My own Firefly story...
My wife started watching it when it was first on Fox. She kept saying "You've got to watch this new show! It's amazing!" I stalled and resisted, I'm not even sure why. But she kept at it, and finally I tuned in. I can't remember what episode it was (maybe Shindig?).
Anyway, I watched about 5-10 minutes of it, and pretty much dismissed it. Cowboys? In Space? Speaking Chinese? No thanks. I figured my wife just liked it because it had one of her favortie soap opera stars in it. Soon it was cancelled, I felt vindicated, and thought no more of it.
But primarily due to the people on this board, I kept hearing how great it was, how they loved it so much, etc. Then the announcement that a movie was being made came, and everyone went bat-shit.
I figured, for one of the few times in my life, that maybe I was wrong, and I ought to give it another try. When Sci-Fi ran the marathon, I planted myself. I remember saying to my wife after it was over "What the hell was I watching the first time??!?! This is brilliant!" She likes to remind me of that one.
We bought the DVD's to get the unaired episodes, watched them all, and just loved them tremendously. We saw the movie several times, and hoped against hope that the box office numbers would take off. Alas it was not to be.
I'm okay with it all. If I could wave my magic wand I'd renew it in a second, but I don't feel angry or cheated or anything like that. I thought it was clever, moving, exciting, and different. But yes, finally, most of us Browncoats have moved on.
) and bullets instead of blasters. To many, sci-fi is synonymous with ray guns and robots and spandex and aliens, not a lived-in universe of human beings who, despite living on other planets and traveling twixt them in spaceships, look more like the Old West than Metropolis (Fritz Lang's, not Clark Kent's). Now, there are several very good arguments that such a situation is more rather than less likely under the circumstances of humanity's exodus from Earth, but they weren't explained in the course of the show - IMHO, to Joss's eternal credit, because it made the show feel more real if it wasn't bogged down by a bunch of characters explaining to each other the things they should take for granted. In much the same way that the original Star Trek series simply took its circumstances and technology for granted, unlike later series that explained everything with technobabble and pseudo-science in an effort to "seem" high-tech, but more accurately just seemed silly (and sillier as it went on).
All the smart writing in the world isn't going to help when the viewer is suffering one of Sheldon Cooper's facial tic storms as he tries to figure that one out!
