Firefly is a science fiction TV show set in a universe without aliens where there are a good number of terraformed worlds. The ``core'' worlds formed an alliance and decided that all the other worlds needed to join, which sparked a civil war between the Alliance and the independents. The Alliance won. Our main characters are a crew commanded by two people who fought on the side of independence and a motley crew of other characters. They are pirates and scavengers, sometimes with a heart of gold, sometimes not so much.

The backstory closely follows the basic ideas of the old west, where the losers of the US Civil War went after leaving civilization to escape a world they didn't want and the law that might be pursuing them. There are even Indians in Firefly, though they are bigger boogeymen than is warranted by US history. To drive home this point, there is a very strong Western genre feel to the show. There's a lot of cowboy talk and folks often dress in a western manner. This is the part that throws a lot of people, but I think that it lends the show a sense of realism, like they really exist in a specific culture.

There's also quite a bit of cultural intermingling. The characters are basically Western/American, but the backstory implies that the Alliance may have been an alliance between the US and China. As such, Chinese culture features prominently. There's a lot of dialog in Chinese, very little not understandable from context. It provides, amongst other things, a way for the characters to curse without having to resort to ``felgarkarb'' or other obviously made-up words. There's also other visual cues to the Chinese influence, but, at least as far as the show got, it wasn't really important, but just more of a backdrop. As far as I remember, there were never even any speaking characters who were Chinese, although some of the upper-class folk have Chinese family names despite not being Chinese ethnically.

Of course, I say all of this and it's not really important. It's just the back story. The show is not really about all of that. It's about the characters. I mean, it's still an action TV show to some extent, and there are firefights and whatnot (though not ship-to-ship combat), but what really matters, and what makes it so good is the relationship of the characters to each other, how they change, and how the characters change. What's truly amazing is how well that was accomplished in, like, eleven broadcast episodes.

I know you said you don't watch TV much, but one of the important drawing points of the show is that it's created and driven by Joss Whedon, the creator behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and its spinoff, Angel), which, itself, has much less to do with vampires than it has to do with creating and exploring well-developed characters. It retains the crisp, scintillating writing of his other shows. One place where it diverges from Buffy is in the superb cinematography. It looks like a '70s western -- lens flares and so on -- very handheld and intimate. The CGI stuff of the spaceships must be done by the same folks who worked on Battlestar Galactica, but it works here because it fits the rest of the cinematography. As they say during the commentaries, most sci-fi is very austere and antiseptic. Not so on Firefly. Almost every aspect of the show is superb. I cannot praise it highly enough.

If you have any interest in real science fiction, I suggest that you go pick up the DVD set. If you're only interested in shoot-em-ups or treknobabble, though, I'd avoid it. There's very little padding of that nature in the show. (Caveat: I enjoy Trek, too.) I'd say that if you liked Deep Space 9 or Babylon 5 that you'll like it quite a bit.