Here we are 8 years after Enterprise ended and 12 years after Voyager, and people STILL complain. How does a show you supposedly never watched because you hated it, ruin Star Trek for you? Another thing I don't get is people who thought Voyager or Enterprise was so bad, yet continued to watch. Why did you continue to watch? If you didn't like Voyager or Enterprise (or TNG & DS9 for that matter), that is fine. But ruined Trek? When you don't watch a show, how does it ruin the show it spun off from, especially when it has already over for 20+ years? Exactly how does that work? In fact, I don't get people who criticize TNG and DS9 either, yet TOS could do no wrong, especially when ALL these shows have been off the air so long, now. This is basically like STILL complaining about Galactica 1980. You know, EVERY Star Trek show had its great moments and its stinkers. Like it or not, TNG,DS9,VOY, and ENT is the MAJORITY of Star Trek. And when you talk about basically a combined 25 seasons TNG-ENT, you can't exactly say it was all bad or a failure, because SOMEBODY was watching enough to keep them on the air. And none of it RUINS TOS. For people who say it does, this is the exact same argument that people opposed to the Abrams reboot make, yet people call THAT an ignorant argument.
I saw in a documentary on Trek, where some TV exec is saying that the raw numbers for TOS may not have been that great, but if at the time they had known how to break down demographics into age groups as well as sex and income brackets, that NBC never would have cancelled Star Trek.
This has been shown to be probably just another one of Roddenberry's yarns that he spun for PR purposes. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series#Season_1_.281966.E2.80.931967.29, references therein:
So I've had a lie floating around in my head for 10 years taking space I could have put porn. Now I'm depressed.
I don't hate any Trek. But I found myself losing interest during Deep Space Nine's run (like many folks did according to the ratings). These days I pretty much focus on TOS, TOS films, early TNG and the Abrams films. There are only so many hours in a day.
^and that disinterest continued amongest the audiance thru VOY and ENT. So instead of thinking this isn't working let's try something differen. They kept to the same old same old.
I think Paramount's biggest flaw was having Berman run everything with a Trek label. Each show and the movie franchise should've had their own creative teams including the Executive Producers and taken place in different time periods.
ER and Friends did well, but they were on major networks way back in the early to mid 1990s when broadcast television was still big and not gone through the slowly steady decline of the 2000s, where even CSI franchise (the last of the megahits alongside NCIS, IMO) is now struggling quite a bit on CBS.
Both ER and Friends ran concurrently with DS9, from season 3 on, and all of Voyager, so I'm not sure what your point has to do with the topic at hand.
^ This. Until 1991 the Trek franchise was effectively under two stewardships, the "movie guys" and the "TV guys". The decision to dovetail The Next Generation into movie theaters meant that the TV guys were suddenly in charge of movies while still being in charge of TV. In my opinion Rick Berman got overstretched beyond his competency zone. (Not to say he couldn't handle it -- clearly he did -- but more than his overall attention-to-detail on each individual sliver of the franchise was bound to take a tumble.) As for on-topic, that's quite a good article the OP found and it manages to articulate a lot of the reasons why Voyager was actually pretty good despite not being allowed to perhaps reach the full potential of it's premise. It seems to me the article does quite a bit of defending Voyager, despite it's title.
He handled it pretty well for 4 films and 2 1/2 shows. Generations, First Contact and Insurrection are fine, only Nemesis sucks. And had Nemesis NOT sucked, nobody would bitch about Insurrection. Let's see how well Abrams' 3rd and 4th Trek film will be received.
I started bitching about Insurrection the day I first saw it on home video. It's the only film that I actively chose not to see in the theaters because it looked so poor. I'd rather watch Nemesis any day of the week.
Mike: But you've got a time machine - you could stop it. Joe Bogart: Couldn't stop the Holocaust - got rid of Strasser, and this dumb painter named Adolf showed up and did it all exactly the same way. Who'd'a read about it?
As long as everyone who is important is making money, everyone who works for a living will be allowed to work for a living.
By my calculations the Star Trek franchise has aired 30 cumulative seasons worth of material. This is not including the movies which continue to be produced. How is this a failure? After 30 seasons, you might expect to see some decline in interest, maybe not among people like ourselves, but in the general public, yes. Even if the franchise is over (which maybe it isn't) it had a good run. Instead of pointing the finger at shows like Voyager or Enterprise, we might remember that the Trek franchise is one of the most long-lasting in television history, and shows like DS9, VOY and ENT actually CONTRIBUTED to that long run, not detracted from it.