Thanks for all the input. I guess it’s not for me. Glad you all saved me the trouble!
My error; and yes, Jayne’s unvarnished malfeasance and somewhat uneven attempts to redeem himself (if sometimes involuntarily, as in “Jaynestown”) provided some of the best scenes in the show. He was criminally underused in the movie, although he did get a few of the most quotable lines. “She is startin’ to damage my calm.”
Stranger
Which two episodes did you watch? The DVD order is Serenity (hour and a half pilot where they scavenge condensed food stuff and have trouble finding a buyer) and then The Train Job (where they contract to steal some boxes that turn out to be medicine for a deadly plague). Those two?
Serenity is very good - probably in the middle-half of the episodes quality wise but perhaps a bit slow, whereas the Train Job is one of the worse episodes of the series.
Skip ahead to “Our Mrs. Reynolds”, episode 6 on the DVD order. It’s the best of the episodes that you can appreciate without really knowing the characters/story yet by going through all the episodes. If you don’t like that one, you won’t like Firefly, and you are a bad person.
I can’t fathom how you love BSG but find the dialogue in FF unconvincing.
I agree with stranger that Baccarina is a weak link. I don’t think there was much dialogue that was written at the 8th grade level though.
I watched the first two episodes on the DVD.
It’s on Netflix instant right now, which is what prompted me to think about trying again.
I had a lot of problems with the underlying premise until it was explained to me that the entire series takes place in a single star system.
Of course, according to ‘canon’ there are WAY too many habitable worlds even if you posit the existence of multiple gas giants with terraformed moons.
As a fun combination of western and SF it is quite entertaining.
As something complex and thought-provoking (like the best of ST, BSG and B5 were) well… not so much.
I saw Serenity and found the situations, characters, and dialogue to be derivative and mediocre at best. After all the raving, I watched what I thought was the first episode. No change of opinion regarding those, but when a main character falsely told another that someone had died, and the poor guy went rushing off to investigate, and then said character and the rest of the crew were shown sitting around laughing about it, I walked off, and refuse to even be in the same room when the show is playing. If that’s someone’s idea of admirable behavior, may he go jump off a tall cliff.
Who says it’s admirable behavior? They’re crooks. It was funny.
For what it’s worth I absolutely did not enjoy Firefly at all during my first attempt. I think I made it about two or three episodes in. I just couldn’t get into it at all, and it seemed like a ridiculous concept to me.
A few years later I watched it again with a friend, and was totally hooked by it. We got through the whole series and the movie in something like 2 nights.
So, for what it’s worth… I’d say to give it another try, based on my experience. And I didn’t really follow Joss Whedon’s other work, with the exception of Dr. Horrible, which is awesome.
Also, that took place while Simon was very much an outsider to the crew, and had just used Kaylee’s life as leverage to compel action from the captain. So it was a moment of payback–a cruel joke with no lasting harm.
The captain does make a few admirable decisions later in the series when he sees the right thing to do set against his own immediate self-interest.
I agree that anyone who’s seen a couple episodes and not liked them is probably better off not throwing more time into it. I like Firefly, but I think it’s more popular than it deserves relative to other creative works.
I’m going through it for the first time right now. It’s the idealized American wild wild west cowboy culture, played out in spaceships - so they win points for the genre alone.
I’m halfway through and I’ll watch to the end. It’s OK but its not going to be one of my favorites - too bad it got shot down before it had a chance to shine, I guess.
I saw Serenity because I heard good things about it, but I only had a vague idea about some tv show it was based on. I did not find this to be a limitation, and loved the movie. So I went right out and rented the series and was underwhelmed, it had all that rough draft feeling that shows on a deadline have. But about a year later I went through it again and really loved the series second time around, mileage varies.
My experience was of finding it very patchy. It had moments that I enjoyed immensely and other moments that I found awkward and improbable and stoopid. Overall I thought it was very much worth watching and I wish there was more of it.
My experience is that most art (in the widest sense, books, TV, music etc) that I really enjoy tends to be patchy. You can watch run of the mill sitcoms or movies and they will never really delight you or make you laugh out loud, but they won’t hit wrong notes and they will be dependably mildly amusing. Pretty dull though.
Just finished watching the film and series on Netflix. I’d say that if the OP didn’t like the first two episodes it doesn’t get much better.
The last episode has some very nice touches, and can be watched out of order without spoiling the series.
I liked the series fine, and went through the dozen-plus episodes in a couple days. It had some good lines. It had a lot of convention flipping --setting up a cliche situation and then doing the unexpected. It had some pretty women. The characters weren’t celibate.
I wouldn’t put it in my top eight favorite shows (e.g. Barney Miller), but if I was a 12-24 y.o. watching it week by week it could have become an obsession.
I watched Firefly at a friend’s house; before the end of the first episode I’d re-classified it as “it’s not science fiction, it’s a cowboys movie with a scifi décor”. I liked it from that first episode and liked the immense majority of it.
I hate Buffy. The first time I saw any of it, it made me gag; pretty much anything I’ve seen has been “what-evah” or worse.
I have no idea why I like one and can’t stand the other… but hey, if you don’t like some form of entertainment, whether I like it or not, you’re welcome not to like it! I promise I won’t subject you to Firefly if you ever come visit 
Speaking as a pretty non nerd type, Firefly grabbed me even after having to hear the (competently performed and composed) theme song 14 times or so. I down"loaded" the series (it was legal!) two weeks ago, and it dragged me down to its level. Cool series. Bummer it got killed, like that little girl, out in Oregon, Gordon Cooper.
I think it’s noteworthy that the cast managed to transcend the limitations of their own physical presences and whatever perceived deficiencies in the script. I’m not a script-man, so I really don’t know or care about technical or “technical” issues in any given area, but as a layman, it seemed OK to me.