My husband and I have taken to watching series TV (mostly Sci-Fi) on DVD in fairly concentrated batches (2-3 episodes/night). We started with Babylon 5, then Star Trek: Deep Space 9, then Sex in the City. All were quite good and fairly engrossing (well, SitC isn’t exactly engrossing, as its kind of repetitve, but I cried a little at the end when we finally learned “Big’s” name). Series that tend to be written towards a larger plot arc, versus purely episodic writing, are often really good if you can see the plot develop over time. Babylon 5 was particularly effective and enjoyable, as the writing was so original (for television), and the characters so compelling.

As my husband has also noted, we’re often late to the game when it comes to cool stuff, so we missed Firefly when it first aired, and were clueless when all of the fanboys started yelling bloody murder when the show was cancelled. However we rented Serenity and found it to be a really compelling and convincingly-drawn future, and a great story. So when we got our new Netflix account, we put the four Firefly discs at the top of our queue. We were not disappointed.

The fifteen episodes that were filmed are quite good. The characters are interesting and multi-dimensional. The world that the show is drawn in is nuanced and believeable (I particularly like the way language, both a slightly “backcountry”-sounding English and a hybird Chinese, is used). And the storytelling is good — each episode carries the larger plot arc, while also telling a number of smaller stories, a familiar mode, but well-done.

I’m sad that no more were filmed, and the “Serenity” movie leaves no room for sequels, as (spoiler alert) too many of the important characters do not survive. Whedon (of Buffy fame) is a great creative talent, and I’ll be excited to see what he does with Wonder Woman later this year.