Looking at the first season of TOS, and by many accounts the best season of Trek, did the franchise get too safe? It seems like there was a series of decaying cycle of flaws introduced to the show to make an increasingly safe world more dangerous. 1) Characters can die. In the initial episode the captain is so hurt he can no longer command. 2) There are increasingly unlimited resources, as the series goes on more and more things can simply be manufactured out of thin air. 3)TV networks increasingly demand that episodes most be fixed for reruns making plot developments not allowed. 4) By tng the world is so safe tropes like the evil admiral, and intergalactic wars are introduced.
Simple answer is yes, they did kill off a couple of first string people over the course of five series, but for the most part you knew that in any give episode no one was going to "permanently" die.
It was always safe, to avoid offending general audiences. advertisers, and the FCC. The riskiest thing I ever saw was Remmick's fate in TNG: Conspiracy, and they never went that far again.
^ Exactly no actually important character died permanently in Star Trek unless the actor requested to leave the show. The gratuitous redshirt deaths in TOS were just cheap thrills. You can kill as many one-off characters and extras as you want, if it is forgotten by the next scene/episode and followed by TOS's infamous "everybody laughs" ending it's just hollow. If anything I'd say Star Trek stayed too safe not became too safe.
How happy would fans have been if in one episode McCoy just got vaporized by a Klingon? Context matters. You can't just off characters indiscriminately in the interest of "realism" or "grit". It's entertainment, and not of the Sopranos or Game of Thrones variety. There's something to be said for the comfort of knowing your favorite characters will be there every week and get out of their near-death scrapes.
Even in a show like Sopranos or Game of Thrones, if a main character dies you want it to be the logical result of their actions, and not just some random thing. I'm glad they didn't mess with the main cast too much but it would be nice if they had a deeper secondary cast that was allowed to die. DS9 did that well.
STAR TREK could've flaunted its reputation as delivering so many "firsts" to television and played that card throughout the entire franchise. This it failed to do. I'm sure there are alot of reasons for that, money probably being the major one. But seriously, whether the reputation was deserved, or not, it certainly existed and could've made STAR TREK at least "seem" much more important, historically ... culturally ...
Yes, it became too safe. Roddenberry supposedly had a chance to do Trek his way with TNG and what we got was pretty damn tepid and never got any riskier as the various series progressed, for the most part. I think having a main character as flawed as Kirk was, was risky in the 1960's. It is honestly something I wish they would have brought forward instead of the "everyone's perfect" cookie cutter. You add Spock in, who was essentially the "gay" character, not his sexuality but how he saw himself in society. It's easy to look at Star Trek through the lens of the 21st century and say there was nothing risky about it and it was only interested in cheap thrills, but it totally ignores the TV landscape of the 1960's.
I'd agree that it was too safe, and unfortunately I see it as the consequence of both the powers that be at Paramount and the fans. ex. Voyager as a show should have been dark. Resources should have been limited, decisions should have been made in desperation etc. that were less idealistic. Alas, because Voyager became the anchor of UPN, it became TNG light instead primarily because studio execs wanted to keep it upbeat (especially in comparison to ds9). Similarly, but from the opposite direction, fans freaked out when there was an episode of Enterprise in which Archer threatened to push someone out of an airlock. Sure, the decision was a brutal one, but fans freaked out that their Starfleet Captain couldn't possible make a less than ideal decision. Finally, if you listen to the "fans" there are those that would argue vehemently that anything after Star Trek:TMP is garbage, anything after TNG is garbage, and that the JJ Abrams Trek is just the worst thing that they've ever seen. What it seems to boil down to is that everything that is changed in the Trek universe is immediately lambasted as terrible. Unfortunately, in these environments, I'm not super surprised that the powers that be at Paramount fear doing anything with Trek that isn't vanilla and therefore less than satisfying.
Not really, it's more that as the medium changed Trek was slow to keep up with it. thats in both production style and in storytelling. And per Piller the largest part of that was the studio being unwilling to change much of the format that made TNG so successful (and near the end of TNG was when we started to see a real change in style in filming and written storytelling was taking place. DS9 managed to get little less interference due to not also having a network to please. But while dS9 was darker then most trek its actually shot very similar to TNG. Enterprise is the one that was able to push the furthest with filming style, but it was still quite a few years behind a lot of the rest of broadcast television. As for casts, its actually very rare for a show to kill of a main character in broadcast television unless, you are seeing someone who wants out, someone who doesn't agree to new contracts, or a show having to cut its budget, or an actor being either a serious problem on set, or doing something in real life that is damaging to the image of the show or studio or network. Rarely on network television is it done solely for storytelling purpose.
I never understood why Voyager (especially) didn't have a larger supporting cast. They had a very limited number of crewman, and with little exception no one to replace them with. Enterprise also could have done better, with even smaller crew, but at least they did have some means of crew replacement (either heading home, or having the faster vulcan's deliver them). of course especially with season three being arc based we did get a lot of reoccurring characters of which how many were ever seen after season 3?
The safeness was based on a formula that was popular at the time, but today, in hindsight, you can see the drawbacks when you rewatch the episode. Killing the redshit loses it shock value really quick and true, the worse is when a redshirt is killed and later the crew is laughing about something later. Like seeing a woman falling clean through a floor and later smiling. The characters came off as morally flawless. Of course, they werent, but they came off that way. In a way, it makes for (somewhat) boring viewing. Even when they killed off the main characters it was usually an heroic sacrifice thing. And they would always announce it in the previews on top of that. Dax, Data, Trip, from what I've read, reactions from fans were not that great. Its not to bash Trek, (Trek rocks) it's just the things you notice, now that all we have are reruns and rewatches. We're getting spoiled by shows like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad etc. They have definitely changed the game.
But how about Janice Rand? A decision was made to stop writing the character into scripts, Rand simply disappeared without a word. If the character had been killed on screen it would have meant more than another red shirt extra or guess star, the audience had to a degree come to know her.
The cheap thrills was only in relation to the redshirt deaths that never had any follow up, not in relation to anything else. I don't watch Western, but was Kirk really so much more flawed than the Cartwrights? (seen a few episodes of Bonanza, but not enough to get a grasp of the characters). I find the comparison of Spock to a gay character very interesting, thanks for pointing that comparison out.
Oh come on. They only did that once, in "The Galielo Seven", and that wasn't even bad. If anything they should have done it more often. In fact, all episodes should have ended with everybody dancing the Cha Cha (whatever the hell that is).
And then there's The Changling, where Kirk loses the usual assortment of red shirts and at the end of the episode jokes about "my son ... the doctor." Cue cute music.
^ That's part of the charm of 1960s television, and one of the reasons why I don't watch much of anything else. And while Enterprise was on the air, I always got the impression that it was trying to be "edgier", but for no real reason other than for the sake of being "edgy," and didn't actually challenge any norms at all. If the "edginess" doesn't actually make the story better or make you think more, than what's the point? Kor
I disgree that ENT was trying to be "edgy". The look of the show, the acting and the themes were of their time. Obviously it looked a lot grittier than the kid-safe 60s, but ENT was overall a lighter show than Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which admittedly could get pretty dark). The edgiest thing ENT did was the season 3 analogy for the moral issues raised by events in the US post-9/11, but I thought their approach was completely sincere.