Why Star Trek Might Not Work For Today’s TV Execs

I think we haven’t seen a new Trek because Enterprise just wasn’t that popular and no one has a new idea.

Personally, I’d like to see something that’s a cross between the original and the X-Files. Have a crew that goes out and ‘cleans up’ a lot of the unresolved ideas from the earlier series. A Special Missions science vessel (but one that can still kick butt). For example, that one with the green glowing blob alien from the orignal series that in a novel in the EU was supposed to be a Q. And what really are the Q? Just pick bizarre, unresolved stuff from the previous shows and send this crew to go figure it out. You could certainly do original ideas where the crew investigates ‘other’ ships’ mysteries too, but I think it would be a cool way of tieing the whole universe together by finishing up old dangling plots. Basically, every week is a just weird mystery that the crew gets involved in. They seek this stuff out. Like Star Trek meets Planetary. Star Trek/X-Files/Planetary would be awesome!!! Dark, creepy and mysterious. Weird and wonderful. Live up to the “where no one has gone before” banner.

The other issue as I see it is the crew. TNG was brilliant in the cast they came up with and the original is of course classic, but DS9, Voyager and Enterprise had some of the most boring crews imaginable. Enough Vulcans already!

You Star Trek kids got tons of episodes to watch, while i get 3 cool movies that are 30 years old, and 3 absolute abominations.  Count yourselves lucky.

It’s already on the air. It’s called Torchwood.  Captain Jack Harkness is as uniquely a hambome classic leader as James T. Kirk.  The themes of morality–literally life and death–are similar.  A Star Trek TV series would be crushed by the weight of the legacy. 

series not serious

Really having trouble with the concept, aren’t you?

Ask yourself, how old was Bart Simpson in Season 1 and how old is the same character 23 seasons later? How many specific real world events were referenced along the way? (I know people who went from being childless to grandparents in the time that show has been on.) The show no more has a single nailed down starting point in 1989 than Peter Parker could have been a teenager in 1962 and scarcely a decade older today. He stopped aging and started floating some time in the early 70s. Once the character was no longer a full time student it became easy to keep things vague.

The same goes for South Park. Early episodes referenced events that for the current season took place before the kids were born. This is what is meant by a floating time line. Things just float along and stories with a fixed date in history are ignored or retconned ala Flash Thompson going from being a Viet Nam vet to someone who wasn’t even born yet when the last US force departed that theater.

There is another problem of real spans of history expanding to encompass more and more stories if the venue remains valuable. Those you have MASH running far longer than the war it supposedly depicts, or Sgt. Rock in a WWII that is seemingly endless as the comic keeps selling.

But this is no big deal for comics or animation. You can change out personnel repeatedly and still say it’s the same product. Making a TV show where you get through a decade with the same actors is vastly harder and thus very rare. In an ensemble cast you can move in new characters as older actors move on, so long as no one of them is needed to make the show work. Tough but it has been managed, mostly by soap operas. Usually a show doesn’t last long enough in the ratings for such considerations to matter. Getting sustained ratings and a primary cast willing to stick around, as in Fraser, is very rare indeed.

Typically, things start to get difficult just after the time the big bucks from syndication start to happen, around the fifth year. First is the difficulty of a show retaining an audience that long. Second is the cast getting antsy and requiring larger infusions of cash to stay. Since the former doesn’t happen that often, the latter tends to make for stories in the press, like the Friends cast demanding awesome sums per episode to keep cranking out the episodes and enhancing the value of the syndication package. (There is so much Simpsons material now, Fox has floated the idea of a dedicated Simpsons channel on cable/satellite systems. There are enough episodes now to go almost 11 days without a break or repeat. Amazing.) So you get Ray Ramano being the highest paid man on TV, followed by Charlie Sheen after Ramano’s show finally packed it in just ahead of Peter Boyle’s death.

Five to seven years is the upper limit for the majority. (Contracts for lead roles, often listed also as Executive Producers to give them an ongoing piece of the action if the show continues without them ala CSI, usually run five years in pursuit of the syndication fulfillment.) Enough for the really big money but not so much everybody involved feels like they lost their lives to this pursuit. Past that is when you get to the very short list of shows that became notable for their longevity even to those who never watched.

David, what are you talking about? There were NO Vulcans in the crew on DS9! Hell… I’m trying to remember if we ever saw any Vulcans on the show, period! I think we did, but they were few and far between.

Clearly, you didn’t see much of DS9, and you’re probbly one of those people who gave up on the show far too early on and never what saw at an amazing show it turned into. If anything, the DS9 crew became the most complex, diverse, and interesting of any the Trek crews. They had greater depth and sophistication than the other crews, and they were the most realistic, well-rounded of the bunch. They even did comedy really well, in spite of being the “dark” Star Trek.

By comparison, the TNG cast was the dull one… Outside of Picard, Worf, and Data, what did we really learn about that crew? Not a lot. TNG was often great, but they didn’t take many chances on that show. DS9 did.

I was no fan of Voyager, but to be fair, that show had one Vulcan in the cast. So again, what are you talking about?

No matter what is said, Star Trek has almost half a century’s worth of fans. That is an astounding fan base. They have to do another show some time. Come on, We are Begging you Paramount!!

I too loved DS9 and TNG  ( hated Voyager& Enterprise)      but how in anyway shape or form- was 2009s STAR TREK a bad movie much less a mess?

It was simply an epic film.