only season, natch.)
Family Guy also had a similar fate, but not because of a botched launch, but because its audience existed, but did not consume television through mainstream sources. It was canceled after 2.5 seasons and then went on to become the best selling animated DVD series. Fox brought it back the next year.
Two thoughts:
1. Certain standalone authors had that strength. Stephen King certainly did in the 80s-90s.
2. I think this is why certain fiction series tend to have very strong followings. Regardless of the HBO Series, people were hungry for "Dance with Dragons" when it came out.
The internet certainly helps with TV series. Much of the popularity of "LOST" was the skillful manipulation of that popularity by the production. Compare "LOST" with "Heroes" (poor quality rapidly squandered popularity) and "Firefly" (utter failure to leverage the growing fandom.)
For those not in the know:
> Firefly is an American space western drama television series [...] The series is set in the year 2517, after the arrival of humans in a new star system, and follows the adventures of the renegade crew of Serenity, a "Firefly-class" spaceship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_%28TV_series%29
I don't want a Firefly sequel, at this point the only thing that could happen to it, realistically, is making it worse. It's good as it is, let it lie, invent some new IP or dig up something that hasn't been on the screen yet.
I could maybe go for a Foundation mini-series. Baring that, lots of other possibilities out there in terms of books or fresh ideas.
Which Firefly episode did you watch first though?
They are out of order.
Why does "character driven" have to imply "starts slow"?
Maybe we have different ideas of what that phrase mean, but for example, I'd say that Firefly was "character driven" and yet was able to hook me (and lots of other people) within about ten minutes.
Anyway, the discussion here isn't so much about why people like or dislike The Wire, but more of a meta-discussion about how you can determine whether a show is worth watching, and how much of something you have to see before you're allowed to say you didn't like it. dublinben seems to imply that you can't declare dislike unless you've literally watched the entire thing from beginning to end. The question is then raised as to why you'd spend that much time watching a series if you didn't like what you saw of it to start with, and responses which talk about how great The Wire is once you put a lot of time into it are then entirely missing the point.
I wonder if this works for TV shows.
I know plenty of people who like all/most of Firefly, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dollhouse, Defying Gravity, Almost Human, etc.
All shows that got cancelled after a season or two because they failed to attract a wide enough audience.
I believe it was a reference to the fictional communication system in Joss Whedon's short-lived TV show, Firefly.
Killing people is not the same as torture, and is not serving the same purpose.
The Firefly gang fight and kill all the time, the first episode forces a pacifist (Book) to confront his objections to violence in a nontrivial moral situation. What they don't do routinely as a tactic is torture people.
A better counterexample would be Jayne and the fed: "Damn, and I was gonna get me a ear, too..."
I can't help recalling Firefly, where (spoilers) only the worst, most sadistic bad guy (Adelai Niska) tortures people[1]. He does so using any method he can, not to get information but just because he loves to do it. It is obviously also a warning to other people not to annoy him, but this is almost a secondary purpose, at best equal with causing immense pain to his enemies.
This is a reasonably accurate depiction of torture, as far as I understand the science of it, and it's one of the few reasons torture might actually be used (i.e. at the orders of a complete psychopath.) - although Mal Reynolds seems unfeasibly good at resisting it (any evidence that this occasionally happens? I'd be interested to hear.)
[1] You can read about the character here: http://firefly.wikia.com/wiki/Adelai_Niska and you can buy the DVD of the original series here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Firefly-The-Complete-Series-DVD/dp/B0001B3YTM (check out, in similar items, the film Serenity, which rounds off the plotlines from the series nicely.)
> If you quote William Gibson's analysis of Japanese society as authoritative or insightful, you already lose...In terms of tech adoption, Japan may have been ahead of the USA in some respects, but in terms of how their society is structured they're still a few decades behind. Their treatment of women, in particular, would strike an American as archaic and quaintly Mad Men at best, and at worst barbaric and abusive.
I am reminded of a recent discussion on 4chan of, amusingly enough, this very essay, where a 4channer reading the appendix noticed that I wrote "mediums" instead of "media", and outraged, wondered how anyone could take seriously anything I had ever written since I could not even use the word correctly.
At the risk of outraging you still further, can't it be true that "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed"? Can't it be possible that in some respects Japanese society is further ahead on a trend than the USA, and in other respect behind?
> Younger Japanese (age 40 and below) tend to be more worldly and cognizant of other cultures, and understand that the social structures which served their parents and grandparents are keeping Japan held back and isolated, economically and socially.
I wonder... Not very long ago, I finished reading my first 'visual novel', one called _Umineko_. The patriarch of the protagonist's family is what one might almost call a Western otaku - English-speaking, European-literature-loving, contemptuous of all things Japanese, and a few spoiler things as well - and the novels themselves are heavily influenced by Western murder mysteries & a bit of philosophy too. I was struck by how old-fashioned this preference seemed in the character. Similarly, I have spent a lot of time on Gainax & Hideaki Anno, and one thing that comes across is how much old Western SF and television Anno & other Gainaxers must have consumed, given the pervasiveness of the references in their work. But younger directors and anime industry figures seem to reference Western materials much less - I would be very surprised to see a _Babylon V_ or _Firefly_ reference in any anime I watched, whereas Anno would freely throw in allusions to Anderson's _Thunderbirds_ TV series and now-obscure Western works like that. I've also seen claims by occasional Japan-related writers that actual English proficiency has declined, which certainly might reduce Western exposure, given how much of it would be in English. All of which makes me wonder what objective metrics there could be for 'more worldly and cognizant of other cultures' and what they would show over the past 3 or 4 decades in Japan?
Author here. I don't disagree with you, especially in the second paragraph. To some degree I think it was smart for Netflix to make a big splash this early on. But the perception that they're "paying for quality" is a bit suspect, given that Hollywood itself -- ostensibly "paying for quality" in its entire process -- has a 98% failure rate on developing projects. Quality talent doesn't always yield a quality product in the creative business. Even the best writers, directors, producers, and actors have their failures. I have no reason to suspect Netflix was any smarter in its approach to developing House of Cards than networks would have been -- though I could be wrong (and hope I am).
At the end of the day, the $100M for HoC was a big bet. It was a signaling tactic, a marketing tactic, and a bet on top-tier talent. But it was a bet, nonetheless, and an expensive one. That it seems to have paid off (to an extent? jury is still out) shouldn't fool us into 20/20 hindsight bias. It could just easily have busted.
"So as I understand it, the author is suggesting that NetFlix produce a bunch of low-rent pilots (or half seasons or so) throw them against their wall of subscribers with a bit of recommendation-targeted magic, see what sticks, then spend the money to produce the "grown up" versions."
Not necessarily, and I should clarify here. I think pilots can be shot for a lot less than they are, and I think audiences are proving themselves quite receptive to previews and other short-form "pilot" systems as proofs of concept. A lot of movie trailers are increasingly being made before the movies even start shooting ("teaser" trailers). I think there are ways Netflix can take the guesswork out of the development process, even if production is still an expensive endeavor.
You have to pay for a quality product, but the system right now also pays heavily for the risk in the pre-production process. That process can probably be de-risked considerably.
I would not recommend testing 100 half-baked concepts to see what sticks. But I do think Netflix could test or tease concepts in development to determine which ones to develop, and/or how to present new shows to the right early adopters.
Something I probably wasn't as clear about as I could have been: half the battle in finding a hit is developing an audience, not just a show. Netflix has better audience-development capabilities at all stage of the production equation. It doesn't need to guess quite as much as networks do.
Maybe -- to your point -- Netflix's audience-segmenting capabilities give it the ability to play the big bets game more than networks can. But historically, people have been shockingly bad at predicting what will actually hit and what will miss. Star Wars was laughed out of every major movie studio in town, for instance, and at the script level, it sure didn't look like "quality" to the eyes of the execs reading it. On the other end of the spectrum, a show like Firefly -- which fans (including myself) consider one of the most brilliant things ever made, has repeatedly failed to gain mass appeal beyond its limited niche, despite many attempts at re-marketing home video, a feature film, etc. The operative lesson here is that "quality," as an objective concept, is hard to parse and hard to pin down. "Quality" is more of a function with a lot of variables, and many of the biggest variables are on the production side and the audience side -- not the development side.
Tldr: People are over-investing in development, when they could be investing more heavily in production -- whether at greater scale, or in greater depth per project.
Complete agreement.
Let's use another great sci-fi 'verse to provide context on why the "frontier" is not a necessary backdrop for good Star Wars, but rather, was a convenient short-hand for the rebel alliance who had to live there.
In Firefly, the browncoats lived in the outer planets (the frontier) because they wanted to be far away from the Alliance (ironic, I know) in the central planets. This embodied the separatist/individualist spirit.
But we needed aspects of the Alliance to show a sharp contrast to what the browncoats fought against and lost to. Some of the best moments in Firefly came from Ariel or Trash, which were set very much in the Alliance world.
So how does this relate back to this wonderfully produced (hey, nice commercial!) but woefully short-sighted plea from some group who claims to speak for the "fans". Well if you ONLY watched the original trilogy, you would think that Star Wars was all about the frontier. After all, there was no Coruscant and the moments in the Death Star were really limited in backdrop and exposition.
Then again, if you've read any of the canon books or played any of the games, you will know that dozens of storytellers have expanded the Star Wars universe, giving it beautiful color and context around the edges that 7-8 hours of the original trilogy couldn't possibly cover.
Sure the prequels were bad, but they were bad because they're bad movies. I certainly don't agree with the de-mysticism of the Force, or Jar Jar, or the implicit racism, or Han not shooting first or Mannequin Skywalker's casting, but let's be honest, those are just bad movie dialogue, story-telling and direction. These are problems every movie has (have you seen Howard the Duck?)
The reason the prequels were NOT about the frontier because it's really a story about Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin and Palpatine, whom coincidentally, all lived in Coruscant, a city. The original trilogy were about Luke, Han, Chewie and Leia and they all lived in the frontier, away from the Empire. Let's also not overlook the fact that Threepio is comic relief and the Ewoks are cute.
In conclusion, let J.J. Abrams make a good movie and let's not put artificial boundaries in because we have some misguided fanboy adherence to rules that were made up to begin with. If we listened to the fanboys, we'd never have Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Heath Ledger as the Joker and there would be 30 minutes of Tom Bombadil singing in the Lord of the Rings.
TL;DR: Let JJ Abrams do his job without constraint and Firefly rocks.
I'm over 20, and I've never heard of the author, group, song, or movie.
For another data point, I know plenty of people who had never heard of The Princess Bride, Firefly or Monty Python before me telling them.
There is no level of popularity which ensures universal familiarity. You should always assume ignorance is genuine. See also: http://xkcd.com/1053/
In immigrant circles, we lament this notion that the first generation works its ass off, the second generation studies its ass off, and the third generation parties its ass off. I think that what we see in cinema is kind of linked.
America post-WWII worked and studied its ass off. Then it defeated the Soviets. You ask people today though, what they think of the future, and I think that the picture is bleak not merely because of the economic malaise, but because people don't know what to strive for.
In a competitive sense, who are we fighting? Our ostensible enemies are (1) the lunatic fringe of Islam and maybe also Christianity, and (2) China/India, depending on who looks more fearful in any given year, except the West also trades and intermarries with those cultures. I think the kicker is that Westerners don't even fetish after Chinese and Indians the way they used to.
Now in a purely constructive sense, what does the future hold? Well we've already seen that the tech industry simply isn't providing jobs for most people the way that manufacturing did. And why should it? Lets face it, our culture is not one that really values math or science or engineering. Most of you weren't popular when you were kids, am I right? It's not nice to hoard all of the pie, but it's not easy to share it on these terms either. The best programmers are supposedly 10x-100x better than the average ones, so even if more people did get into tech, they'd probably be discouraged and see it to be insurmountably difficult, and they might be right.
Tech has increased the productivity of workers in the West, but it has not necessarily increased the well-being of the average person, and that's what cinema was originally made for. It is a mass media. It caters to the common man, and the common man probably thinks better of the past than the future. I think it isn't surprising then that the latest Star Trek actually feels strangely like a retro-future, or that the tech in it is just shiny polished toys. I think that's the real danger here, that in tech, we will simply just relegate ourselves to making shiny toys for people, and all they do is consume. That's probably not the path to a healthy future for our society.
It may be instructive to look at a series like Firefly, or even BSG. When people are feeling down, they want to be empathized, and Firefly assuages that in a way. In the future, even if things all go to hell, some people will still make it out, by the ties they share and their ingenuity.
Let me get this straight.
Any investigative journalism that does not directly address what you believe to the most important topic (the legitimacy of the US government) is automatically not actual investigative journalism. Not only that, anything that does not address your favorite championed cause is automatically "small potatoes" that is in fact part of the conspiracy for journalists all over the country to fool everyone into believing real journalism is occurring.
Are you seriously leveling this claim?
In other news, all sci-fi TV shows are in fact not actual sci-fi TV shows because they aren't Firefly.
Firefly season 2
I wonder what would happen to a show like Firefly[1] or Jericho[2] Caprica[3]if they were suspended after the first season, and the studio put up a kickstarter saying "We'll cancel unless we get $2m from fans of the show".
At least those shows do stand a chance with fan-backing. Something like 'Rubicon' would, I think, totally fail at kickstarter even though it was good.
[1] A great show. I'm not sure how well it would have lasted with the traditional US "spin out a series for as long as possible" format. But, with careful plotting, it would have been an amazing 3 season (12 episodes per season) show.
EDIT: Fox hates the Firefly fanbase. (http://io9.com/fox-bans-the-sale-of-unlicensed-jayne-hats-from-firefly-471820413) Really, this is just open contempt for people who are willingly promoting your content.
[2] I really wanted to like this. I did like the first series. I really wanted an OQO (the tiny handheld computer that one of the characters has). But the second series was daft. This could have been a pretty good show and it's a shame it's gone.
[3] Caprica was good, I thought. Had some interesting concepts.
"even the trope-busters are, themselves, tropes (cf. Joss Whedon's parade of badass waifs)."
Don't forget http://io9.com/5959794/the-firefly-episode-were-really-glad-joss-whedon-didnt-get-to-make
I'm not sure that he would go this route. Based on what he's said in interviews, I get the sense that although he loves the Firefly characters as much as us, he DID get a chance to make the movie (Serenity) to wrap it up. VM fans/Rob Thomas didn't get that chance, hence this Kickstarter.
Also with the huge success of Avengers, Joss is going to be busy directing big budget sci-fi/fantasy/awesome movies for a while.
VM was one of those smart shows that died an early death, kindof like Arrested Development or Firefly. For the longest time fans of movies and TV have been able to buy DVDs, tickets to cons, posters, action figures, etc., but all of that is a proxy for what fans really want to buy: MORE CONTENT. Glad to see this working.
Here is the most complete and eloquent explanation of Big Bang Theory hate that I have read:
http://butmyopinionisright.tumblr.com/post/31079561065/the-problem-with-the-big-bang-theory
I recommend reading the whole thing. The snippet that pulled me in was the perfect comparison to Community:
"There’s a saying which made its rounds in geekdom recently – “Real nerds watch Community”. Now I take issue with the idea of “real nerds” but the sentiment still stands. Whereas The Big Bang Theory sees nerd culture as an object of ridicule, Community celebrates it. Community’s laughing with you whereas Big Bang is giving you a wedgie and laughing at you. When TBBT makes a pop culture reference it uses it as a punchline, it names a show like Firefly and asks you to laugh at it. When Community makes a pop culture reference it commits. Community makes a whole episode based on a trope or a genre, it doesn’t just use paintball as a plot device it takes paintball seriously and bases two season finales around epic battles of paint. Community doesn’t laugh at the idea of playing D&D it bases an episode on it. Parallels can be drawn between the characters of Sheldon in Big Bang and Abed in Community. Abed too has trouble reading sarcasm and emotion, he has obsessions with routine and structure as well and disruptions in routine cause him considerable distress. Abed sees everything in terms of television and film tropes. This is how he understands the world around him and how he figures out how best to react. Unlike Sheldon, it is often confirmed that Abed does have mental difficulties, most likely Asperger’s Syndrome. But, crucially, the main difference between Sheldon and Abed is that Abed is treated as a hero. In the pilot episode Jeff Winger, arguably the most conventionally “cool” member of the group says this: “Abed is a shaman. You ask for bread and Abed gives you soup because soup is better. Abed is better”. In one episode Abed is literally treated as a god. Yes, his neuroses do at times inconvenience the rest of the group but his belief that they see him as a nuisance is dismissed as his own insecurity rather than the truth. Community positions us, its audience, as Abed. It knows that we are knowledgeable about the things we love, it knows that we understand tropes and genre conventions, it gives us the benefit of the doubt and treats us as intelligent human beings who will not only understand the meta pop culture references, but will find them funny and love the show for it. Community tells us it’s cool to be a nerd. If Abed is better then we are better. Community is a warm hug of acceptance whereas The Big Bang Theory is a pantsing and a punch in the face."
I'm not a fan of political shows. That said, I decided to watch House of Cards last night.
It's not bad. Having Kevin Spacey as the lead is good. There's a good cast of supporting actors too. The writing is a bit mundane, but not terrible. I know the show is somewhat of a remake of a BBC show from a while back, but I never watched it so my take is purely on this experience.
I plan on watching the rest of it. It was interesting enough to have keep me up till 5am doing the "just one more" thing. The format of no commercials and having all the episodes available at launch is a really good thing. I was pleasantly surprised when the 2nd episode started playing as I finished the first one. I was fully expecting to have to wait a week to see the next one. No episode felt rushed, like things had to be crammed into a specific time slot.
The things that work for this format:
1) Release at once 2) Natural variable time lengths 3) Good production values 4) Good cast 5) Decent writing
If they use this as a framework for other types of genres, I think it will be good. I'd personally like to see the next show be sci-fi. Something with a unique premise that has never really been done by networks, because they screw it up. No time travel, or future detective, or alien invaders thing. Something gritty but uplifting, along the veins of Babylon 5, TNG, or BSG.
I'd like to see a near-future show about solar system colonization. Could have an entire system-wide, multi cultural backdrop like Firefly. Hell, try getting Josh Whedon to do it. Visits to Luna, Mars, asteroid mining colonies, deep space science labs, political intrigue from Earth, the companies that own colonies, immigration rights, etc. The solar system as a backdrop is big enough to have an infinite number of stories, but keeps everything so close together that it feels real. Star Trek provided a big galactic tapestry, but many times still felt distant and isolated.
Anyway, check out HoC if you have Netflix. Hopefully we'll see more shows from them.
Interesting that he uses the term "objects in space" on this text. I wonder if it was inspired by the Firefly episode with the same name, which itself reflects the directors reading of Nausea[1].
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausea_(novel)
> What I'd really love to see is a popular tv show with a loyal fan base but marginal viewers on cable to just switch over 100% to Youtube. Put the episodes in full HD and run regular Youtube ads. Maybe do some in-show advertisement, product placement, that kind of thing.
The budget for one Top Gear episode (for example) is greater then what PSY made from his youtube video with a Billion views.
On top of that, even the smaller networks enjoy a built in audience of hundreds of thousands (if not several million) viewers for each new show they put out there. If you start a show from obscurity it has a much steeper hill to climb.
If you take an already existing show, like you say, it will lose most of its audience because people will think "whatever happened to" and promptly forget about it. That's how good stuff like Firefly gets killed, you move the schedule around a bit and ratings tank because people don't keep up with that.
I'm not one of those "Firefly is t3h greatest show evar" people but I would still say that, yes, Firefly is better than Citizen Kane. But we would have to define what we mean by "better".
Citizen Kane gets a lot of rightful attention for being historic and groundbreaking in a number of ways, especially by people who have never seen it. Unfortunately, despite often being conflated, "groundbreaking" and "good" are not really the same thing. Now, don't get me wrong, Citizen Kane is a fine film and still worth watching today. But divorce it from its historic role and consider modern audiences. Think about what it would be like if released today. At best it would be critically-acclaimed and lauded by a small audience without ever seeing mainstream appeal, much as Firefly has.
Now, granted, I haven't gone a single shred toward showing that Firefly is actually any better than Citizen Kane though I have gone some way to putting them on roughly the same level. And Firefly has more explosions and space zombies making it more watchable for many people today.
Is Firefly really better than Citizen Kane? It will never be widely thought so by critics but I can definitely see an argument where it is better for modern audiences and I really think that's what matters at the end of the day.
Citizen Kane is famous for a bunch of different reasons, including advancing the state of the art of cinema and being basically a flawless masterpiece. But probably the thing that stands out the most today is its psychological depth, in that to this day it's arguably still the best character study ever done.
Firefly doesn't have that sort of psychological depth, but it does have a lot of moral ambiguity, something that's virtually non-existant in CK. That's something that would have gone a lot deeper had the show gotten another two or three seasons, but they never got that chance. It also has some of the most clever writing of any TV show, up there with only Arrested Development really. Cleverness might not be as prized by critics as authentic character writing, but it's still at the top of its form nonetheless. The main downside of the show was that it was already starting to get a bit formulaic toward the end of season one when they canceled it. In any event, I don't think you could ever put Firefly above Citizen Kane, but certainly I think it pushed the boundaries of its genre in a way that is rare.
The Avengers, on the other hand, has virtually no redeeming value whatsoever except for Joss Whedon's clever writing during the second half and the amazing effects during the NYC fight scene.
I think you could at least make an argument that Firefly is comparable to Citizen Kane. It makes a lot more sense than saying that The Avengers is the third best movie of all time.
"Look at the popular SciFi shows of the last few years. Namely Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Both presented a future that was lived in, almost dirty."
Good point. One reason the first three Star Wars movies were so popular is that the places they showed looked "real". They looked reasonably lived in, solid places with actual inhabitants. The Falcon looked like my parents used station wagon.
It can go wrong, the Aliens movies always end up in a future that's positively filthy. Blade Runner, I think, sits just on the fithy side of the line. But future LA feels like a real "place".
My personal favorite vision of the future is the one presented in the Fifth Element loosely based on Valérian and Laureline. It's lived in, bustling, stylish (at various levels of fashion), shiny and bright where it counts, unfashionable where it should be and just dirty enough in the places that should be dirty. Small details, like the dirt Leeloo picks up when escaping the lab, add to this feeling of solidity. Popular culture is magnified to stand out amongst the crushing masses, and it seems like a place with endless nooks and crannies to explore. It's not utopian, but it's not dystopian. It feels like what the future would be like if it were the present...and somebody made a modern day adventure movie. It has an amazing tone.
It's amazing to me that more works haven't been created in that universe.
The other element is the fact that like Lilyhammer, all 10-13 episodes of the series will be released at once, setting fans up for epic marathon sessions.
I think this is the beginning of an entirely new format. So far we've been restricted to the video equivalent of serials and short stories with TV shows and movies respectively. Its time for the rise of the video long-form novel.
There are certain stories (like Firefly IMHO) that really need this format to work. They make terrible serials from a network execs POV (because if you miss an ep or two, it becomes really hard to get into it later) and movies that only a fan could love by jamming too much story into 2 hours.
I think TV series is a bit too much. I mean, even I liked Firefly but "emotionally investing"? Come on.
On a different note, I do have a smartphone. But I hesitate as hell to buy apps on my Android (no paid app here) for the very fear that if I suddenly jump to another platform I'll lose everything. Of course, I'm quite new to this "new" smartphone generation.
My previous smartphone was a S60 Symbian over 6 years ago.
> I think that over the next 50 years, various Chinese phrases, language quirks and usage will start bleeding into English
Right on. That was one of my favorite elements of the Firefly TV series.
Hey I don't watch a lot of movies, but I love tv shows. Any thoughts on incorporating metacritic as a backup when rotten tomatoes isn't available? That would be amazing. Also preferably use the user score, because critic reviews are pretty bad. Take for example Firefly, there's not even a critic score for it, however there is a very accurate 9.6 user score :)
Mal, Inara, Jayne, Kaylee, River, Simon and Wash are all characters from the television series "FireFly." Jubal Early (Richard Brooks) is the bounty hunter in the last episode who ultimately ends up as an object in space.
Throughout the episode, his hypothetical situations always end with the rhetorical question, "Does that seem right to you?"
My comment was a tip of the hat back to Chris Stucchio. I enjoyed the article and also look forward to more.
> According to the "Economics of Anime" post, it should be possible now for people to revive gone but beloved shows in that medium on Kickstarter. New episode of Firefly, anyone?
That IP is owned by Fox isn't it? Surely Fox would notice the large amount of cash on the table and demand a large percentage cut of it.
I think this model only works for well-known creators making new work. So Joss Whedon could make something new by using his popularity to raise funds...
(Edit: not to ignore the unknown people out there using kickstarter to make work. They're a workable model too)
The argument used to be that everything was as it should be because only big media could make you famous enough for this sort of thing to work on a big scale. Uh-oh.
Uh-oh is right. This is the sort of thing that Scott McCloud wanted to bring about with micropayments -- a more direct connection between artists and their fans.
According to the "Economics of Anime" post, it should be possible now for people to revive gone but beloved shows in that medium on Kickstarter. New episode of Firefly, anyone?
Doing something like that would be as important as Louis CK's video. It would be another step towards the fall of the media status quo.
Actually, I managed to change my girlfriend a bit in that respect. I think the biggest problem of SciFi is that its mostly associated with Star Wars and Star Trek, the first is a geekfest for nerds and the second is a very special facet (both not bad, but hey) and also associated as "boy things" already.
We actually watched more thoughtful things like Blade Runner and discussed the film afterwards. Half-SciFIs like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which have a more subtle use of SciFI-topics are also good. Its best if you can say "hey, you just watched a SciFI movie" without her realizing that at first. Firefly is also good, because there is not spaceship-shooting-at-things stuff. As my girlfriend is a suspense fan, Alien will be up next :).
And yes, I know half of the story of DA because my girlfriend is far ahead of me :).
Don't forget that this was the era when Fox also cancelled Family Guy and Futurama. Both of these series were able to be resurrected due to their DVD sales and syndication numbers. Fox made a lot of mistakes during that time, but were just learning about the secondary sales potential for their shows. I'd like to think that a similar set of shows would be able to stick around longer now. Those shows were able to be resurrected easily because they are animated. Firefly, not so much. But another show (Arrested Development) cancelled by Fox in that era is getting resurrected by Netflix, which while not straight to consumer is more direct than through the studios.
Also, Joss Whedon (and the rest of Hollywood) I think learned a lot about distributing directly to the consumer with Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog. I think that this grand experiment was a good template for future direct-to-consumer productions.
Unfortunately, you still have to deal with the problems of initially funding large movies. I can imagine a system where instead of having dedicated studios, you have smaller one-off production companies. These companies would then be funded VC style by funds that seek to mitigate their risk by diversifying their pool of movies. You could fund a few flops, so long as every now and again an Avatar comes along.
You have to ponder the inefficiencies of an ecosystem that supports a $200 million movie.
I'm reminded of Firefly. Such a great show, with lots of loyal fans. I guess it just wasn't a big enough fan base for Fox. I thought at the time that the producers should go independent and distribute straight to the consumer. Maybe that was too risky in 2002. I don't think it would be today.
Make a Github for movies.
If I don't like a part of your movie, I can fork it and make it better. People collaborate, and the system tracks their share in the project, and when the movie makes it to the cinema, TV, Netflix, etc., they are remunerated accordingly.
Initially, a resistance is to be expected in the established distribution channels, therefore a new distribution channel is to be built. Perhaps a P2P on pay-if-you-like basis. Do you like your new Firefly series? Do you want it to continue, to thrive? Then contribute as much as you see fit. Contribute financially. Or submit screenplay ideas to the project. Make the 3D CGI scenes better, add more details, make animations more fluid. Offer acting - maybe you will be selected by the audience in a democratic process.
This must be funded, filming equipment and studio time is expensive, rendering time in the cloud is also not entirely free. But once the equipment is purchased and studios built or contracted, the projects can share them.
Go get 'em.
Firefly (as some-one mentioned underneath) are perfect examples of shows that would thrive under Netflix.
I have to disagree with this, Firefly is not the type of show Netflix should be focusing on. They need shows with low production costs with broad - lowest common denominator appeal. Expensive shows catering to a niche market (which they pretty much already have captured) is not what they're trying to do here.
There's a few ways they can go, sitcoms and short form comedies are going to be much more profitable for them at this point so Better off Ted is a much better fit.
Then there's the Showtime/HBO premium market (which folks are already paying for as a premium service). But even here I think they'd play it safe short term - more Sopranos and True Blood type mass appeal then Boardwalk Empire and The Wire (both are great, but much more focused market).
I cancelled my service when they announced qwikster.
I was in the "Meh, I'll keep this around because it's only a few bucks a month, and, well...they do have all of the firefly episodes. Maybe the selection will get better eventually."
I wasn't really using netflix very much, and the qwikster announcement caused me to re-evaluate wether it was actually a service I wanted.
I have a feeling there was a lot of people in my shoes that cancelled.
I always seem to find some television series that's available via streaming that my wife and I want to see. Each time I say, "We should cancel streaming when we're done with this" and each time we find something else that fits the bill. Firefly. Battlestar Galactica. Sports Night. Better of Ted...
We cut the cable cord over a year ago, relying on Netflix Streaming for older content and iTunes for newer stuff. Even paying for the iTunes stuff, we're WAY, WAY, WAY ahead. I should do that math someday...
I rarely see a movie more than once. If it's on iTunes or Amazon Video I can rent it for $3-4 (just like a video store, would you imagine that) and see it.
Buying it has two problems:
- I don't want to spend $15-20 on something I'll see only once.
- I want to see it now. A lot of my movie viewing is spontaneous (e.g., "I'm tired and don't want to do anything tonight... what good movies haven't I seen?"), and I'm not a hardcore enough movie buff to maintain a physical backlog of movies I need to see.
- Reselling is a pain. How? Craigslist? For one thing, I'm not sure what the demand is for random obscure DVDs on it, and secondly, that's more time I burn meeting up with a buyer just to get $5 on a DVD.
I will buy physical copies of things that I truly love and intend to see over and over again (e.g., the Band of Brothers box set, or the Firefly box set...)
I looked into this long and hard and even built a website and minimal implementation, as I'd had some experience running and contributing to bounties on Open Source projects, but the more I thought about it, the less like a solid business it seemed.
The biggest problem is that the amounts involved are small, and the number of projects involved is also small (this is a $400 project, and it was considered interesting enough to get front page on HN; this indicates a tiny market). At the time, SourceForge, and several other Open Source sites, were beginning to add bounty and "hire this developer" features, and I couldn't see how a third party could more effectively reach those users or those developers (because you need both sides to buy into your product in order for it to be useful). The amount a third party could charge for the intermediary service is bound to be low or developers would go elsewhere; a couple points, maybe. So, 2% of $400 is 8 bucks. It'll take 10,000 projects of that size per year to pay yourself a decent salary and cover expenses. There probably haven't been 10,000 Open Source bounties in the past decade, much less the past year.
One of the problems a product like this would solve would be the trust issue: Can the bounty contributors trust the developer to deliver quality code if paid at the start, and can the developer trust all of the bounty contributors to pay up in a timely fashion if the code is delivered first. But, there are already ways to solve that problem. ChipIn solves the latter one, and many Open Source developers are sufficiently well-known in their community that no one would doubt they would finish the job. The other problem is connecting developers with money; but SourceForge and elance and many other sites already provides mechanisms for users to give developers money, as do traditional contractor agreements.
Of course, you've specified "digital content", and I was just looking at software, which opens up the market quite a bit. There were discussions amongst the browncoats (Firefly fans) of building a system to directly fund new Firefly episodes through viewer contributions. But, I think in the end, everyone agreed that the math just didn't add up. It might for lower budget content.
Back to software, I think github and SourceForge could make a few extra bucks from this kind of idea, but I don't think there's much room for any third party to fit into that relationship, if they aren't already in the loop for some reason.
> It was unclear when Google would begin spending the money to create the new programs, but the source said that Google has visited top Hollywood talent agencies in search of ideas, and will probably end up making deals with production companies and directors to produce the content.
Buy rights to Firefly and make new episodes.
If anyone at Netflix is listening:
BUY FIREFLY AND MAKE NEW EPISODES.
I would gladly play an extra $4 a month (or more) on top of streaming just for access to new weekly/biweekly episodes of that.
Quoth Nathan Fillion in the interview: "Yes. Yes. I would examine very closely Fox’s reasoning — I’m a little gun-shy. 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."
Note that he's still committed to doing Castle, and the only definite thing giving Fillion the rights would get is free Firely for all. That's a good thing, but it's not new Firefly. What Fillion did not say is "I wish I had $300 million so I could make new Firefly episodes." Of course, Firefly isn't Firefly without Joss Whedon, and he has said nothing.
I think it's important to note that no one, at any time, has talked about new Firefly episodes. This is just about distributing the existing series.
Anything Joss Whedon calls Firefly, I'll call Firefly.
The cast made the show, to be sure, but they did so on top of Whedon's words, and Whedon did the casting. He's proven over and over again that he can put together a compelling, poignant show (or comic book) no matter the premise.
I've scoffed at every single show he's ever put out: - Re: Buffy; Who's gonna watch a remake of that movie? It's gonna suck. - Re: Angel; Spinoff? Really? Vampire in sunny LA? Dumb. - Re: Firefly; A space western? What? Stupid. - Re: Dollhouse; Wow, that's abstract, even for Joss Whedon. How are we supposed to care about characters that have no character?
Every time I've ended up happily eating my words, and while I still consider Firefly to be the best science fiction TV show of all time (personal opinion), I have no qualms about somebody trying to resurrect it, so long as that somebody is Joss Whedon.
Fringe has become the last series I truly enjoy watching these days.
I'd definitely be in for $40 if there was a good chance for another 13 episodes of Firefly.
They should maybe use WePay for the largest collective payment ever?
Science Fiction appeals to the male brain's obsession with structure, order, pattern recognition, and penchant for legalism. You can see a sci-fi movie and then spend hours pondering how to fill in the rest of the blanks in the galaxy that the movie introduced.
Romantic comedies, on the other hand, don't ping those same pleasure sensors.
I think this was one reason why Firefly, though definitely beloved by many, remained a cult show and failed as a movie, it was half story and half mythology, so neither the nerds nor the mainstream could ever totally embrace it.
From what I've read the main behavioral changes are dropping a grade point, falling out with friends, misbehaving in school or increased truancy.
During my day (I'm 22) this was called "falling in with a bad crowd".
For the actual medical symptoms, these are so average run-of-the-mill symptoms that it shouldn't be randomly attributed to wifi. I know in my school my greatest cause of nausea was fresh paint, a stink bomb going off or bad food in the caf.
IMO these parents are ignoring the simplest and most obvious answer: their kids are being kids and their illnesses are them trying to skip school. I had my fair share of nausea when new games came out; I even had a bout of 'nausea' during college when I picked up the Firefly box set (I'm from the UK, never saw it on TV but had a mega-huge recommendation from someone I trusted), I watched 1/4 of the first episode before I called in sick.
I look at shows like Firefly -- any decent scifi really -- the masses aren't interested, people like me will only do on-demand (even if it is downloaded etc), and will buy merchandising. This can't work in most current network models. But in something like we are discussing, there is room for it be profitable -- maybe not insanely so -- but profitable nonetheless. This is why I think "good content" will flourish in such situations. People will still watch jersey shore, but people like me can get good content too.
An interesting thing has been going on lately anyway -- there are a lot more 12 episode seasons. And a lot more summer seasons. Content producers are starting to experiment. The syfy show Sanctuary started out as with a "pay for webisodes" model. Things are starting to move in interesting ways already.
Oh, come on. Are people really taking this article seriously? Look, it would be interesting to read an academic analysis of possible differences in how the sexes both produce and perceive entertainment. That is not what this article is. It is about pushing a gender war, where men are battling against a female gay alliance for control of the media.
From the article: Men, young and old, find gays and bisexuality (among men at least) about as attractive as a “fabulous” Broadway show followed by a viewing of all three of the “High School the Musical” movies. In fact, the more “gay” Broadway has become, (and the more technically excellent), the more repellent it has become to men and boys. Indeed, metal and rap’s popularity stem from the hostility both have to gays, making male sexuality not “questionable” the way the love for Broadway showtunes would be.Women generally like gays, and find gay sex fascinating the way men do lesbian sex. However, men know well that most young women, if presented a magic button that would make most men (average joes) “gay” they’d break their fingers pushing it. The chief objective of attractive young women being turning off male desire of all but the most Alpha of men.
This is so wrong I don't know where to start. The author misrepresents men who like musicals, gay men, rap music, and women all in one paragraph. The article he is responding to, "The War on Science Fiction and Marvin Minsky" is just as bad.
As a final note, some of the recent television shows the author uses to support his conclusion that women are ruining science fiction are "Battlestar Galactica", the new "Dr. Who", "Buffy", and "Firefly". It has not been my experience that any of these shows have succeeded in repulsing a male audience, although perhaps that's just my group of friends.
That simply isn't true tho'. The biggest and most famous franchise of all, Star Wars, is heavily religious, the very first film states it openly. So is the best recent sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica. A main character of Firefly is a preacher.
Even in Star Trek the Vulcans spend an awful lot of time contemplating candles and wearing robes. They may not talk about it on-screen but the producers must have consciously chosen to use monastic/Catholic imagery.
"The copyright holders seem to think that we still travel the Atlantic in a ocean liners run on coal. So they operate with licences that ignore the fact that people don’t care about countries and borders anymore."
I like to watch TV shows. I also like to discuss episodes with other people. Unfortunately most TV shows I watch are either months behind or don't air at all where I live. So I read about these shows, but by the time I can participate in the conversation the discussion has moved on. That's why I torrent shows. Not because I'm not willing to pay for them (I own most of the DVD sets) but because otherwise I wouldn't get the chance to participate in one of the most gratifying aspects of following these series.
More extreme examples are series like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Both never aired here and likely never will. I'm not willing to spend 45 euros on DVDs based on Internet word of mouth alone, but in both cases I got hooked after torrenting a few episodes and payed afterwards.
This is a fine essay on the importance of having a marketable concept.
That said, I'm a bit concerned that he's overgeneralizing from a biased sample set: His major examples (besides his own comic) are TV series. TV series often take time to get started; they always have. To pick some examples close to the geek heart: Star Trek:TNG had a crappy first season. Babylon Five had a very spotty first season.
There's a reason for this: traditionally, the first half-season of the typical TV show was written by a team of more-or-less freelance writers who worked from a "series bible": A big book written by the series creator that describes the characters and the setting and some of the possible plot directions. [1] They might also have had a pilot script, or even an actual pilot, to work from. But these writers would not necessarily have seen the actors performing in their roles. They might not even have known who the actors were. So their scripts would form an odd patchwork that would be stitched together by the producer, the director, and the actors on the fly. By the third season, however, things would have sorted themselves out: The producers would have found a stable of writers they like, the writers would have seen the older episodes and have some idea of how the actors inhabited the characters, there would be a canon to draw upon, and so on.
---
[1] This has changed, of course, particularly for drama series. Heroes was awesome from the first moment; most people agree that it was all downhill from season one. Other shows -- Firefly, the new Doctor Who -- also exhibit the pattern of initial awesomeness. This is arguably because the economics of TV series production has changed a lot: The rise of DVD box sets has changed the target audience and the product life cycle for TV series, and the way shows are pitched, produced, and financed has changed. And it's probably also because writers and producers have learned from the experience of shows like Babylon Five and X-Files and, later, Buffy: Show runners seem to have a greater tendency to be highly capable writers who are given much more control over the early episodes, often to the point where they will write most of those episodes personally.
I wonder, how much in dollar value are the ads in one episode of scrubs. It seems like the TV networks could use something like this technology and just charge a per-episode rate of (X * 1.5).
Based on some back of the envelope using the superbowl ($3 million / (30 second spot * 100 million viewers) = $0.03 per viewer commercial * 36 commercials per hour = $1.08. That's probably an upper bound since super bowl ads have a good chance of making the news outlets, talk shows, etc.
So would you pay $1.50 an episode to watch commercial free your favorite show whenever you want? For Firefly yeah, but I'm not so sure about The View.
Then again my implicit wage rate is $0.03 * 120 = $3.60 an hour so I'm willing to earn $3.60 an hour watching television ads but only if I get Joss Whedon unpaid breaks.
On your last point; now we have another study, from a somewhat biased organization that believes strongly in, relies on, and supports, the "long tail" version of the music industry to support the long tail theory.
You're absolutely right. I don't think the facts have quite come out yet. I do think it has a lot to do with the models of the businesses doing the research. I bet you'd find that Hulu has a pretty interesting long tail (and plenty of blockbusters, as well), because I go there a couple of times a week, and I'm sometimes surprised by what has bubbled to the top 50 results--quite a lot of back catalog stuff. Even stuff that has been out of regular syndication for years, like the original Battlestar Galactica, and other old, somewhat forgotten shows, and shows that didn't make it very long on TV, like Firefly and John Doe.
I don't know, as I haven't studied things very closely--I saw Anderson give his long tail talk a few years ago, and I've read the article when it was published, but I haven't paid it too much mind. I do know that my tastes are squarely in the long tail. I don't watch blockbuster movies, I don't buy blockbuster records, and I don't read blockbuster books, in general. But, I also know that I'm not "normal" or "average" in my tastes, so I am and outlier and not a reliable predictor of anything the average consumer is going to do. I will point out, though, that there are more independent records being made, more independent films being produced, and more independent literature being produced than at any time in history. That has to be explainable somehow, though I don't know if the long tail is the right way to explain it. Maybe it's just bigger populations plus the Internet equals "everybody gets to makes records/movies/literature" now.