Where I get concerned (there are a couple of things, but this one mainly) is that this won’t take long to turn into a “help rich people take your money some more” type of situation. Sure, the fans can finance whatever they want, but celebrities and major corporations will always have the upper hand in terms of sheer visibility. If I can budget out $200 bucks in the first half of the year for projects like this, how likely is it that I’ll find the small-but-great web series or brilliant indie projects if there’s attention-sucking sinkholes like this littering the landscape?

If this works, I’d be expecting a lot less of what Kickstarter was probably intended for in the first place.

(1) I’m a tried & true capitalist, so I support anyone’s right to get a project like this made, but …

(2) This really smacks of feigned theatricality b/c these two have been very vocal about bringing this back FOR YEARS, so methinks some of this is the end result of web-nerds being ‘spun’ to think they did it.

Now, that said, I still think it’ll fail in much the same way the FIREFLY movie really didn’t get new life to that whole franchise. (Yes, maybe it’ll survive in marketing tie-ins like books or comics or Apps or what-have-you.) But, at the end of the day, no studio exec is going to greenlight a property that doesn’t have dollar signs showing in his (or her) eyes.

I’d much rather they take their $2M — assuming it all gets collected — and produce some way-terrific web content (something like ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT is doing with Netflix) and then show an industry how to transfer that property (a cult-followed TV show) to a web-followed one b/c then a major studio might (might!) pick it up and see something smart is done with it.

In ways, this whole ‘finance it ourselves’ thing really smacks of the whole ‘own it yourself’ phenomenon that took over the comics industry in the early 90′s. While there were some good properties that came out of it, there was an awful lot of crap, too. Some folks NEED the studio system in order to make something of exceptional quality while others can prove they can do something outside the box. Say what you might but VERONICA MARS was never anything more than a critical hit (don’t EVEN get me started on the whole “Well, it would’ve been bigger if it had been on a major network” because now YOU’RE the one who’s delusional). Sometimes it pays to swallow the blue pill; sometimes you’re better off with the red.

That’s just my two cents. I tried the show and didn’t much care for it; couldn’t say why, per se, I just didn’t see it all that interesting. I can’t see why that got me flamed to Holy Hell yesterday (not here, but elsewhere).