Firefly

If you watch sci-fi, when was the last time you got hooked on a good sci-fi TV series? If you said Red Dwarf, that's close. If you said Babylon 5, that's closer. If you said Quantum Leap, you're reaching. All these series went to completion (Red Dwarf is still running, bless the BBC). So how depressing is it when you find a series worth watching week to week and they cancel it, even before the first season ends! Of course cancellation isn't relegated to sci-fi (think Sports Night), but it really seems that all the smartly written TV series get cancelled. If this doesn't point to the idiocy of the television watching audience... I mean, it only aired on the Sci-Fi Channel. What else was competing with it?! This series had quirky characters, a bizarre setting (heart-of-gold rum-runners roaming from planet to planet), a uniquely designed spaceship and several good storylines, building on existing tensions between the crew and the setting. Not the perfect series -- the cheese factor is full blown -- but the combination of the actors (clearly having a ball) and the design of the show should have sent it on a successful voyage. Luckily, the crew will be back in a feature-length film, Serenity, this fall. As the producer says in one of the featurettes, perhaps someone will see the film and offer to host a TV series based on it.

year: 2002-2003
length: 15 60-min. episodes
rating: 3.0
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303461/combined