Thanks, I Hate It: Firefly (Patreon)

Joss Whedon remains a successful and beloved writer in spite of the ever-mounting stack of sexual misconduct allegations heaped against him, but if the turning of the cultural tides has not robbed him of his money it has at least shoved him firmly out of coolness and into the realm of simpering try-hard glurge where he's always belonged. Whedon's career has been uniquely awful in so many different ways but Firefly, his twee space western from the early 00s, is perhaps the most tooth-grindingly precious metric ton of slurry he's pumped out over the past two decades. 

The show's dialogue is its biggest offender, buried as it is somewhere between Deadwood and Gilmore Girls with its compound complex run-on sentences and sappy, snippily sophomoric tone. Lots of "I reckon there ain't a thing you can do to belay my progress" and "he's got my nethers aquiver with that devilish look" competing for space with glib one-liners and blunt, grimly heroic statements about misbehavin'. I've never cringed harder than when I realized the show's American cast was going to be swearing in butchered, awkward Mandarin for the entire season. Worse, I think there's only one actor of any Asian extraction at all, period, in a fictional universe allegedly shaped in large part by Chinese culture. 

The world of Firefly never quite comes together. It's hampered, of course, by the understandable limitations of a TV budget, but Star Trek: The Next Generation seldom felt incoherent or inauthentic even when its effects and sets fell flat. The difference, I think, is purpose and attitude. TNG was a show about philosophy and peace and its entire design reflected that, even when it did so in cheesy or cheap-looking fashion. Firefly is a show about how it would be cool/funny if cowboys were in space. That is not a concept with a lot of staying power on its own, and Whedon's boilerplate secret government villainy plot, ickily mismanaged preaching about prostitution, and cast of one-note cartoon characters doesn't give it much room to buzz its papery little insect wings.

For a show with Firefly's uninspired ambitions to still blunder into letting its reach exceed its grasp is a kind of accomplishment, I suppose. The cowboy shenanigans planetside never feel like anything but a shitty Western while the space stuff is just sort of generically Star Wars-y, an unhappy marriage which never results in any viable offspring. It's a show where a bunch of Cracked.com-level wits snigger and quip on a succession of identically dusty planets while somehow managing to romanticize the defeat of the Confederate States of America.