I could have written your first paragraph word for word. I usually ascribe the change to them losing the metaphor--the show was a brilliant metaphor for adolescent angst (to quote dpolicar, "When you're a 17 year old girl who loses her virginity to an older guy who then doesn't return your phone calls, it seems like he's turned into a monster and the world is about to end...only in Buffy's case, he did and it is."). While the later seasons had some fantastic individual episodes (even Season 4 had "Hush"), once they left high school the central metaphor was gone and the show got caught up in its own details. If not for Spike (a/k/a The Man Who Has Chemistry with a Door), I'm not sure I would have made it to the end. The same thing was happening to Smallville (which has a basically identical central metaphor) last season, but they seem to have returned to their roots a bit this year.
Firefly felt totally different to me and I loved it from the start, but my start was in a different place than anyone else I know. We were downloading in London, so we started with the original pilot that was floating around on the net. Most of my friends had to start with The Train Job and couldn't really get into the show until Out of Gas, when they finally started to get a clue about who these characters were. We own the DVD now and I was somewhat disappointed that the pilot on there isn't the one we originally saw--instead of the scenes from the Battle of Serenity, there was just Zoe telling Simon about it and, frankly, I can imagine much more horrifying battlefield scenes than any TV budget can show me. I'm holding my thumbs for Serenity-the-movie to be a critically acclaimed box office hit.
Random piece of trivia I've been dying to share: David Krumholtz, who plays the hot math dude on Numb3rs, is playing "Mr. Universe" in Serenity.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-18 03:59 pm (UTC)Firefly felt totally different to me and I loved it from the start, but my start was in a different place than anyone else I know. We were downloading in London, so we started with the original pilot that was floating around on the net. Most of my friends had to start with The Train Job and couldn't really get into the show until Out of Gas, when they finally started to get a clue about who these characters were. We own the DVD now and I was somewhat disappointed that the pilot on there isn't the one we originally saw--instead of the scenes from the Battle of Serenity, there was just Zoe telling Simon about it and, frankly, I can imagine much more horrifying battlefield scenes than any TV budget can show me. I'm holding my thumbs for Serenity-the-movie to be a critically acclaimed box office hit.
Random piece of trivia I've been dying to share: David Krumholtz, who plays the hot math dude on Numb3rs, is playing "Mr. Universe" in Serenity.