What was wrong with the premise?
I have no beef with the premise, only with the execution. Cowboys in space? I'm down with that.
Cows in space? That makes no sense. A society with space-travel and genetic engineering technology doesn't hire a spaceship to transport a herd of heifers, it sends an email with the
Bos taurus genome and ships some kind of "animal-maker" the size of, say, a refrigerator.
Why would future guns look like 19th-century revolvers but sound like rayguns? That makes no sense. Why would you write a script where one guy asks the assassin if he's from the
Alliance and the assassin asks "am I a
lion?" before meditating on his various leonine qualities? That shouldn't have even made it to shooting. What the fuck? I was embarassed on their behalf, and on behalf of all the Whedonites who retconned that as some kind of seminal work in the art of honest dialogue.
Why would you have an episode with the hoariest of all Western tropes, the hooker with a heart of gold, only its an entire brothel of heart of gold hookers called the Heart of Gold, and then call the episode "Heart of Gold" just in case there was one retarded person in the audience who didn't pick up on the trope by the first 30 seconds of the episode? And how would you do
that much lampshading and not do
anything at all to subvert the trope?
Lazy, lazy, lazy. I've become a Joss Whedon fan, but I almost didn't
just because Firefly was how I lost my Whedon virginity, and the whole thing was so phoned in. Swearing in Chinese is stupid - people
always swear in their native language. And why would a show about how the Chinese settled a distant planet (solar system? galaxy? universe?
They never actually say because Joss Whedon never actually decided) not star any Asians? At all?
Even in the 20th century, firearm propellants are self-oxidizing (and therefore work in a vacuum as well as underwater), but in the distant future you have to put a gun in a spacesuit to fire it?
I expect something more from my science-fiction than Mad Libs worldbuilding. I expect that if you're going to do funny physics tricks like have a gun fire through a spacesuit, you're going to actually do some research about the physics and chemistry of firearms - or
actually make a decision about the technology of future guns, and stick with it.
Space opera settings are highly dependent on technology. The Old West is a setting highly dependent on specific sociogeographic, technological, and political realities.
Firefly gives no evidence that the writers thought about any of that at all.