I was left completely unimpressed by Firefly, for a variety of reasons.
I think those are all reasonable criticisms. I'm ambivalent about the long story arcs. I was brought up on American sitcoms, so episodic television was, for me, the rule until not too long ago. Consequently not all American writers start with them. On a series like
Buffy that could practically guarantee several whole seasons, you have the luxury of writing a several-episode story arc. When you're writing your first season in a pre-Netflix series, you don't necessarily want to dive into a serial format right away because early viewership in an American market depends on single episodes being self-contained enough
Battlestar Galactica ended with a fairly unsatisfactory "punch-out" ending precisely because the last season was supposed to be two seasons, and the producers got wind that there might not be two seasons. Therefore the writers crammed all the wrap-ups into the last one. At least
Firefly got enough interest for a feature film to try to tie up loose ends, which was only partially satisfying. I think some characters could have had story arcs in a second season to develop backstories, such as why Book was obviously not the simple cleric he appeared as, whether Mal would pull a Boromir-like stunt and turn River against the Alliance, whether Jayne would eventually turn against Mal.
I really like Whedon's dialogue. I mean in general, but even when his dialogue is bad it's better than most other Hollywood writing. You're judging the dialogue by Whedon standards, and that's perfectly valid. But I agree that the Chinese was distracting, mostly because the contrast between it and 19th-century American Western vernacular just didn't seem to work too well. I think it was worth an experiment, given the Space Western genre, but I would have phased it out in the next season.
Whedon is an outspoken self-promoter. I tend to attenuate a lot of what he says about his own work. But mostly I don't pay attention to it, and let the work speak for itself.
One of the things I like most about
Firefly has nothing to with the show itself. Most of its fans are people you'd actually want to hang out with, and not feel like you don't want people from your family, church, or place of employment seeing you there.
I was constantly distracted by the unresolved issue of whether the various planets were orbiting one star (in which case how did so many planets fit into one system) or many different stars (in which case why did they never seem to be either in deep space or hyperspace (or whatever)). Also, I felt the low tech of some of the planets they visited seemed to be just a little
too low tech.
The setting is a single star system, apparently with a Goldilocks Zone wider than Jarrah White's yellow streak. Yeah, it's really hard to believe it could have so many habitable planets and moons. You have to put faith in the purported terraforming and the retconned presumption that it was an anomalous star system with lots of interorbiting suns and satellites. Yeah. At a certain point you file it in the same drawer as transporters and the Force and accept that it's ineptly conceived plot device.
