lordjedi said:
Joss Whedon may not be the best writer in the world, but he can write some pretty funny stuff. Most of what made Buffy and FireFly so good were the one liners and the action. Hell, the single greatest episode of Buffy had almost no dialogue (Hush) with the second best episode being the musical (Once More, With Feeling).

Buffy had more to it than one-liners and action. Firefly not so much. A whole lot of bland characterization, with the show expecting you to love these characters while pushing how cool the show supposedly is. But all that was way better than Serenity. At least in the case of Serenity shit WAS unpopular -Serenity flopped at the box office, to my great delight.

But the problem is that Joss fans push the view that Joss IS in fact The Best Writer In The World. And they think his writing was the best on tv. I guess they never saw Oz or The Wire. Or the whole load of other shows that had better writing. Factors other than writing made Buffy the quality show it was. But Firefly didn't have anything to save it from the shallowness that Joss's work often falls into. Almost a cynical shallowness. That show DID get cancelled, something which I'm happy about. And Angel got cancelled too, which thrilled me even more. There was one good season of Angel, the first season, and then the quality dropped out and it got worse every season after that. The final season made the Star Wars prequels look good by comparison. It was like nobody was making an effort and by the end it looked to me amost like Joss was deliberately fucking it all up, kind of reminiscent of the prequels actually. I have Whedon issues as much as I have Lucas issues.