% skip episodes, IMO: TOS season 1-2: 50% (Have not seen season 3) TNG season 1-2: 75% TNG season 3-6: 20% TNG season 7: 30% DS9: 30% Voyager season 1-3: 60% Voyager season 4-7: 40% Enterprise season 1-2: 90% Enterprise season 3: 40% Enterprise season 4: 5%* *This does not mean I think it is the best season of Star Trek. It just means it has the higher proportion of episodes that are C or higher.
It's only a question of language. Threw out can mean: A. I put the dvds/vhs in the garbage. B. I sold the dvds/vhs. C. I gave the dvds/vhs away to poor friends with no taste, or children I am related to. Really? You literally put two seasons of Enterprise in the Garbage inbetween the spent coffee grounds and expired meat produce? GAHDZOOKS! I can imagine that you came back from a fishing trip and your wife has put all your Star Trek Bollocks on the side of the road for your own good, and then I can't imagine you giving that entirely not mentally ill woman a hug for looking after your emotional well being so kindly. Don't look at me like that, YOU married her.
Now. But this insane purge was nearly 20 years go when I was in knee socks. Everything that was, has been rebuilt and expanded upon. 5 years ago I "evolved" into a digital pirate which is why I still have room to breath in my bedroom... And money to eat. Digital comics do not count towards the population of my collection, but I still have maybe 60 thousandish real physical comic books, and I smack any one who says that I should sell them. The more you know.
I once knew someone who threw away ALL his comics because Jesus told him to. I inherited a few piles of them towards the end but he assured me all the really satanic ones were now pulp in a tip. That poor guy.. he used to talk (endlessly) about how he'd given them up like he was at a narcotics anonymous meeting. Eventually was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He also had a girlfriend for a while whom he was infatuated with who left him to become a nun which also made a very good story he would tell people (he had a sense of humour about that one).
So very true! DS9 dared to be different and did it very well, with long-running arcs and proper character development. Trek started to go downhill during VOY's run, with the latter two poorly thought out TNG films continuing the demise, then came ENT just to really screw things up.
People look for different things in shows, and sometimes the order in which you watch shows can impact your view of them. For me watching the shows in order, I found very little different in VOY from say TNG. One could say most of the stories VOY told could have been told in the AQ, which is a failure of using their premise.
I was wondering about this the other day, how many of the fist Voyager scripts were left over unused TNG scripts? In reverse, the season 3 episode of Enterprise "twilight" was supposed to be the Janweay and Chakotay hooking up script which never found it's way the whole way through production hell... But pon far T'Pol alleviating herself on the closest male medically and then developing attachements after the fact that might have been trillium powered, is a much nicer sort of rape than Chakotay tricking a woman with a brain injury into taking her pants off becuase he's bored and lonely.
When discussing the decline of the franchise in terms of ratings, as the OP's article does, steadily shedding viewers over their runs is what's wrong with DS9, VOY, and ENT, all three. Not only could none of them attract new viewers, they couldn't even keep the viewers they had. Generally speaking, if all you can see is a show that you like, then you aren't being introspective enough to understand why John Q. Public couldn't stay interested. People found plenty not to like, and fans may have a hard time understanding that. The fact is, DS9 experienced an even greater decline in ratings over its run than VOY did. Failing to mention that is another thing wrong with the OP article.
Speaking of throwing out Trek episodes, I think I have concrete proof that time travel will never be possible. Bear with me. If time travel does, in the future, become a possibility, I know for sure that one of the first trips some hardcore demented Trekkie would take would be to wipe "Threshold" from the historical record. The fact that we still have "Threshold" means, therefore, that time travel will never be invented. Of course, there's always the possibility that originally "Threshold" was even worse, and that the episode we know is the one that resulted from some time meddler, so there goes that theory. Back to throwing stuff out, I've got to confess that the only Trek I own is a DVD of TAS. Everything else is streaming via Netflix. Also, a coherent ratings point: I've seen the ratings charts for all the Trek shows, and accept that they all have a decline. But I haven't seen a control group--how do VOY, DS9, and ENT stack up against other shows? What's the expectation for a TV show these days?
They're all released inconsistently, to different markets in different GENERATIONS. The viewing habbits, and how that translates into advertising revenue of a 35 year old in 1988 is going to be different to that of his 12 year old grandson in 2004, even though they both consider themselves die hard Trekkies. It's ridiculous to compare the series unless you just want to be an ass.
That's an excellent question. Well, let's consider Friends, a successful show that aired during the turn of the millennium. That's what a successful show looks like: overall, it added viewers. ER is another example of success. It had a steady run for ten seasons, including over the millennium, and started on its downward trend only in its eleventh year. Expectation is another matter. Most shows aren't successful, so by definition expectation would be failure. But if you mean, what would be expected in order to be considered successful, or in other words what's the difference between success and failure, the basic answer is ya gotta pay the bills. It's pretty well known that science fiction shows present unique problems in terms of budget that other types of shows don't have to contend with, so other shows might be able to get by on less. It's pretty clear, though, that a steady decline in viewership is unsustainable. Trek apologists like to point to competition from cable and the Internet to shift blame for the ratings decline away from Trek's shortcomings. The fact is, as demonstrated, there were successful shows with increasing or steady audiences that aired during the same period, so competition from other sources was not an inherent problem in the television market at that time. Given what a success looks like, perhaps such competition was only a factor for the failures. Another one of the popular whipping boys for Trek's failure is franchise fatigue, AKA an oversupply. Unfortunately, the data doesn't really support that, unless by an oversupply one means "an oversupply of shows that people don't want to watch". One can't even blame science fiction. Here's a third example, this one from science fiction: The X-Files. The ratings for this show have a more ballistic trajectory. Unlike the post-TNG Trek shows, its ratings actually went up for the first half of its run, and they didn't significantly dip below where they started until the final season. I'm not an expert on The X-Files, so I can't offer well-informed explanations for why it peaked in the middle, but drop-off in the final season is fairly clearly due to the departure of Duchovny. I would suspect ossification of formula as the most likely suspect for peaking in the middle, though. By the way, adhering to ossified formulas is one of the main problems with all TV Trek, from late TNG onward.
I'd like to believe that the Department of Temporal Investigations helped to resolve the matter. --Sran
Sci-Fi like any genre has it's core audiance. If netwoek A schedules a sci-fi show and networks B and C schedule they Sci-Fi shows so that they all air at the same time, all 3 will lose out in terms of numbers. Today's viewing habit's are different from 2002 or even 1992. With DVR some pople might store months worth of episodes and hit them in a marathon session, but those viewers wouldn't be counted in the fina laudiance figure. We also have catch up services like BBC's iPlayer, OnDemand services etc... Some pople might forgoe watching it on TV all together and wait for the DVD/BR release.
Wikipedia was explaining to me how TNG had this fantastic trick for getting aired almost everywhere... They gave it away for free. Affiliates are supposed to pay through the nose for absolute crap but here's Paramount offering up TNG for nothing if they give them back half the advertising time to use as they want to. Firstrun syndication gave TPTB the possibility of reaching %90 of the house holds in America meanwhile UPN is this tiny cupboard in the wastelands which almost no one had access too. A horse of another colour entirely.