ST: TOS is often described as such "Wagon Train to the Stars" but a better description would be "Captain Hornblower in Space" since Kirk was modeled after Hornblower and the Enterprise behaves much more like a man-of-war rather than a nimble craft with hundreds of years of space research. Almost all successful shows on TVs are hybrids, grafting on elements of one genre onto another giving it a new twist. Criticizing Firefly, one can criticize every single show on that list showing that it crafts a genre onto another. Yes, Firefly was a more overt hybrid but that was just about making sure the audience "got" it so that they would know that could have a future that would mirror the US Civil War conflict of the past. There has been a general PC attitude that that to mention any positive attributes of the Pre-Civil War American South has been to endorse racism. By removing slavery out of the equation (at least in the few episodes that were shown) and transporting the issue to the future were are able to sympathize with issues of decentralization that were as much issues of the civil war as were slavery. ST:TOS was able to do the same with the issue of racism which was really too hot a subject to handle when the series was first established. The conspicuously cosmopolitan crew and several episodes which dealt with the issue (as well as so many episodes which handled the issue by showing that it wasn't an issue with the multicultural crew) suggested a future where racism was an automatic feature of future society. Science fiction really becomes the best medium of examining issues of today by stripping the preconceptions of today and extrapolating a certain issue and exploding it into tomorrow. I always find it fascinating that someone can easily sympathize with Worf or Spock from the various Star Trek shows yet find a devout intelligent Muslim (I am not Muslim) who believes that western society is corrupt as somehow more alien that the Star Trek alien characters.