Is it better to have loved and lost than never loved at all?

Remember "Roswell"? The series about 3 teenage aliens from that famous Area 51 spaceship?
Somehow a teenage terminator just doesn't have the panache that AHNOLLLD has.

Hey, the girl who said, "Come with me if you want to live"; was she Summer Glau from the Firefly series? I was wondering if she'd be in anything else. I doubt it will last but, eh whaddya gonna do?

Yes.

I think "kill you with my brain" was supposed to give that away.

People go on and on about "Firefly", yet where were the ratings if it was that great of a show? Has nothing to do with Fox and it's programming proclivities, it has to do with ratings. If this show has them, it will be around.

The Terminator guy looks a little weak. I think I could kick his ass. In fact...I'm going to.

People go on and on about "Firefly", yet where were the ratings if it was that great of a show? Has nothing to do with Fox and it's programming proclivities, it has to do with ratings. If this show has them, it will be around.

Fox is notorious for playing games with show's timeslots. The X-Files had so many different timeslots over the years it was ridiculous. When the show is bouncing all over the place it's hard to build a fanbase. Personally, I'm still bitter at their killing Brimstone just as it was starting to hit it's stride.

O.K., that was about the worst rendition of "come with me if you want to live" that I've ever heard. Or seen. I was expecting her to blow a bubble with gum and twirl her hair. It would have, on second thought, been more believable if she had.

Ohhh, I get it now.

This is "The Sarah Conner Live Journal". Right.

Well, The Simpsons on occasion features good science fiction episodes, but definitely not all the time. Fox News, of course, is just second-rate fiction. But what happens when you combine them? Why you may well get exposure of the latest liberal outrage!!!

[I know, conservatives, I know, you're astonished by how Homer's reaction so closely mirrors your own. He's a genius, isn't he?]

Here's the thing about ratings: a well-written show generally does not reveal everything that is interesting in the first episode; a badly-written show does. After the first episode, a well-written show has time and space to build up its characters, tell its story, and develop a believable background. After the first episode, a badly-written show repeats, over and over, the same themes, while the characters go nowhere and never change.

The difference in ratings is that well-written shows usually get their fan base well and truly established by about the middle of the second season. Badly-written shows have a short, sharp rise in fan base for the first two or three episodes, after which it begins to taper off and slowly fades until eventually the show is completely out of steam; a year or two later, it's finally cancelled when it's obvious that the audience is not coming back. Well-written shows require the network to have patience. When the network does not, as Fox typically does not, you get shows like Firefly and Space: Above and Beyond that die just as they are hitting their stride, or shows like Drive, that never get the chance.

But it's not just Fox (though they're one of the worst, since they cannot leave a show in a timeslot, and often put their most promising sci-fi right after football, so that half the time it's only shown part way through in any case, due to the game running past the scheduled slot, or it's shown late): Babylon 5 and Farscape were both on other channels. Good sci-fi needs a channel to champion it during its start-up phase, while it's building an audience and getting into its stride. Sadly, the Sci-Fi Channel is not apparently going to be doing that, so my guess is that we're mostly SOL for good sci-fi. (Though the new Battlestar Galactica is encouraging, at least if they can get past the wretched third season and back to the feel of the first two seasons.)

"The Terminator guy looks a little weak. I think I could kick his ass. In fact...I'm going to."

Agreed. I'll probably still watch it though.

I never saw a single episode of Firefly and it kills me to wonder how many other of Firefly's best audience also never saw a single episode.

I'd *heard* about it and this is what I heard... "Buffy" and "psychic."

But Buffy fans aren't the same "set" of fans as Firefly fans. Sure the two sets might overlap but not greatly.

Same writer and producer as Buffy and, yeah, River Tam is "psychic" but it's a show about the old west with a bitter ex-Confederate soldier (sorta) who's trying to keep his spaceship from falling apart.

Now who was responsible for the publicity?

Never saw a single episode *on television*.

I am a HUGE firefly fan (literally as well as figuratively). But I never even heard of the show until Instapundit started talking up the movie Serenity a few years ago. It's sad but amazing at the same time. A decade ago the show would have come and gone and I never would have seen it. Thank God for DVD box sets.

I'm with Jay about Fox screwing this up. I'm still pissed about Drive. They keep doing it sooner in the shows life ...I anticipate this show being pulled halfway through the pilot.

Also, to those who don't understand what Fox did to Firefly, they canned the pilot and started the series off with the second episode. Essentially they knocked off the 2 hours that explained the series and introduced the characters to the audience. Some people might have found that part usefull.

Finally, in Summer Glaus first scene in Firelfy (well, what should have been her first scene, in the pilot) she was introduced buck nekkid. From a quick shot in the trailer and knowing how the Terminator time machines "work" it looks like she'll start this series off the same way. THAT's how you set up a long career....

Ditto what brainy435 said. Never heard of it, never saw it until Serenity. Without knowing a thing about the series, I was immediately drawn by the great dialogue and deep characters. Unlike most movies, the characters did what actualy humans would do, so i could relate at that level. So many times characters do such dumb things you don't care whether they live or die. Not only did Fox bounce Firefly all over the place, they also played the episodes out of sequence. It would be like giving U2, before anyone knew them, 13 nonadvertised gigs and expecting them to sell 60,000 tickets. Xfiles didn't get an audience until well into three or four seasons. Someone was out to kill the show before it started. OK, with that off my chest, I doubt this will catch on. It doesn't even seem to fit into the storyline that well. Maybe they have some clever way to explain these terminators don't look like arnold (when the others one did), or the fact that in T3 these 'chronicles' and other cyborg attacks were ever mentioned. On an unrelated note, I just read Joss Whedon will no longer be writing the Wonder Woman script, which sucks. Not like I would have seen it, but he's got such a great gift with the pen.