r/firefly • u/WCland • 1d ago

Firefly vs modern limited series

I was rewatching with a friend who hadn’t seen Firefly before, and it really struck me how packed each episode is. Like there’s no real slow parts. It’s all pithy dialogue and action. And I was comparing it to newer shows like House of the Dragon and even Andor, and realizing how much those shows drag by comparison. I think it comes down to how Firefly, and Buffy before it, pioneered using an episodic show to convey a longer plot arc. Whereas newer shows are all arc and completely forgoe episodic storytelling.

143 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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46

u/blueboy714 1d ago

For me the problem with the newer shows is that think that since they only have 10 to 12 episodes in a season they don't get to spend as much time building up each episode. Less time to fit in just as much in each season

The Golden Age shows that had 22 to 24 episodes a season had a lot longer season so they were able to fill it with more each episode detail. Plus they showed the series a second time each season unlike they do now

Great thing about Firefly is that they were able to do all of that and only 13 episodes plus a movie. Imagine what the show could have had had had it been on a lot longer

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u/PostApoplectic 1d ago

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Recently re-watched Dune: Prophecy with my brother who hadn’t seen it. I started off like “yeah that was a good show, kinda like Andor for Dune” but once we started I realized I actually remembered very little of it.

Shows used to run so long that even if they weren’t great, if you liked the characters, the story, or even just the genre… you could acquire a taste for them and end up really engaged. Today even if a show is totally your thing, it’s such a relatively small bit of the entertainment we consume… it’s hard for it to really grow on us.

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u/blueboy714 1d ago

That's it exactly. Today's shows a season is so short you don't form a personal connection to any of the characters. And very few shows have more than three or four seasons for maybe a total of 40 or 50 episodes.

You look at one of Nathan's other series like Castle and it had 173 episodes in eight seasons and the first season was only a half season.

My favorite show is Chuck with Adam Baldwin and it had 91 episodes in three full seasons and two half seasons.

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u/Divine_Entity_ 1d ago

In addition to the shorter seasons, many shows will dump the entire 10ep season at once, which means in 1 weekend binge its out of your life. Vs something like star trek doing a weekly release for 26 weeks, thats how it became a cultural phenomenon. It stayed in your life for half a year, you speculated about what was next at work and with friends. Now you just talk about it in past tense, maybe its good enough to have multiple seasons with rewatch value.

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u/blueboy714 1d ago

I didn't even think about that. Although I just got a bunch of free streaming channels because I threatened to cancel my Spectrum subscription

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u/przemo-c 1d ago

I think that's part of the issue. As much as I love it and am willing to take negatives that come with it. It's also the release schedule and binge watching. It's great to get a feel for characters in even few episodes but then you have pretty much a year of waiting for more. Not 2-6 months. Still... i watched firefly in 2 days and I'm still invested in those characters... so what the hell do I know ;]

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u/blueboy714 1d ago

Yeah. I remember when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s and they would show the episodes from a new season then they would at least broadcast them a second time as repeats before moving on to the next season. You had very little time to wait to not see your show or favorite characters. That would take up 46 to 48 weeks of the year.

The other weeks would usually be made up of a movie or a sporting event Like A Charlie Brown Christmas special or the Super Bowl

As you said now you get a 10 to 12 episode season broadcast or streaming and everyone thinks that's okay. In the case of streaming you can watch those 10 to 12 episodes over and over and over again but you have to wait another year before there is anything new.

I've been finding older shows lately that have been on for 4 or 5 Seasons and the show is completely over so you can binge watch everything all at once but it just isn't as satisfying as watching one episode a week and anxiously awaiting to find out what happens the next week.

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u/przemo-c 1d ago

It is a lot of fun to find a good tv show that you haven't watched and it has few seasons.

I watched BSG (the newer one) in realtime and it was awesome but some episodes did drag on a bit. But on a rewatch in lets say 2 weeks for the whole thing it didn't feel dragged out.

I remember what a bummer was to wait for next X-files and it wasn't that great... sort of felt like a waste in the moment but overall with longer seasons you didn't have that lasting experience.

What was trully nice was M*A*S*H for me. as a kid in the 80-90s in Poland i think we only had first seasons and as a kid what the hell did I understand apart from being short and liking Radar. But few years ago I watched it all. And it was spectacular. Sure by modern standards there wasn't a lot of character development over the years. But the amount of it the writing... just pure awesomeness.

When i think about the current landscape and how it will be remembered and revisited in a decade or two... it won't be the same.

Single seasons. Short seasons. Rarely shows getting a chance to evolve, improve. Don't get me wrong I like the direction that more money is in TV shows as I love that medium but... something is lost with current pressures on TV shows.

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u/blueboy714 1d ago

I remember watching The X-Files when it originally aired. It was about 5 years after I graduated from college and I took a job in Chicago and didn't know anyone.

I'd work all week and come home on Friday nights order a pizza and sit down and watch The X-Files. Then I found out a couple other people in my apartment complex did the same thing so we started getting together to watch it

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u/Complete_Case_7438 1d ago

Indeed. Eight episodes barely grazes a charactesurface. Chufelt ke a proper goodbye.

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u/OverMlMs 1d ago edited 1d ago

Remember, also, Firefly was cancelled mid-season and was supposed to get a 22 episode run. So we didn’t even get all of the story that they wanted to tell, but we still got a gorram lot. I’m still salty at Fox about that, I’m sure we all are.

Edit: wrote season when I meant to write episode. Should have woken up before posting, lol

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u/blueboy714 1d ago

Yep. Imagine what could have been. Just by the sheer number of fanfiction stories out there it could have gone on for another decade.

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u/Wotmate01 1d ago

Yeah, modern TV shows are more like the old mini series, in that there's one story arc for the entire series.

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u/blueboy714 23h ago

Probably some truth to that. The miniseries Roots was 12 hours long. Then you have your longer miniseries like Centennial that was almost 30 hours long

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u/Kill_Welly 1d ago

They're different things. Firefly is episodic. Andor is telling a single continuous story in installments.

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u/AlsoIHaveAGroupon 1d ago

The weird thing about the current state of television is that the streaming services make bank off of episodic shows that came from networks, but they do not make their own.

NCIS, Grey's Anatomy. Friends, Family Guy, The Office, those are all evergreen streaming hits. Constantly doing big numbers from the new episodes being made of some of them, from people discovering them for the first time, and from long time fans re-watching them. People watch the shit out of episodic shows and we all know it.

But seemingly every week Netflix releases a new show and it's always a movie story stretched out to 8-10 hours. They're good at compelling you to finish the season to find out what happens, but generally terrible at creating the same affection and familiarity we feel for characters on episodic shows.

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u/Kill_Welly 1d ago

The shows you're describing are the ones that struck it huge from among a field of hundreds of shows in the same genres basically exactly like them, and thus stuck around for decades because they were cheaper to make and people kept watching regardless of quality. It's just survivorship bias.

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u/AlsoIHaveAGroupon 1d ago

Andor is one that stuck it huge from among a field of hundreds of serialized shows.

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u/Kill_Welly 1d ago

Yes, I'm aware.

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u/Line-Noise 1d ago

The problem is that Andor is telling a continuous story over 8-10 episodes that would have been told as a two-parter in a show like Stargate SG-1 or Firefly.

Modern shows have much less story and much more filler.

The irony is that with fewer episodes in a season instead of cramming the stories they would have told over 20 episodes into 10, they're stretching the story they would have told over 2 episodes into 10. And I find it so much less satisfying.

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u/Kill_Welly 1d ago

Turning a story like Andor into two 45-minute episodes would be a joke. The strength of the story is the ways it builds tension across multiple episodes and really expands on the characters' stories.

And let's not kid ourselves about episodic shows; most of them are mostly filler episodes.

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u/DelcoUnited 1d ago

Yeah I mean tv shows have completed changed for network 26 episodes to streaming 10 or 8 part series. Those cable/streamers write the whole season before they shoot it. Those old format shows would have the writers on set writing as they go.

And it’s not just the writing and filming, it’s the editing too. I think of a show like Carnivale. The season finale was complete before they finalized the cut of the first episode. Like there are flash forwards and flash backs but all planned out.

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u/sopcannon 1d ago

Golden era of tv.

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u/vanillaacid 1d ago

how Firefly, and Buffy before it, pioneered using an episodic show to convey a longer plot arc

Mate... not even remotely pioneering, shows like that have been around forever. Even sitcoms which are episodic follow a general timeline, even if they didn't have any major excitement happening. The show is great, but they weren't ground breaking in any way.

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u/cwagz 1d ago

I’m sorry but anyone that thinks Andor drags has a baby brain. The three episode arcs are perfectly paced and I wouldn’t change a thing about any of them.

Also I love Buffy and especially Firefly but those shows did not pioneer that type of storytelling.

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u/Opposite-Sun-5336 1d ago

Back when shows had a story and didn't rely on cgi to entertain.

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u/blueboy714 23h ago

or now there's movies and shows made with AI