I grew up watching Westerns like Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers. Eventually I started watching and reading science fiction: Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who. The two genres obviously have a lot in common: unexplored frontiers, hostile aliens, larger-than-life heroes having exciting adventures. When I first ran across the Space Western idea it was 1987, and I was a devoted pint-sized fan of the cartoon "BraveStarr". So you'll understand when I say that "Firefly" is a bit of a rip-off.
If the idea behind the series is nothing new, its creators haven't noticed. Every scene and every shot seems to bear the caption "Look how awesome this is." For example, in a saloon brawl in the first episode, our hero gets tossed through a holographic window. Wasn't that awesome? It's just like in a Western, but with an arbitrary science-fiction thing too. Some of the baddies ride hovercraft, other ride horses. Our hero wears a leather duster, but his engineer dresses in the latest Harajuku fashions. The entire cast cusses in Mandarin with Texas accents. Isn't it all so irritatingly clever? Isn't it all just so pointlessly, overbearingly precious?
If cleverness was all you needed for a successful show, maybe "Firefly" would have gotten somewhere. But it's generally accepted that good shows need good characters and good stories; "Firefly" has stereotyped characters and clichéd stories. There's hardly a script that hasn't already seen a thousand typewriters, from the blandly generic "Train Job" to "Heart of Gold", in which the crew defends a whorehouse as if it were Fort Petticoat. Our heroes are the swaggering Captain Mal, icy "Warrior Woman" Zoe, gun-crazed lunatic Jayne, cute but autistic River, and some others. Most of them are crazy and/or violent, but cursed with Joss Whedon's dialogue they become merely, well, cute. There's not really any psychology here, at least no more than you'd expect from something like "The A-Team". The stereotypes are balanced out by the show's villains, mostly in the shape of the cookie-cutter totalitarian Alliance, who are merely a less effective iteration of the Galactic Empire trope known already from Star Wars. The Western's obligatory Indians have been functionally replaced by zombie-like "reavers", who seem to have trespassed from the set of a horror film.
To sum up: "Firefly" is annoyingly cute, insufferably clever, and has lots of shooting. It has neither depth nor originality. If you like self-consciously quirky dialogue and guns, then this is the show for you. If you like intelligent science fiction, or even intelligent Westerns, then this ain't your show, pilgrim.
If the idea behind the series is nothing new, its creators haven't noticed. Every scene and every shot seems to bear the caption "Look how awesome this is." For example, in a saloon brawl in the first episode, our hero gets tossed through a holographic window. Wasn't that awesome? It's just like in a Western, but with an arbitrary science-fiction thing too. Some of the baddies ride hovercraft, other ride horses. Our hero wears a leather duster, but his engineer dresses in the latest Harajuku fashions. The entire cast cusses in Mandarin with Texas accents. Isn't it all so irritatingly clever? Isn't it all just so pointlessly, overbearingly precious?
If cleverness was all you needed for a successful show, maybe "Firefly" would have gotten somewhere. But it's generally accepted that good shows need good characters and good stories; "Firefly" has stereotyped characters and clichéd stories. There's hardly a script that hasn't already seen a thousand typewriters, from the blandly generic "Train Job" to "Heart of Gold", in which the crew defends a whorehouse as if it were Fort Petticoat. Our heroes are the swaggering Captain Mal, icy "Warrior Woman" Zoe, gun-crazed lunatic Jayne, cute but autistic River, and some others. Most of them are crazy and/or violent, but cursed with Joss Whedon's dialogue they become merely, well, cute. There's not really any psychology here, at least no more than you'd expect from something like "The A-Team". The stereotypes are balanced out by the show's villains, mostly in the shape of the cookie-cutter totalitarian Alliance, who are merely a less effective iteration of the Galactic Empire trope known already from Star Wars. The Western's obligatory Indians have been functionally replaced by zombie-like "reavers", who seem to have trespassed from the set of a horror film.
To sum up: "Firefly" is annoyingly cute, insufferably clever, and has lots of shooting. It has neither depth nor originality. If you like self-consciously quirky dialogue and guns, then this is the show for you. If you like intelligent science fiction, or even intelligent Westerns, then this ain't your show, pilgrim.