Firefly is the best show ever

See, I can't judge any show that didn't make a whole season the best ever. No matter how brilliant.

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I can.

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Firefly is the best show ever, and Out of Gas is the best episode of any series. Can others disagree with me and not feel the Firefly love? Certainly. And I'll feel much pity for their poor, misguided, tv-watching souls.

When I was large with the Firefly love, certainly Out of Gas was my favorite episode, and seeing Serenity last nearly killed me. But I never thought OoG was the best episode ever, of any series.

Love,
Ms Guided

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I can pull 13 sequential Angel episodes I like just as much, if not better. Probably can do the same with Buffy.

However, it got blazingly out of the gate for me, so that counts for something.

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I can't judge any show that didn't make a whole season the best ever.

I agree with ita, though I can't speak to this point as it applies to Firefly. I love My So-Called Life more than anything else ever televised. But even with that, I can't say it's "better" than Buffy or even Six Feet Under, simply because it never had the chance to get bad.

To me, what makes a TV show great is the way the canon stretches across years and off- and on-screen changes; the way the writers, directors and cast deal with different concepts and forms, and characters who have grown and changed.

It's a lot easier to be brilliant for 13 hours, than to be consistently great for 100.

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Standard Ple Avert Your Eyes Warning

In baseball terms, this argument is summed up as Peak Value vs. Career Value when discussing Greatest Player Ever. And I think it's a useful distinction here. Peak Value, Firefly was (to my mind) as good as BtVS S3 (my gold standard). Career value? It didn't last as long to cover the kind of territory Lyra alludes to.

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Hmmm. I don't know about "best episode ever". I usually have a bunch of episodes that impressed the hell out of me out of each show, but it's difficult to compare superior episodes on the merits alone. I mean, if someone told me to choose the "best" among "Innocence", "Becoming", "The Wish", "Hush" "Restless", "Once More With Feeling" for example, I'll be hard-pressed to choose one. Now, if someone asked me which one is my favorite, I'd probably say "Restless", which has as much to do with me as the skills with which the episodes have been crafted.

I adore Firefly and I mourn it deeply, but... eh. Different things ping for different people. I'm one of the people who didn't really "get" Wonderfalls-- not that it didn't entertain me in bits, but it didn't fire me up with "OMG! My show!"-type of recognition. Obviously, there are bound to be people for whom it's the other way around.

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I adore Firefly and I mourn it deeply, but... eh. Different things ping for different people. I'm one of the people who didn't really "get" Wonderfalls-- not that it didn't entertain me in bits, but it didn't fire me up with "OMG! My show!"-type of recognition. Obviously, there are bound to be people for whom it's the other way around.

I think I'm one, although I had no idea my Firefly love was so shallow, when it was on the air. I thought I was a true lover. Turns out I was fickle.

Standard Ple Avert Your Eyes Warning

When Natter was all pimp cup talk, penis talk, and penis-in-pimp-cup talk yesterday, I decided I was not going to feel badly mentioning baseball, again. Not that Plei was talking about any of these things (as far as I recall, anyhow)--just that I had a clear moment of "Okay, this is getting to be not-so-much-for-me" and scrolled by, and then realized I didn't have to be self-conscious about the baseball talk.

In baseball terms, this argument is summed up as Peak Value vs. Career Value when discussing Greatest Player Ever. And I think it's a useful distinction here. Peak Value, Firefly was (to my mind) as good as BtVS S3 (my gold standard). Career value? It didn't last as long to cover the kind of territory Lyra alludes to.

I think what you and Lyra say covers some of what I meant, when I mentioned I can't compare a 13 episode series to a 144 episode series. And now reading this, I realize also though, that I just didn't think any of Firefly at its best was as pleasing to me (although it was pleasing) as BtVS and Angel at their best, and that Firefly's best, for me, doesn't have the same sort of staying power. For me, Firefly is that guy I went on a handful of dates with. We had a great time, and he really made my knees weak. When he stopped calling, I was broken hearted for about a week. Two years down the line, I realize I never think about him at all, until someone else brings him up.

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As Hec says, there are different ways of judging the shows: best career is, for me, Buffy; best peak value, on the other hand, might easily go to Firefly. Sub-categories are required: best episode (I think Out Of Gas and Hush are the top two-- but which is better?) and best season (Buffy s2 is probably actually my winner, but can we compare Buffy s1 with Firefly's entire run, because then they're more equal in length terms? and what do we prize in a season anyway? arcs or brilliant episodes?) at least.

And what do we prize in a show, anyway? Character arcs or story arcs? The witty, the angsty, the good-looking (in actors or cinematography), the mixture?

t /questions

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Two years down the line, I realize I never think about him at all, until someone else brings him up.

Whereas I'm still harbouring deep, black, terrible anger-- partly because, unlike Buffy (whose calls tailed off in quality before they stopped coming) or Angel (whose calls came to a satisfying end), Firefly's calls were stopped by an alien power, not Firefly himself.

ETA: the thing about Angel's calls didn't sound as porny in my head.

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