L233: I'm intrigued. Explain why Firefly is overrated, if you will?
That's the wrong question to ask. The right question would be: what is it that supposedly made this show so great?
Was it the intriguing characters? Nope, they were pretty much all retarded stereotypes. The elderly negro preacher offering sage advice? The nerdy pilot? The stuck-up doctor? The random tough guy with a soft heart? The witty captain? The Dark Angel meets Leeloo kung-fu genius girl? The tomboy mechanic? Cliche galore, that's what it is. The pilot's wife was completely uninteresting and one-dimensional... kinda like the black Ensign from Enterprise. The prostitute was the only somewhat interesting character.
Was the Space Western theme done well? In my opinion, no. Cross-genre stuff can be great if you take the cool stuff from each genre and blend it into something unique. Firefly didn't really do that. In space it was pretty much vanilla SciFi and on ground it turned into a Western craptacle and there was hardly any cross-genre stuff going on. That really, really hurt believeability. I just wasn't able to wrap my mind around the notion that people arrive on frontier planets with space ships and with all the amazing tech being available they'd convert back to a early 19th century lifestyle, including fashion, architecture, rapier duels and horse wagons.
The Western element felt completely fake, so did the Asian element. Things just didn't blend very well. If you do cross-genre stuff you have to be really careful and make sure that the various elements from the genres you're crossing don't feel tacked on but stringent within the fictional universe. In that regard, Firefly didn't work for me at all and I usually love cross-genre stuff like Steampunk or Space Gothic and shit like that.
Maybe Firefly had some well-written, entertaining dialogue? Nope, all we got was more endless witty banter like in Buffy and Angel, albeit a slightly more mature version of it. The typical Whedon style.
Maybe FF had awesome special effects or just very well done visuals? It wasn't bad but it was nothing special either.
Maybe the story was deep and captivating? Ok, there was the River plot line which was reasonably interesting. Other than that it was "meh". The backstory was just lame as hell (post Civil War Reconstruction era thing with the evil Alliance... hi2u "Birth of a Nation").
Worst of all, everything felt like I had seen it before in some form. It felt like Whedon just ripped random elements from stuff that has already been done and mashed it together into something new. Exotic? Yes, but it didn't feel particularly creative, innovative or even fresh.
FF wasn't a horrible show. I found it rather entertaining despite the fact that I could barely stomach how Whedon messed up the basic Space Western premise. IMO, he did a shit job at it. I certainly wouldn't have minded if FF had had a multi-season run. I might have even watched it. My point is that this show is just _vastly_ overrated, especially by the small crowd of rabid fans who pretend like FF was one of the greatest shows to ever grace our TV screens. It just wasn't that good.
The latest BSG was very good, BTW. The show's never dipped in quality, but it'd been going slowly without many truly memorable eps. I suspect the season finale will deliver in a similar fashion.
Someone said he expects epic space battles. If that's the common expectation people will inevitably end up disappointed with BSG. It should be clear that a story about a ragtag fleet carrying the last survivors of humankind escorted by a half-broken battleship has to be mostly about running away and avoiding direct confrontation - and not about epic space battles.