{"id":5401,"date":"2005-09-30T10:14:03","date_gmt":"2005-09-30T14:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5401"},"modified":"2005-09-30T10:14:03","modified_gmt":"2005-09-30T14:14:03","slug":"serenity-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/serenity-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Serenity now"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s the end of a long week, so how about a little Friday diversion from the usual political news?<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t say I watch a lot of television, but I tend to enjoy a handful of writers whose work really stands out. I tend to love just about every word Matt Groening and Aaron Sorkin write, but Joss Whedon is a personal favorite. I particularly enjoyed Firefly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Granted, the pitch doesn’t sound like much. It’s a western in space, a few centuries in the future. There are no aliens. The crew flies a ship with no external weapons. Lots of characters carry guns, but they don’t even shoot lasers. They occasionally curse in Chinese. But just below the surface, it managed to be one of the most engaging shows I’ve ever seen.<\/p>\n

You’ve probably heard the story by now — Fox gave the show an awful timeslot and no promotion. Critics loved it, a cult following loved it, but no one else saw it. Firefly was unceremoniously cancelled after 11 episodes. Usually, that’s the end of any story about a show with poor ratings.<\/p>\n

Not this time. It went to DVD where it sold a gazillion copies. Universal noticed this and agreed to turn it into a movie, called Serenity<\/a>, which will be released today nationwide. I, among others, am very much looking forward to seeing it this weekend.<\/p>\n

I suppose I should also mention that there’s been some talk on the web about the political ideology underlying the show\/movie. As far as I can tell, as is often the case with political interpretations of art, people are generally seeing what they want to see — conservatives tend to believe Firefly\/Serenity represents fundamentally conservative values (freedom from government interference, boot-strap capitalism), while progressives see the opposite (balancing the freedom of the individual against the needs of the community, sacrifice to advance a common good).<\/p>\n

Ultimately, though, this isn’t a political show\/movie; it’s a fun adventure with terrific characters and stellar writing. Anyone else in the Carpetbagger community looking forward to this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s the end of a long week, so how about a little Friday diversion from the usual political news? I wouldn’t say I watch a lot of television, but I tend to enjoy a handful of writers whose work really stands out. I tend to love just about every word Matt Groening and Aaron Sorkin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}