It’s remarkable that Firefly has such a big audience today, especially since Joss Whedon could barely get anyone to watch the series when it first hit TV screens way back in 2002.
Then Whedon had the chance to bring Firefly back via the movie Serenity, and the response, at least initially, was somewhat lackluster.
Still, it is quite clear that if Firefly came back there would actually be an audience for it this time around. There’s been a lot of wishful thinking over this, especially with Veronica Mars coming back via Kickstarter, and Joss Whedon would love to have it back as well, but he’s going to be busy with Avengers 2 for the next two years.
Arrested Development will be resurrected via Netflix, and there are similar rumors that Heroes will be back on MSN. But Ted Sarandos, the Chief Content officer of Netflix, told Giant Freakin Robot and the Huffington Post that he doesn’t feel a Firefly reunion wouldn’t be as big as Arrested Development’s return. Well, we’d like to disagree with that, but let’s hear him out…
“Let me give you one broad statement about these recovery shows,” Sarandos said. “In almost every case the culture around the show gets more intense and smaller as time goes by. Arrested Development was the rarest of birds in that the audience of the show grew larger than the original broadcast audience because people came to discover it years after it was cancelled.”
But Sarandos also felt, “The Firefly fan is still the Firefly fan from when it was on TV and there’s fewer of them and they’re more passionate every year. Whereas with Arrested Development we’re going to be serving a multiple of the original audience. Any of the other shows we could bring back would be a fraction of the original audience.”
There’s plenty of fans out there that would love to prove Netflix wrong, and again, we think the Firefly audience would be there this time, because the show is bigger than ever. Will this be the case when Whedon has some free time on his hands after Avengers 2 hits theaters on May 1, 2015? Who knows how many will still be carrying a torch for one of the most under-rated sci-fi stories ever by then, but we don’t think the current Firefly fanbase will be jumping ship any time soon, if ever.
