Firefly

Staking its claim on inventive, alien-free sci-fi more than a year before the grittier reimagined Battlestar Galactica launched, Firefly took the same witty, playful sensibility that revered creator Joss Whedon brought to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and applied it to a wild space-opera/Western fusion. While cosmos-explorer/cowboy parallels have always been pretty obvious--nowhere more so than "Space: the final frontier"--Firefly approaches the similarities quite literally, creating a retro-futuristic universe where spaceships and horses are equally valued modes of transport. Whedon's Firefly-verse also features English-speaking characters that casually pepper their sentences with Chinese, and cheekily presents prostitution as one of the few legal and respectable professions around. Though the TV show's genre/cultural mash-ups could have been little more than a gimmick, whip-smart scripts and a fine ensemble cast, led by the ever-charismatic Nathan Fillion, elevated Firefly to something far beyond its ramshackle parts. Unjustly canceled after one season and then miraculous resurrected for the fine Serenity feature film (thanks to undying fan devotion), Firefly lives on in well-received Serenity comic-book installations, making it an unexpected multimedia franchise.