Not a bad review, based on the three episodes I've seen so far... It's a shame the reviewer couldn't take the time to discover (through Google) that Firefly is being replayed on The SciFi Channel.

Maybe her cable company (or satellite service) doesn't carry it, or charges extra.

Back in the day, the phrase "space opera" was coined as an analogue to "horse opera", slang for the ubiquitous Western. I know of at least one SF magazine who had a special rejection postcard preprinted just for stories that seemed to merely substitute setting and props: rockets for horses, blasters for six-guns, Space Patrols for the US Cavalry riding to the rescue in the inevitable nick...

Of the many things I've already come to love about Firefly, the aspects of classical Westerns co-existing with far-future space opera are foremost -- that includes the soundtrack! On the blog page to which you linked, the commentor styled "Jim Rockford" has a limited understanding of SF, and even less of how conditions might be in the 'verse through which Serenity travels. He's too trained by Trek and Star Wars to expect universal technological utopia. 19th C. level tech and skills are, IMO, more believable in the hinterlands than, say, hovercars parked outside of the Mos Eisley cantina.

Anway -- It makes perfect sense that people might be reminded by Firefly of early Heinlein -- Farnham's Freehold, especially. Where else do you think he borrowed his rugged individualist tropes from? Heinlein grew up in Kansas City, after all... not far removed in either time or geography from dime-novel tales of the Old West.

[to the tune of the movie theme: "Farmer in the Sky? Sodbusters!"]