JoeG... can I ask what SF television you do like?
I can easily see being unimpressed with Firefly as an SF fan. Firely is SF solely by virtue of being set in the future (in space). It didn't employ any of the major SF themes/motifs, no angsting about rapid cultural/technological change, no invoking then de-fanging the Armageddon, no 'what's the role of man in the universe after we meet more sentient races with funny noses, not even one uppity AI demanding to treated as a person... It was about struggling with being us, right now[/i].
It could have been set aboard a boat in Thailand , or in the real Old West, or any boarderland place between the First and Third Worlds.
But not liking the characters (or at least respecting what Whedon did with them, and the actors portrayals)? So much of the dialogue was wonderful, and not just in Whedon's trademark clever-clever way. It cleanly and quickly delineated --what is it-- 8 primary characters? That's no mean feat. Plus moved each self-contained yet interwoven story along. I've never seen a show that was simulaneously as entertaining and efficient.
And I think what Firefly's (rather enthusiastic) supporters are reacting to is the way Firefly was good at what so many SF shows are bad at; to whit, character development and the creation of believable conflicts. Consider how awful B5 was at the day-to-day interplay between the human characters, I loved the show, but found most of the spoken dialogue outside of the certain aliens and the speechmaking to be embarrassing. B5 was often great in theory, but lousy in execution.
Or consider the later incarnations of Trek, which replaced real dramatic conflict with a dull, predeterminded game of "What would Starfleet do" (later DS9 excpeted, of course)?
