The short-lived sci-fi series Firefly has had a very tumultuous history since its brief run on the Fox network back in 2002. After its ratings failure and abrupt cancellation from broadcast, the show became a hot commodity on DVD and built an avid cult fan base, who called themselves “Browncoats.” That was enough to convince a major Hollywood studio to revive the property as a feature film in 2005… which then flopped at the box office. However, that movie also found more success on home video and has become a staple of every new video format to come down the line.

Unfortunately, the experience of being a Firefly fan has gotten more complicated in recent years, due to series creator Joss Whedon turning super-toxic and effectively being exiled from Hollywood. Revisiting the show two decades later, in light of Whedon’s scandals, gives me very conflicted feelings about what to think of it today. Can, or should, art ever truly be separated from the artist?

Title:	Firefly
Season:	1
Release Year:	2002
Number of Episodes:	14
Watched On:	Blu-ray
Also Available On:	DVD Hulu Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

Truth be told, I was never the biggest Firefly fanboy. I was much more obsessed at the time with Whedon’s other two series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel, both of which suffered in quality in later seasons due to what I perceived as Whedon’s loss of interest and absence from their production. A little part of me resented the silly space Western for drawing his attention away from his flagship shows. Not helping matters, the programming executives at Fox obviously hated the product Whedon delivered, and aired its episodes completely out of their intended order (the pilot episode held back to last!), then canceled it less than halfway through the planned first season. Without question, watching the show during its original broadcast made it feel like a confusing and awkward mess.

Nevertheless, something about the show really stuck in the minds of certain viewers, who demanded its return and were first in line for the (otherwise mostly empty) theatrical screenings of the eventual movie. Even I warmed up to the series through rewatches on DVD, where the greater story arc, or at least however much of it was filmed, made more sense when viewed in proper sequence. For as half-baked as some of its ideas may still be, the show has a bunch of appealing characters and is infused with Whedon’s trademark wit. That goes a long way. For those on its wavelength, the fact that Firefly was cut so short also plays into the underdog nature of its narrative.

I’m not going to bother recapping much of the plot this late in the game. In many respects, the story is a traditional Western, about a group of cowboy bandits riding horses and firing six-shooters – but it also takes place in the future and they fly a spaceship from planet to planet to do those things. The mix of genres may have felt pretty novel to most American viewers at the time, but looking back, it strikes me now that Whedon probably just watched a bunch of episodes of the anime series Cowboy Bebop and figured he could pass off a live-action version as his own to audiences unfamiliar with it.

The debt to Star Wars is extremely heavy as well. Hero Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) is obviously meant to be a Han Solo stand-in, and the oppressive Alliance government a barely disguised version of the Empire. Those parts, at least, I don’t think Whedon was trying to hide. The show is meant to be Whedon’s take on what he would do playing around at the far fringes of that famous franchise. These days, even Star Wars itself is doing pretty similar things with official spin-offs like The Mandalorian.

Not having watched it in a number of years, some things about the show bug me even more now than they used to. The low-budget nature of the production is really chintzy. The CGI visual effects are downright blurry most of the time, and it’s kind of hilarious that a couple episodes simply borrowed leftover costumes from Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers without modifying them at all. Whether it was Whedon’s idea or something forced on him by the network, the fact that the old-fashioned pistol and rifle props are accompanied by silly pew-pew laser blast sound effects is cheesy as hell.

More problematic, the character of Simon (Sean Maher) is a total drip who makes every scene with him a little duller, and the story arc for his more interesting sister River (Summer Glau) takes forever to warm up, only to get cut off by the show’s cancellation before it goes anywhere.

One particular idea of Whedon’s – that prostitution would not only be fully legalized but even considered a noble and respected profession in this galaxy – may have felt somewhat progressive when the show came out, but plays differently after hearing stories about what an abusive and lecherous creep Whedon allegedly was to some of the young actresses who worked for him on other projects.

Thoughts like those are difficult to ignore when trying to evaluate Firefly objectively today. Is it the show’s fault that its creator wasn’t what he presented himself to be? How much of that is really evident on screen, and how much am I just reading into it? For what it’s worth, the series did have women in other prominent writing and producing roles.

Honestly, even with all that off-camera context in mind, Firefly remains a pretty entertaining sci-fi drama that makes a fun (and easy) binge when the mood occasionally strikes. It became a springboard for stars Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Gina Torres, and Morena Baccarin to launch into bigger projects later. Since my last viewing, I’d forgotten that a pre-Mad Men Christina Hendricks also has a prominent role in two of the season’s best episodes.

I still like Firefly well enough, but I’ve never considered it the neglected TV masterpiece its most ardent Browncoat supporters have. Even if my feelings about specific points may fluctuate, that overall opinion hasn’t changed much with this latest trip through the ‘verse.

The Blu-ray

Following its disastrous run on television, Firefly found a much greater audience on home video when it was released in 2003 at the height of the TV-on-DVD craze. A Blu-ray upgrade later followed in 2008.

From a video quality perspective, Firefly is very difficult to evaluate fairly due to the nature of how the show was made. When episodes originally ran on the Fox network in 2002, they were aired in two formats: traditional 480i standard-definition and cropped to a 4:3 aspect ratio on the main analog broadcast channel, or 480p widescreen 16:9 on Fox’s so-called “EDTV” (“enhanced-definition”) digital channel. A few years later, Fox would update the digital channel to 720p HD, but that wasn’t an option for this series. At no point was Firefly expected to be viewed in high-definition.

Although live-action portions of the show were shot on film, all CGI and other visual effects work was rendered in standard-definition resolution for budgetary reasons. While that may have blended well enough to get by when watching in standard-def, it creates a very schizophrenic appearance when watching in actual HD.

The Blu-ray is authored in “Full HD” 1080p format, in a 16:9 ratio. For the most part, the widescreen framing is well-balanced and must be preferred by the show’s creators, given that the cropped 4:3 version is no longer available anywhere and has effectively been lost to history. However, at least one shot in episode Trash has visible fringing in the far corners, where the camera’s light mask slightly intrudes into the frame. That sort of problem is rare enough that it’s forgivable.

Thankfully, fully live-action footage comprises the majority of screen time in every episode. All of that material is true high-definition and looks pretty good. Sadly, image quality takes a considerable dive whenever visual effects occur, whether that be the fully-CGI space scenes or even live-action shots that happen to have VFX elements somewhere in the frame. All those parts tend to look blurry, dull, and often riddled with artifacts.

For that matter, the live-action scenes aren’t flawless, either. Film grain looks noisy, colors are sometimes oversaturated, and highlights occasionally bloom. Regardless, the show looks significantly better on Blu-ray than the streaming version currently available on Hulu, which is standard-def and looks worse than DVD quality. (I can’t speak to what paid VOD versions look like.)

The Blu-ray also benefits from 5.1 audio, whereas Hulu only offers stereo. That said, the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track isn’t particularly aggressive or impressive. Surround activity is mild, and most of the shooting and explosions during action scenes sound weak.

The review I wrote when it was released says that the DVD box set included audio commentaries over seven episodes. I count eight on the Blu-ray. Either I missed it in 2003, or the track for episode Our Mrs. Reynolds was new at the time of the Blu-ray’s release. Other bonus features are mostly replicated from DVD: a half-hour making-of documentary, a featurette about the ship, a handful of deleted scenes, a gag reel, Alan Tudyk’s audition tape, and a painful bit where Joss Whedon sings the show’s theme song.

Definitely new to the Blu-ray was a half-hour reunion roundtable with Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, and Ron Glass (who would later pass away in 2016). Whedon’s presence and interaction makes the conversation way more uncomfortable to watch in retrospect than it may have felt in 2008.

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