To be fair, it was really only the last nine. The was nothing wrong with TNG, DS9, or Voyager in it;s first two years. From season three on, it started to get old, and ENTERPRISE wasn't any better.
Well, regardless of what killed Star Trek, an Excelsior-based series starring George Takei would not have helped it any.
The whole idea behind Voyager was that it was a sturdy, smaller ship on a long journey home. The sense of containment reinforced the notion of Voyager as home to a stranded crew and the scale of having to return to the Alpha Quadrant. The Excelsior on the other hand was a state of the art ship in her time. If a series were to be set involving the Excelsior then it would have to be a different premise from Voyager. A few years ago a Sulu series may well have worked. I agree people are giving him a hard time because Takei has performed well outside of Trek where he's not limited to the same supporting role. But to be honest, by the end of the 90s/early 2000s there was Star Trek overload. It could have been a Sulu series or Enterprise, the point is it wouldn't have endured.
Not really true - the ratings declined steadily for every one of TNG's sequels starting from their second episodes. And the key is repetition - all of the times that TNG did the same thing over and over in the same style have to be factored in to the exhaustion factor by the time DS9 and "Voyager" and "Enterprise" each picked up the cycle. People can argue series preferences, but if you look at the ratings it's hard to argue that audience fatigue didn't start to set in about 1992 (reflected in the first two years of DS9's ratings - its highest - if not TNG's). And you don't get that fatigue from a standing start, so "eighteen years" is about right.
Among all this talk of what "killed Trek," I suppose someone should point out that there is a big-budget Star Trek movie in production with a very hot Hollywood director at the helm. As to the original question, I agree that Takei doesn't have the acting chops to be a series lead. He's fine in small roles - Heroes, etc. But he really has the whole reading-from-cue-cards style of delivery going on.
A Sulu series instead of VOY would have been neither better or worse. If they had the same writers and producers, the results would have been similar. It didn't really matter who was in the captain's chair. He's too old now, anyway. They should get that guy who plays Miles on Lost. He may be a little squirt but I could see him being a convincing kick-ass who could scare The Sisko. TNG got repetitive pretty early on (not long after it stopped sucking in S3). VOY was repetitive for seven seasons. ENT was repetitive in S1-S2, different but still sucky in S3 and different and decent in S4. Only DS9 managed to be non-repetitive most of the way through, after the first season. But the fact that that series - and new BSG - are not kicking ass in ratings just goes to show how little originality or "grittiness" matter for ratings. I think that to get back on its feet, Star Trek needs to be even more of a departure than DS9 ever was.
No, it wouldn't have worked for the same reason ENT didn't work, and this new movie will not work: Trek should *never* go back, but rather, it should *always* go forward.
As has been mentioned, the trouble is in creative repetitiveness. Think about it: TNG, DS9, and VOY ran 7 years each, and ENT ran 4. That's 25 seasons worth of essentially the same creative show, some of it concurrently. It is reasonable to conclude that an Excelsior series would be creatively no different than any of the aforementioned and would therefore be no positive or negative, but basically the same. Trek overkilled, and without creative originality, n o show can survive 25 years without dwindling it's audience. That's why the new movie could be very promising. Going back and reinterpreting the concept and making it fresh (or fresher).
I see it as risky, very risky. There will be die hard fans who may go to see it and become pissed. It may also be a pleasure to old fans. It could attract new fans to the Trek legacy. The only good thing is that You can't loose fnas because of this movie, a trekkie will never abandon trek because they each have their own favorite era of trek.
I don't think Takei had the acting chops to pull off such a series. It probably would have crashed faster than Enterprise. A LOT faster. He's great as a supporting player, but he couldn't carry or lead an ensemble series.
maybe a mini-series would have been cool as hell.... Voyager's "Flashback" was awesome in showing the movie era, but a little too much technobabble.
One of the major problems with VOY was technobabble. Whatever the new series is, it must keep that to a minimum. Even Kirk's cheesy fist fights worked better as a storytelling device.
I think that Voyager was better then a series based on Captain Sulu. Don't get me wrong, Sulu is great but, in my opinion, Star Trek is about moving forward not back. That is why I am so angry about the next movie.