Firefly Lane

Firefly Lane can be soapy and sappy, but it’s a fun ride full of humor and high stakes relationship drama. Heigl and Chalke are invested in their characters and they sell the friendship at the heart of the story.

Based on the novel by Kristin Hannah, “Firefly Lane” is so efficient it nearly takes the guilt out of guilty pleasure.

If you drop in for a visit, you'll probably be inclined to keep the lights on until the end.

Firefly Lane is a show that’s better in concept than in execution. But considering the ideas it’s exploring are relatively unique in the TV landscape, it’s at least a mom show with merit.

Ten impossibly fast episodes fly by without them saying anything profound, even in relation to the political eras they occupy, but manage to keep us invested in the lives of two small-town women who are just trying to get by.

Firefly Lane has some good things going for it: it’s a celebration of lifelong female friendship with its heart in the right place. But it aims higher and misses: not funny enough to make you laugh and not deep enough to make you cry.

In patching together Beaches-lite melodrama, newsroom comedy, coming-of-age high-school hijinks, and, least successful of all, cliffhanger-heavy mystery, Firefly Lane’s second season is less a genre hybrid than a Frankenstein-like creation built for the “Live Laugh Love” set.

I didn't expect to like this series but in fact I have. It's far from original and the concept of the storyline, endless friendship through the ages and life's stresses, has been done many times before. However, the execution here is very good and the acting admirable. It's also helped by some really good dynamics between the two women in the lead roles. Maybe in real life they hated each other but on screen, it's very believable that they're lifelong pals. On the downside, there are endless layers of quite tacky sentimentality thrown in and of course, some of the propositions in the script are irreconcilably in conflict with what we see on screen. For example, nobody is going to believe that very good-looking women really are going to find it difficult to encounter men that are interested in them! Hollywood's been asking us to believe that one for a hundred years and it's getting very tiresome. It's just not what happens in life. Even so, good series and well done to all involved.

Firefly lane May not sit well with everyone, but the lovely chemistry between the leads is enough to carry the show. It also delivers a nerve wracking finale that leaves an instant desire for more.

More appropriate for the Lifetime Channel. Why are all the men 1-dimensional and shallow. I could never believe the characters. All I saw were the actors playing themselves.