One of the great geek peeves I have is getting attached to a new TV series, or game title and finding out once I'm done that it's over, there isn't any more excellence to be had. Two sterling examples of this are Joss Whedon's Firefly series, and the criminally under-appreciated Icewind Dale titles.
Firefly was a particularly innovative sci-fi series that combined a number of interesting concepts including a Chinese-Western culture mesh in space re-imagined as the wild west during the frontier era. The tagline for it is so brilliant it got picked up almost immediately for it's entire first season. But when the time came to renew and give it more play, Fox dropped it citing "creative differences" and falsely poor ratings. The people watching loved it, but critics got hung up on the genre blending and excoriated it, artificially dropping the Nielsen index to 98th. Fox replaced the series with Fastlane, a show I had to look up on Wikipedia and still don't remember.
Icewind Dale, and Icewind Dale II were cursed with bad timing, each being released among a host of similarly themed titles. ID2 had to compete with Elder Scrolls:Morrowind which, despite the flaws I've found in it, did inconceivably well in popular reviews because the first person aspect engaged the player more than ID2's overhead camera. It made money, performed well, and in my opinion, was the best implementation of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition game play into a computerized medium. But although it was solidly designed, contained a great story that was a joy to progress through, and had a beautiful soundtrack, its series was dropped due to lack of popular interest.
Now my point with all this is not that Serenity should be resurrected after all this time. My point is that even though Firefly had a rabid fan base, was produced by an well known industry name, and had a cast of brilliant actors and actresses it failed because the station it was on didn't like the show. They thought Malcolm Reynolds should be "jolly" and insisted on turning it into an action-adventure series instead of a beautiful character-driven drama. And the Icewind Dale series was cut from production after failing to achieve amidst similar titles, although it sold brilliantly, and continues to be a niche favorite, continuing to sell today.
This begs the question, "Would the series survive a reincarnation?" If you restored Serenity, un-martyred it, if you will, or brought back the D&D top-down game, would it still be as good? Could you return to Serenity's universe without the eponymous ship and its lovable crew? Could you travel through Ten Towns again, or any of the exotic locations of the Forgotten Realms? Black Isle had plans for a Baldur's Gate III, where we could discover the nation of Sembia, and the Dalelands. What if it got made now?
Overall I wish they could continue pumping out my favorite stuff, but I worry that the inevitable result is a weakening of the core content. If the son of Mal came back in a new show, I might not watch it, because maybe it wouldn't live up to the bar the original set. And maybe that's a good thing, a mixed blessing. It's a longtime fantasy trope that the dead who walk are abominations. Let it be good while it can and once its over let it go.
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