Firefly, as its legions of its fans, the self proclaimed Browncoats, know died almost before the show ever got off the ground thanks to interference from and a lack of patience amongst the executives at Fox, the network that broadcast Firefly between 2002 and 2003. Fox executives apparently thought they knew better about how the show should get made than did the successful show runners and writers who actually wrote it and produced it. Fox executives, for instance, demanded another pilot episode, finding the two part "Serenity", which was supposed to be the first episode, too lacking in action content despite the fact that there are more than enough action sequences in that episode. Apparently, Fox executives can no longer comprehend a narrative world that unfolds and is heavily character centred in their brave new world of adolescent comic book Hollywood movies with little plot and lots of special effects and make the pilgrimage to see them upon their release. Presumably these films with their multiple cliffhangers provide the next best thing to an orgasm for the fanboys and fangirls who go to seem them about every fifteen minutes. Additionally, Fox showed episodes out of order making a hash of at least some of the narrative arcs and character arcs built into the show.
Most commentators get this woeful tragi-comic tale right, something that isn't that difficult given extensive interviews with those who created, ran, and made Firefly. There are other aspects of Firefly, however, where the so-called critics who dominate the world of cyberverse television and film "criticism" seem to be writing about a show that isn't the real Firefly that was actually broadcast on Fox in 2002 and 2003. Take the "critic" who calls him or her self Faefyx Collington (a nom de plume?). Collington, like many others in the cyber world of television and film criticism, is yet another one of those critics who actually think they could make a better Firefly than those who actually made it. Collington, for instance, in her ScreenRant essay on the possible Disney reboot of 5 July 2001 ("How a Modern Reboot Could Work"), argues that one of the best things about a possible reboot would be the ability of those making the new Firefly to fix the politically and ideologically incorrect aspects of the old Firefly. According to Collington one of the main "mistakes", as she calls it, of the who made the show was to make it an apologia and polemic for Southern states rights and, by extension, Southern slavery. Another "mistake" or problem with Firefly was, according to Collington, its lack of Chinese characters in the show despite the implications of the show that China, or at least China in alliance with the 'West" is the Alliance. Representation, you see, is an obsession with some "critics", particularly in the academic world, who seem to think that equal (if not selective demographic) representaion is essential if the progressive world they imagine and code as good is to come about.
There are a number of problems with this approach beyond the one in which a critic, who, as far as I know, has never made television beyond YouTube and others of its ilk, thinks he or she can make better television show than those who actually make it. Another problem with the polemics of those like Collington is the fact that Firefly isn't a tale about the US Civil War despite the fact that it is a loose adaptation of a book of fiction that is about the Civil War, Michael Shaara's Killer Angels (1974), a book that Whedon read while on a trip to London and led him to wonder about what happened to the losers in war. War thus isn't the dominant theme in Firefly. Nor is state's rights. Rather the dominant focus of Firefly is what happens to the losers in war. Firefly, in other words, is about the losers--Mal, Zoe, Wash, Kaylee, Jayne, Simon, River, and Book--who band together for various reasons out in the Black so to eke out a living on the edges of the populated universe in order to escape the smothering, stifling, and morally questionable Alliance and its corporate ally or master, Blue Sun, which is helping the government create a cadre of true believing assassins that will help them rule their shiny high tech empire and keep it safe from those who might challenge it. One of the main metaphors, if not the main metaphor the show explores, is the difference between the rich core planets of the Alliance, a metaphor for the rich core nations of the world, and those spaces and planets on the arse end of the galaxy, which are metaphors for the poor peripheral and exploited nations and countries of the modern and postmodern world. As for slavery, Firefly condemns it several times, most clearly in the episode "Shindig". And as for representational issues, a lack in Firefly, an unfolding text, is not necessarily absence (unless critics are omniscient and I don't know it) even out in a Black populated by the poor and outcasts, including political outcasts.
Why do some critics prefer their simulated Firefly to the real Firefly? A lot of this, I think, has to do with the fact that humans, by and large, socially and culturally construct their realities. The realities they construct, not surprisingly, reflect their utopian visions (more prominent among those on the left) or dystopian visions (more prominent among conservatives, critics of the Enlightenment, and the multitude of populist know nothings). As is well known from social scientific experiments, political and ideological correctness (a cultural phenomenon that characterises most political, economic, and cultural parties and movements particularly of a religious nature including nationalism) has been known to override and overdetermine what is actually there on the "page" or in the "text". And it is such creative readings of "texts" that makes the homiletical criticism of critics like Collington problematic.
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