Firefly gets fuckier when you realize it’s influenced by that period of 70s-80s sci-fi where there were weird second wave feminist vibes of women’s religious societies as a model like the Bene Gesserit, and so the Companions aren’t just unionized whores, they’re something like Sex Nuns

So something on my mind today from my old TV screenwriting push is the concept of a story engine

Which was the mechanism, in episodic writing, by which your cast got into new plots each outing. That, more than any ideological issue, is why there are so many cop shows. Same as medical shows, or lawyers, or P.I.s, problems with stakes just show up. A patient is delivered to the ER, or our crew is dispatched to a crime scene, or a client walks in the door with a case.

They don’t even have to be that logically weight-bearing: while puttering about, an elderly mystery novelist hears of a murder, or The A-Team becomes aware of an injustice.

One thing I realized trying to write a spec script for it, Firefly has basically no story engine.

Plenty of characterization and backstory, but like, no consistent mechanism for things to happen. You have to individually justify each plot and each character’s role in it.

Like, Buffy. “Buffy Summers goes to high school, and it’s her duty to fight monsters of the week.” Even Star Trek, a setup for sci-fi short stories of any variety, you could answer “why are they there?” with “they’re on an exploratory mission” and “why are they doing this?” with “Kirk’s the ranking officer, they follow his orders”.

Whereas even putting forth a “‘cause Mal’s the captain”, you’d have to account and write for the fact that Zoë would accept that blankly, Wash would be pulled along by his emotional dynamic with both of them, Kaylee would extract emotional collateral, Jayne would expect to get paid, Simon would want an intellectual justification, Inara would have to work the right side of her push/pull dynamic to overcome her autonomy, Book and River???

That “thick characterization, weak engine” setup seems to work better for sitcoms, which might have engine-like recurring bits that usually set theme more than plot, like Frasier’s callers. Night Court isn’t about the cases, it’s about the interplay of the characters. In contrast, though there are character dynamics, House is really about the pathology cases.

Riffing off that Sady post from a while ago, yeah, you really get an appreciation of fiction when you try to write it. When I was in LA I was trying to be a TV screenwriter. Wrote some amazing stuff, but didn’t work because I don’t have connections to get anyone to read my stuff and had too much contempt for the people I’d have to schmooze to make them.

Anyway writing spec scripts really gets you a feel for the medium in general, and your selected show in particular. I ended up doing a Veronica Mars (amazing, available on request), and a pilot (ditto) but before that I started a Firefly. I abandoned it halfway through because it was really too  out of date, but one of the things I realized that’s a real problem with the show is that given that so many episodes are about the gang getting together for some heist, it’s damn-near impossible to work up an explanation for why and how Inara would join in.

You realize the actual staff - which is to say, people on the Minear, Espenson, Whedon level - couldn’t really figure this out either. In Jaynestown she kind of got a side mission that looped in at the end, but most of the episodes she’s kind of given an excuse to stay away. The only episodes where Inara had an organic part of the mechanical plot were the Saffron episodes, because Saffron was goatee-universe Inara, but there’s limits to that. (Remember how Vampire Willow episodes of Buffy were amazing, but the actual Willow Goes Evil plotline of the pentultimate season was such a mess?)

That’s a shame because for how hard she is for the mechanical plot, she’s got great potential for push/pull dynamics with each character to power the equally important emotional arc:

Mal (basic love/hate)

Simon (shared appreciation/longing for the finer things in life in the harsh emptiness of frontier space, bonding over their identity as professionals, resentment that he takes his professional status from the settled straight world as equivalent to her status from the demimonde they now inhabit)

Kaylee (shared appreciation of an unapologetic girlishness that can cut both lacy and innocent or leathery and promiscuous, conflict over the fact that their skill sets are so far apart that if they’re ever under pressure together one’s always acting the ignorant amateur to the other’s polished master)

River (motherliness towards someone who’s earned her respect but still exhibits vulnerable neediness, especially on the grounds of a ‘still waters run deep’ weaponized femininity; wary that she can’t even conceive River’s interiority well enough to manipulate her at all)

Jayne (the same direct brutishness/elegant intrigue contrast that makes for great personality conflict also makes them a pretty balanced team in pursuit of a goal, plus the Whedonian play against TV convention with the complete impossibility of romantic subtext given that Inara would never and Jayne doesn’t do subtext)

Shepherd (the shared experience of secret-keeping vs. the fact that Shepherd intentionally presents to avoid his mystique while Inara presents to enhance hers)

Zoe (envious of her easy and uncomplicated relationship with Mal/cautious that it relies on the exact kind of unquestioning deference she avoids; cautious about her role as the crew’s female icon of settled monogamy/envious that it’s the exact model of egalitarian relationship she wants.)

Wash (Actually, I don’t know how you’d write an Inara/Wash plot. Wait no, I got it. She’d depend on him for something and he’d fuck it up in a dumb way and try to joke her temper down and she’d call him on his bullshit then be catty about him to the rest of the crew. Then he’d pull a totally amazing save and she’d look like the jerk. She’d do fish-out-of-water dealing with being the least liked person around, and appreciate the way that he’s really the one holding the crew in balance, performing the same kind of emotional labor she does.)