Joss Whedon, creator of Fox's new SF series Firefly, told SCI FI Wire that the network is giving the show another chance to attract viewers with its recent order of two more episodes. Early in the show's first year, "we just couldn't have been more boned by baseball and clearly in the death [time] slot and not promoted very heavily and, you know, the show taking time to find itself, as shows do," Whedon said in an interview during a break in the filming of "Objects in Space," the show's 11th episode, which Whedon wrote and is directing this week.

Whedon added, "The only question is whether they're given that time. And now Fox is getting a good response to the episodes we're putting out, and so they're looking to see, well, if they do give us a bit of a push, can we build some and get a base that's big enough for them to justify keeping us around. So ... we all feel like we're on Serenity. We're looking ahead to that next job. We're still flying. The future's uncertain, but we're still flying."

The show has taken a while to find an audience, in part due to preemptions for the World Series. Fox won't air episodes this week or next, but will return with original episodes starting Dec. 6, with "War Stories." The series' two-hour pilot, "Serenity," which hasn't aired yet, will finally get special treatment in a full broadcast on Dec. 20.

"The ratings in December will matter" for Firefly's future, Whedon said. "A lot of that is on their shoulders. They have to bring the people in. Whether or not they stay is our job. ... That's our hope, that we're building. But we have started out kind of handicapped in not showing the pilot [yet]. That was a creative decision that threw a lot of people off and kind of put it out in the ozone that there was something wrong with the show, and that's never a good way to start. So we have a lot to overcome. But we're definitely in creative sync with [Fox] now, and we're working enormously hard to make the episodes as exciting as humanly possible. And they recognize that the quality of the work is really high, and I can say that without reservation, because the work that we're doing is so hard. The actors are as good a bunch of actors to a man as I've ever worked with. And I've got [executive producer] Tim Minear and [writer] Ben Edlund and ... some great goddamned minds working on the show. So when I say the quality is high, I'm not just bragging. Well, I'm sort of bragging. More boasting than bragging." Firefly airs Fridays at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

Originally posted by spainlinx0
So if a movie is set place in a time where people "thought" magic and superstition were real, even though I can't recall any scene in the movie where magic or superstition were used, it still counts as Sci-Fi? That's the strangest tag line I have ever seen. Is that for real?