It was a travesty that Fox canceled it in the first place.
FOX no longer owns the rights to Joss Whedon’s Firefly! That right there would be enough to make my day, but it gets a little better than that because the cult hit TV series is returning to basic cable – running in it’s entirety plus a few extras! The Science Channel has acquired the rights to Firefly and plan to being running the series on Sunday, March 6 with the two-hour pilot followed by the first episode. Episodes will continue to air every Sunday night, in order, and in High-Def.
In honor of Firefly’s return to cable, Nathan Fillion took some time to talk to EW, here’s a little of what he had to say:
What was the part about playing the character?
It was my favorite job ever. What wasn’t great about it? I got to wear a low-slung holster. I got to ride horses. I got to have a spaceship. I got to act mean and curmudgeonly. [Creator Joss Whedon] is really good at kicking characters in the nuts so the other characters would have laughs at my expense and that was great too.
If Castle had its series finale tomorrow and Fox said to you and Joss: “We screwed up, let’s try doing Firefly again.†Would you do it?
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 own my own, and distribute it on the Internet.
I am still hoping for a revival of the series, or at least a sequel to the film Serenity, and this is probably a step in the right direction getting the rights away from FOX and to someone who will hopefully do something with this great property. I’m hoping airing Firefly on cable again will introduce a whole new audience to this fantastic series that may have missed it the first time, and maybe, just maybe, a resurgence in popularity will give Joss Whedon and company a good reason to revisit this world again.
Since then a website (helpnathanbuyfirefly.com) has been created to - you guessed it - raise enough money to help Fillion buy the rights to the show, or at least convince someone out there that there is a following that wants Firefly back on the air.
The movement has grown among some of the former staff of Firefly, as well. Jose Molina, who wrote a pair of Firefly episodes and currently produces Haven, tweeted "For what it’s worth, I’ve told him I’d drop what I was doing and follow." Jane Espenson, who wrote an episode and produced Battlestar Galactica, responded to Jose: "I'm there, if needed."
It's a start, but there are a few more big pieces that need to be on board (coughWhedoncough). It's about time to get your hopes up, though.
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