Jewel Staite talks odds of a Firefly revival

Back before the age of streaming, when TV shows had to air on networks that could cancel them at will, you didn’t see a lot of revivals. If a show went off the air, that was pretty much it; no streaming service was going to swoop in and save them, regardless of how passionate the fan campaign.

That’s why the story of Firefly was so impressive. Made by Avengers director and current Hollywood pariah Joss Whedon, Firefly was a sci-fi show about a motley band of space-faring mercenaries who went from planet from planet just trying to survive. It didn’t even run for a whole season on Fox, but it inspired so much passion in fans that Whedon managed to make a feature film out of it: Serenity, which bowed in 2005.

If Firefly had been made today for some streaming service, it probably would have stuck around longer. But might there be hope for a revival in this new ecosystem?

Could Firefly get revived two decades later?

Speaking to TVLine, star Jewel Staite (who played the cheerful ship mechanic Kaylee) doesn’t see much hope; it has been quite a long while, after all. “I get asked all the time about Season 2 of Firefly, which makes me laugh because it’s been like 20 years, but when I get asked that, I’m like, ‘There’s a better chance of L.A. Complex than there is of Firefly,’” she said. “There’s been rumblings and talk about that with [L.A. Complex creator] Martin [Gero] a little bit over the last few years in the hopes that maybe we could get to do that again someday.”

The L.A. Complex was a Canadian drama about a group of aspiring actors living in an apartment complex together. It ran for two seasons in 2012. Staite played Raquel, a once-successful actor determined to get her career back on track. “It was so unfinished when it was left off and just feels like we could have kept going for a while,” Staite said. “It’s the kind of show that just gets zanier and zanier, too, as time goes on, like a juicy sort of guilty pleasure kind of show, and it felt that way to work on it, too.”

That’s probably not what Firefly fans want to hear, but at least Staite has a very firm idea of what happened to Kaylee after Serenity:

"Oh, I just wanted her to be a mom. I think Kaylee would have made a wonderful mother, and I love the idea of a baby being on the ship and raising the stakes so much. I feel like it would just show different sides to every character’s personality to have a baby around. I would love to have seen Captain Mal holding an infant and not sure what to do with it…. I feel like there’s way more than one kid there. Kaylee would just want to have as many as possible."

Captain Mal was played by Nathan Fillion, one of the bigger stars to come out of the stars. Alan Tudyk did pretty well for himself too. If the show never does come back — and I wouldn’t hold your breath — at least its legacy lives on.

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