Since Meagan and I only have one more season of The Wire to go, I’ve selected a new TV series from Netflix to work on called Firefly.
I had some friends who half-heartedly recommended this series to me in the past, but I never felt drawn to the program. I say “half-heartedly” because they were obsessed with it and feared having to defend the show when its qualities aren’t really defendable.
Firefly belongs to the sci-fi sub-genre of “Space Westerns.” Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is the only Star Trek season classified as a Space Western on this Wikipedia page, but I’d argue that the entire Star Trek series is somewhat of a space western. In every season that I’ve seen (I’m not that familiar with the show aside from Star Trek: The Next Generation), the crew is on a mission to tame the open space in front of them. This underlying story line inherently belongs to the Western genre – exploring uncharted land, fighting with savages, staking claim on new area, surviving.
The shows mentioned on this page, including Firefly, are very obviously westerns in the sense that the characters have a cowboy drawl, wear guns on their hips, and wrestle cattle. The settings and costumes are what make these shows westerns in space in addition to the overall plot of taming a new frontier.
I haven’t seen a lot of this sub-genre, but my assumption is that each one of these shows is terribly cheesy. Firefly has great characters that go on fun, exciting adventures, but the show is filled with corny one-liners and unrealistic outcomes. This might be one of the reasons why I like the show, but it’s also what makes the show impossible to defend. It’s kind of lame. If you like it, great. If you don’t like it, you don’t even have to explain yourself.
Meagan and I got interested in the show after we saw a portion of Serenity, a movie based on the series, on TV. Firefly ain’t no Battlestar Galactica, but it’s a fun show if you like science fiction and this guy.