I've followed your advice and bought the whole series and the movie extremely cheap on BluRay and am completely stunned.
After seeing the first 8 episodes and realizing, that I've already seen half of it, I can understand that you're mad.
This is easily one of the most awesome series I've seen in my whole life. How could this get cancelled?!
Is there ANY remote chance, that it will be continued?
Was it aborted due to American TV conspiracy not allowing heroes to speak Chinese now and then, the captain sometimes simply doing what has to be done (the moment with the turbine made me laugh in a very special and surprised way) and especcially for having a high class prostitute as one of the most noble characters?
Seeing how well the series was received by critics and the audience alike, it sure smells like it was aborted for political reasons. It breaks with so many norms in such an excellent way...

This is really infuriating.

An American told me once, "the series features a bunch of outlaws defying and outright fighting the government right after 9/11, and you're surprised it got canceled?" I keep trying to convince myself it was just shit talk.

After all this time, chances of it being continued are essentially non existant. Maybe a reboot, american franchises do that all the time, but would you trust a reboot?

I doubt that any major network would cancel a successful series midway through its first season because they don't like its politics. The reason is far simpler: viewer ratings were really low. Not surprising, since it seems like a show that appeals mostly to a niché audience. High praise from critics and a dedicated (perhaps even excessively rabid) fanbase don't necessarily translate to mainstream success, which has been the case with a lot of things that are nowadays considered classics, but failed when they were first released; this applies whether we're talking about movies, TV shows, games, novels, etc.
Keep in mind that general audiences seem to favour disposable, simplistic garbage. After all, one of the most popular shows of the past eight years is The Big Bang Theory.

Granted, by all accounts, Fox's dumb decisions didn't help Firefly, such as inexplicably airing the episodes out of order.

Hell, the only reason the movie got made was because fans organized a massive letter-writing campaign, and it also went on to fail at the box office.

On that note, I'd also like to point out that I regard Forever Knight as one of the greatest TV shows ever made, which was also cancelled because of insuffcient ratings. Thrice. Two letter-writing campaigns from fans brought it back for a second and, eventually, a third season.

From what I've read, it reached quite good quotas in relation to the time of day it was aired.
It wasn't aired at prime time, so there are other standards and politics always played a major part in TV.
P1na stated another, probably way more important example of such reasons.
They literally took the original outfits of the soldiers in Starship Troopers (the stereotypical good and dumb American army grunts) and used them for the Alliance in Firefly whose main protagonists are on the other side, doing good - outlaw style, right after 9/11.

Look at the director's work and tell me, he isn't tighly tied to strongly politically influenced corporations and therefore bound by their laws: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0923736/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
Looking at his track record, Firefly is way above all of it and looks extremely out of place and it was shut down before it really started although the numbers weren't bad.

That settles it, I guess...

I still doubt that it was political. Everything I can find about the show mentions fairly low ratings.
Yes, the show was screwed over by network executives, but such situations usually have more to do with those people being complete morons with inflated egos than with politics.

A show like Firefly will always be a hard sell to general audiences, regardless of quality, and if there's one thing a relatively costly Sci-Fi show needs, it's a large audience to support the production. And if 9/11 factored into the situation, it was likely more on the viewers' side, who were probably turned off by such material even more at that point in time.

As an unrelated little fun fact, a season of Power Rangers also re-used Starship Trooper's outfits.

Nope, haven't seen him.

In seriousness, the real answer (spoiler rot13 encrypted for your protection):
V urneq ur qvrq.

(I suggest not trying to decrypt that message unless you don't mind being spoiled, or you've already seen the new Star Wars movie.)

Leia's face though.

Great. You made it. Now I've seen the whole series and am angry and sad. That's what you wanted, right? Are you happy now? ;)
I just hope, that the movie will resolve a bit, I'll see it tomorrow. It still can't replace the many dozens of episodes I'd like to see instead. This should have been as long as Babylon 5.

Seriously, finally a really good Sci-Fi series in every way that made about everything right and.... argh.

Mild Spoilers




The only "alien" is a mutated cow fetus that is labeled as an alien in a freak show at a fair; there are no magical force fields, preventing most space fighting since everything is broken immedieately and those ships are too expensice to just blow them up and rather get boarded and it's the only Sci-Fi series I know that doesn't have sound outside of athmospheres (!!!).

I really liked the scene, where you see the two ships from the outside in complete silence, a shot is fired, still complete silence, the ship is hit, zoom into it and at the same time you start hearing sound. I always wanted it to be like this in all Sci-Fi series and a space western is the forst I know of to do it and gets cancelled. :'-(

Great was also
"Psychic? Sounds like Sci-Fi..."
<You are living on a space ship.>
"And?"