When the original Star Trek series was threatened with cancelation in the 1960s, fans of the show rallied to save it through a letter writing campaign. In more recent years, tech-savvy fans have built thriving online communities and utilized online petitions as a way to support their favorite franchises. Since most “save our show” endeavors – both online and off – have failed to resurrect a doomed series, many fans have now started organizing charity events to keep the flame alive, “giving back” to the world-at-large in the process.
Arguably the most impressive example of this ongoing sense of “community, fandom, and charity” is the short-lived Firefly, a FOX television series developed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon. Since 2006, fans around the world have organized annual Can’t Stop the Serenity (CSTS) fundraisers benefiting women’s rights advocacy organization Equality Now and featuring viewings of Serenity, the big screen follow-up that Whedon wrote and directed in 2005.
Both a stand-alone story as well as a continuation of the Firefly narrative, the film – like the series – follows a rag-tag group of space-scavengers 500 years in the future who live on a Firefly-class ship called Serenity. Their captain, Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds, fought in a civil war between the Alliance, who sought greater control over the numerous planets that the human race has populated, and the Independents, who wanted more autonomous freedom. Reynolds was on the losing side and now retains his sense of independence by adopting a mantra of “find a crew, find a job, keep flying” while trying to remain outside the reaches of the Alliance.
The series makes an apt metaphor for the widespread fanbase that the show has attracted over the years. The FOX network mishandled Firefly from the start, advertising the series as a “quirky adventure” when, in reality, it was a stark psychological examination of surviving on the edges of society and civilization. The series was also given a Friday night death-slot, and FOX’s commitment to Major League Baseball led to a disruption of the show’s schedule. Firefly was eventually cancelled in December 2002, after only eleven aired episodes.
Where most television stories end, however, Firefly’s had barely begun. A “Save Firefly” movement quickly developed, with fans even adopting the term “Browncoats” – as the Independents were known – for themselves. Joss Whedon was just as determined to not let the series die and eventually convinced Universal Pictures to greenlight the big screen Serenity, but the film failed to generate any box office traction. Again, most stories would end there, but Christopher Frankonis, a Firefly fan and blogger who went by the moniker One True b!X, had different plans.
“Late in 2005, a group of Browncoats were leaving one of the last big screen showings of Serenity,” Anna Snyder, herself a Browncoat, told the Portland Mercury of how the fundraiser began. “And the One True b!X was thinking, ‘Hey, maybe there’s a way we could get the movie on the big screen again, just for fun.’ And that morphed into, ‘Well, if we could do it to raise some money, that would be great.’ Which then became, ‘Hey, let’s organize a charity screening and let’s see if we can get other cities involved.’”
Can’t Stop the Serenity featured 47 showings of the film in five different countries – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States – in its initial year and raised $65,000 for Equality Now. The charity organization was founded in 1992 by Jessica Neuwirth, Navanethem Pillay and Feryal Gharahi as a way of bringing attention to the gender disparity in the human rights movement, and addresses such women-centric issues as domestic violence, rape, female genital mutilation, trafficking, and reproductive rights.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is the only city that has participated in every installment of Can’t Stop the Serenity since its inception. The first local CSTS was organized in 2006 by fellow Browncoats Cate Steven-Davis and Kiersten Ball, with the former later taking over full-time. “It’s a lot of work, more than I anticipated,” Steven-Davis explained during the 2008 Can’t Stop the Serenity. “We have a global organizer who helps a lot, getting sponsors. And a lot of the stuff you see in the raffle was donated from the global sponsors. But there was a lot of work. Just pulling it all together, trying to raise money and not lose money. It’s challenging but at the end of the night every drop of sweat was worth it.”
Since 2011, other members of the Rivers and Bridges Brigade – as the Steel City collection of Browncoats are called – have taken over organizing Can’t Stop the Serenity. In addition to the actual screening of Serenity, the Pittsburgh version also includes numerous Firefly-themed games, an assortment of food items, and the raffling of door prizes at the end of the evening. Just like in other locales across the globe, many attendees also arrive dressed as their favorite characters from the film, adding to the celebratory nature of the event.
“Pittsburgh was one of the inaugural cities that held Can’t Stop the Serenity charity screenings back in 2006, and we always took the fundraising aspect of the event very seriously,” Chris Tobias, current head of the Rivers and Bridges Brigade, said of the group’s efforts. “But as the years went by and fewer and fewer cities were holding events with each passing year, it also became a source of immense pride to us that Pittsburgh was among those cities that had organized a charity screening of Serenity every single year.”
While the COVID outbreak in 2020 was an obvious challenge, the Pittsburgh Browncoats were determined to organize that year’s Can’t Stop the Serenity nonetheless. “We started looking at ways we could hold the event outdoors in a manner that would allow attendees to be masked and socially distanced,” Tobias explained. “Drive-in theaters proved to be prohibitively expensive, but we arrived at the idea of screening the movie in a field next to a grove in Allegheny County’s South Park. We screened the movie outdoors in the park at sundown, and attendees were asked to bring their own blankets, chairs, food and drinks. With all of the donations being handled online ahead of time, there was no need for tickets or money to change hands. We ended up screening ‘Serenity Under the Stars’ to a ‘capacity crowd’ of 40 dedicated Browncoats on September 5, 2020, and as a result Pittsburgh was the only city in the world that managed to hold a CSTS event that year.”
Malcolm Reynolds and the crew of Serenity found a way to beat the odds with the simple philosophy of “find a crew, find a job, keep flying.” Firefly/Serenity fans, meanwhile, have likewise defied conventional wisdom by building a flourishing community centered on a television show that was cancelled after a mere eleven episodes. Even after two decades, that comradery still exists, and both the show and film – as well as Can’t Stop the Serenity – remains relevant to Browncoats everywhere.
“Wendy Scott said quite often on the UK Firefly/Serenity podcast Sending a Wave that Can’t Stop the Serenity is probably the only annual fan-driven event in the world of science-fiction that exists primarily for the purpose of helping others,” Chris Tobias noted. “Since 2006 it has raised over $1.35 million for Equality Now and other charities. But I also think it’s important because it gives the Browncoat community a reason to gather and celebrate their love of Firefly and Serenity every year, and it has also ensured that the movie Serenity – which is arguably one of the best motion pictures in science-fiction history – has run continuously on the big screen for 18 years.”
A popular slogan among Browncoats is “Done the Impossible,” which is the title of a DVD documentary that tells the story of how the motion picture Serenity became reality through the efforts of that community. As the annual CSTS charity events demonstrate, however, Firefly/Serenity fans are far from “done” with the “impossible” – a fact that will no doubt remain prevalent for many more years to come.
Anthony Letizia