Matthew94 said:
No one watched it as the episodes were shown in the wrong order which made the plot impossible to follow.
The movie finished it up nicely I thought.
Yeah, cop out explanation that only serves to placate Whedonites and browncoats. SciFi showed it in the correct order and no one watched while it was on. All that explanation does is shift blame from the real culprit, Joss Whedon, to the Network, whose only crime is putting the show on in the first place. Spare me the Executive meddling line, please. Great shows have survived executive meddling better than Firefly did.
If the show had a stronger foundation, then the order would not matter. That is solely the fault of the writer. You can't blame that on the network or the viewers. Whedon did not do enough work pre production to make it a complete universe. The Buffy plan of make this up as we go along only on networks starving for ratings.
Before you say, "well how can he commit to doing that much work on the show if he could not get support from the executives," the answer is he should have done it anyway. He should have built a lot more of the universe than he did before even getting to the pitching stage. Had he done that, the show would have found an audience sooner.
Sorry, but that's the reality. If a show feels like it has no idea where it wants to go, the audience will feel insulted. If the audience feels insulted, it will not tune in.
Serenity kind of proves my point. He had a solid foundation from the show and instead of making it up as he went along, he was able to pull the parts he needed for his script without wasting time explaining it on camera. It was more showing and less telling like the series.