Correct. If anything Star Trek has regressed from the mean established in the 60's! - an era not known for spectacular displays of diversity.
Bryan Fuller: Diversity is key
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Yeah. In fact, I don't read Rapp's comments as "Look! Star Trek finally has a gay character!" But more "Look. Star Trek finally has a gay character..."
We are talking about cultural diversity,right? Religion has mostly died out or become private, Humanity has evolved in the wake of WW3, First Contact, and Post Scarcity to have an overarching Human culture, as evidenced by the fact that we aren't trying to kill each other over ideological differences anymore. Now, if you think the human culture presented in Trek is a bit to close to what we recognize as western culture, that's a legitimate criticism, caused by Trek's American roots. But the fact that Humanity has a single overarching culture is a natural outgrowth of the universe as set up. Roddenberry had a point of view of what he thought the ideal human culture was, and if you don't agree with his ideas on that I don't know why you would want to watch the show.
A homogenized culture is boring, as we learned in TNG. This is a show made for 21st century audiences, and 21st century audiences will want to be able to relate to the characters.
Yup.
In the interest of not painting everybody with the same brush, which is something we can all agree on in theory. I'm not exactly the same as you and you're not exactly the same as anyone else, never mind where you came from/grew up, etc. Even identical twins are different from each other.
Why not? Sometimes, as shown with the original series, modern issues can be debated/discussed, without threatening people by being set in modern times. People go "oh, it's the future," but don't always get that a show is really addressing an issue of today. They can learn and perhaps learn something/change their mind on an issue.
As for diversity, why not? People like to see people like themselves - color, sexuality, gender. Nothing wrong with that. There is plenty of room in a cast of a show to have diversity. And I've found in life that constant exposure to a group that is different than your group often leads to acceptance and understanding that pretty much, we're the same. Most of us want the same things. Our customs are just different.
The important thing for this show will be good stories. If the stories are good, people will tune in and watch. If not, they'll drift away.
^This
I related to TNG characters just fine and it is my favourite Star Trek show (or any TV show, really.) And if viewer numbers are concerned, it was the most popular Trek show ever, so I'm hardly alone in this.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for diversity, but I really don't want to see people in Star Trek behaving exactly like modern people, but just in space. TNG has quality of a good period drama, where the people actually feel that they're from a culture and time that is many ways different than our own.
A couple of them were even Canadian!!1!!1!
Not many people do. That's why it died in 2005.
That's why the only successful attempt to reboot it so far jettisoned as much of the "Gene's Vision" nonsense as they could while avoiding violent nerd riots in the aisles at Star Trek conventions (they were only partly successful at that last bit).
The "Gene's Vision" excuse for bad drama and bad storytelling is dead and buried, as the producers of this show have made clear at one turn after another - and it should be.
Never a good start.
Absolutely. The futuristic/unreal setting allows us to look more critically at what is going on in our time, to separate what the characters are doing from our own experiences and produces and then see ourselves reflected in their actions. It works much better than a show about yet another contemporary doctor, cop or lawyer who is just a bit too close to us, carrying too much familiar baggage with them for the point to seem anything but forced. In Trek's world you can be sledgehammer blatant and the story still works because, hey, aliens and ray guns.
It's a tired cliché that science fiction is actually about the time in which it is written, but that is consistently true. Much of it can of course continue to resonate for future generations, but science fiction more than almost any other genre tends to reek of the time in which it was made. Every Trek generation does. That's part of the reason, incidentally, why Discovery couldn't copy TOS. Voyager, in the late 90s, copied a show that oozed late eighties from every pore, and it didn't fit in anymore - and ratings declined. Enterprise then made the same mistake, and by the time they tried to make it about something contemporary with their 9/11 analogy, it was too late.
It really is not a great start, but If you disagreed with something I actually said after that, then commenting on that might have been more constructive.
To reiterate, I want to see diversity of ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, etc, but I want to see these people be united by common humanistic philosophy. When some people talk about diversity, it seems they want to see creationists, Taliban and clansmen on the bridge, or less inflammatorily just port our modern cultures as they're now into the future.
Yes, because we want to see that these people overcame their differences and learned to get along. Not because of everything they were was flushed down the crapper.
That's just a straw man, nobody has said that. But this:
Is what Trek has always done. TOS is American culture of the late 60s. TNG is definitely a period piece as you say, it is a period piece of late 80s America. They may portray people in the future but the things they care about, the attitudes they have, the way they approach problems and the stories they take part in all reflect strongly the times they are made in. The latter Berman era shows were trying to replicate TNG so are less reflective of their own periods, but the comparison is back with JJTrek and the late 00s. Undoubtedly, Discovery will be, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight in years to come, a mirror of late 10s American culture.
Yes, they did overcame their differences by abandoning their misguided and hateful ideologies.
You're totally wrong about TNG. It was a bold attempt to portray evolved humanity, and many people hate it for it. Personally I love it.
The themes and issues certainly need to be relevant to the modern times, but this doesn't mean porting over the modern culture as it is.
They had a therapist on the bridge, had a secretive evil empire enemy hidden behind a big space wall and their biggest threat was cyborg technology run amok. They couldn't have been more late 80s if they tried. That's before we even get to the design and the hair.
They were certainly trying to portray an evolved future human race, I don't deny that, but what they ended up with was an eighties vision of the future.
I love TNG, it was my Star Trek, and it has a holistic consistency to its visual world building which I think is brilliant (you know what you're watching from a single frame), but it is as much a product of its time as any Sci-fi, and perhaps even more so for trying not to be.
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