It amuses me when people say that FIrefly is like Traveller, in that it's the 'small fish in a big pond' thing of average joes ekeing out a living in the spaceways... they seem to forget that actually the Firefly crew turn out to be pretty huge fish in that they destabilise the government and forment revolution against them (presumably that would have been the point of the series had they not needed to finish it off as the Serenity movie).
You don't get interesting stories by being 'small fish' - that's what the filler episodes in Firefly were. The interesting stuff was then they started doing the big things and being Big Damn Heroes. Same with Traveller - the CT setting is terminally boring to me (seriously, you want me to figure out mortgages on spaceships? That's *fun*?), while TNE gave people the opportunity to make a big difference much more of the time.
You don't get interesting stories by being 'small fish' - that's what the filler episodes in Firefly were. The interesting stuff was then they started doing the big things and being Big Damn Heroes. Same with Traveller - the CT setting is terminally boring to me (seriously, you want me to figure out mortgages on spaceships? That's *fun*?), while TNE gave people the opportunity to make a big difference much more of the time.