Mel and I have become couch potatoes this past year. It seems when everything in life comes at you at once, it kind of knocks the breath out of you, so for the first time in my life, instead of taking things outside to the hiking trail, I've taken to lying on the love seat or the exercise floor while Mel lies on the sofa, and we watch shows on Netflix. I've blogged about this before and received some great TV show tips from this blogsite. Thanks, girls. You've told me about NCIS, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist, Bones, Castle, some of the most exciting shows out there. Some gave me nightmares, granted, and I've had to get away from those at times and fall back on lighter fare, but you've given me some interesting hours of couch potato time.

Some friends of mine recently talked me into checking out Firefly--something I'd passed over before, even though it looked interesting, because it only lasted one short season. I figured the viewing public knew what they were talking about when they canceled it. After my friends did some arm twisting--these friends are of the creative persuasion, and insisted I must study the show for it's creativity--I decided to check out Firefly. Mel gave up after we were halfway through the long pilot because there wasn't nearly enough man-action while they introduced characters. I went back to my friends and complained. They continued raving about it. As a writer, I must experience it, or some such nonsense.

So while Mel was gone last weekend at a medical conference, I fired up the television, put on my exercise gear and went to work. I was going to find something to like about this show for the sake of my friends. Nathan Fillion (the star of Castle, by the way) is a funny actor. In my opinion, he has good comedic timing, which made the character work even when he was coming across as a hard-nosed jerk. I'm really slow on the uptake, but by the third or fourth episode, I realized the show was very truly a space cowboy show. In fact, the intro is played with extreme country twang and the picture shows horses running beneath a low-flying spaceship. Maybe in 500 years horses will become accustomed to spaceships and not stampede--oh, wait, come to think of it, they ARE stampeding on the intro.

Most of the settings are on western-style planets far from the center of the galaxy, and on those planets, the people live as Americans lived in the 19th century in the desert, much like the picture above. The main characters have quirks aplenty, and they talk the way we perceive hillbillies talked far out in the middle of nowhere over a century ago. I wasn't able to complete my marathon of 22 hours of Firefly before Mel got home Sunday night, so I tied him down and forced him to watch the final shows, as well as the follow-up movie, with me. He didn't complain much. We watched the movie, Serenity, tonight. I don't know that the movie would stand alone, but it does an interesting and exciting job of tying up loose ends, and there was plenty of fighting and action to keep even Mel interested.

One other perk, every time I watched it I saw our own beautiful Denise Hunter in the guise of one of the characters. If Denise had dark brown, wavy hair, she would be the spitting image of this young woman.

If you get Netflix, you might want to check out Firefly. It might not be for you, but then again, the dialogue truly is more interesting than the average fare. I fast-forwarded one scene I did not like, but I played back some scenes so I could catch the rhythm of the words.

So...anyone else have some favorite shows to share? Now that I'm done with Firefly I'm back to watching reruns.

Labels: Eugene Patterson photography, Firefly, tv shows