Was 4 years a little short for this series run?

Hopefully Discovery doesn't end as short as Enterprise did.

 

Enterprise was cancelled so by default 4 years was too short because it never finished its story.

 

Four seasons isn't a bad run. Had seasons one and two had the quality of three and four, there'd likely have been more.

 

Was four years a little short for this series run? Well, yeah, because they spent at least the first two seasons just trying to figure out what the hell the show was supposed to be about.

Then by the third season they decided that the show needed to be a 9-11 analogy.

Then by the fourth season they realized what they should have known all along: If you're going to bill the show as a prequel to TOS, then have it actually reference TOS. Unfortunately in the process, they went extremely overboard to the point where they needed a two-part episode just to explain why TOS Klingons don't look like TNG Klingons.

I think if the show were given the three more seasons they all thought they'd get, ENT would have eventually toned that down and actually been a pretty good show. But alas, they were not given that chance.

 

4 seasons was to short because in season 4 they had the Romulans to show up so they could have had the Earth / Romulan War that lead to the United Federation of Planets if they had done that it would have been better but they end with the Confederation of Planets which was the beginning of Interplanetary Cooperation.

 

I think four seasons was too short. I wanted to have a longer series run like the other like TNG and Ds9 and Voyager series did. At least the Romulan war books and the Rise of the. Federation continues the characters story arcs,

 

My thoughts exactly.

As someone who ate up the change in S4, that season holds up the least for me...and it's exactly for the reason you mentioned. By the time a show is in its fourth season, it should already have it's own canon and the characters have all had at least one major character arc. It's with good reason that DS9 only ever had one Q episode and why Worf and O'Brien rarely reminisce about their time on the Enterprise.

Enterprise had just gotten done saving the world, at personal sacrifice for many: Trip was grieving a sister, T'Pol had left her career and Phlox had a big, fat Denobulan family that he left behind save a species in a conflict he had no dog in. And after "Home," none of that is brought up again. EVER. The only carryover from Season 3 was the Trip/T'Pol stuff.

I could have done without a Klingon forehead arc to get some followup on the Xindi. Are we tenantive allies? Did they find a new homework? Shit like that.

 

Season four was fun for being crammed with incestuous franchise references, but it was way overboard to the point of fanboyishness. By the fourth season, the lead-in to the rest of the franchise became the whole point of the show, rather than a vehicle for compelling storytelling.

There should have been a more solid overarching story plan from the very beginning of the series. The series should have started with what we got in Season 3. The changes in Vulcan society should have played out over a few seasons instead of having a radical shake-up right when the show was about to end. The Klingon augment thing never should have happened. The temporal cold war was pointless. And no Organians, please.

Kor

 

That's just it, though: by season 4, everyone knew the writing on the wall. If they were going to get cancelled and had only one season left, then they might as well have started segueing into TOS, since there was really nothing else to do. But if three more seasons were guaranteed after that, then perhaps S4 wouldn't have been so TOS-centric.

 

I would have liked to see it go longer. In the final season, it finally reached the potential I always thought it held (aside from a few obvious episodes). I'm glad it got to show how good it could be. But if it had three more seasons with the quality of season four, I think the series would have been more highly regarded.

 

I would have liked to have seen where Manny Coto would have taken the series in Season 5. The only Star Trek series that had a 7 year run where I thought the later seasons (5+) was good was DS9. TNG was running out of steam creatively by Season 5 and a lot of Seasons 6 and 7 were honestly dreadful. They looked nice production wise, but the writing was lacking. For me VOY ran 6 seasons too long.

 

Discovery might still be shorter because they are doing 13-15 episode seasons, not 22.

 

I'd say DS9 hit it's high-water mark in season 5 too. After the 6 episode Dominion arc at the beginning of season 6, nothing substantially Dominion happened until the finale of that season. When Dax died. Lots of Season 6 and 7 felt like padding and the 9 episode dash to the end of DS9 and the Dominion War, felt long in the tooth by the end of it all.

VOY had it's high-water mark during season 4 and 5.


ENT was cut short just when it was about to hit it's stride.

 

Had all of ENT been as good as season 4 it would have most certainly lasted the seven years.

 

^But the ratings continued to decline in season 4 (although only slightly, more like staying in place).

 

The thing is that Star Trek has no looked forward since the 1990's. Every series and movie since Voyager left the air and Nemesis tanked has been about looking backward. Star Trek was never about world building. The Original Series had so little interest in it that they rarely had reference to exactly when it was taking place - they never stated the year and even got the century inconsistent. Even TNG was more focused on building on what came before.

Enterprise was a fun show, but it lacked energy. The Bad Robot films have energy but little to no originality. Discovery doesn't even interest me. I am more interest in what happens next, not yet another look at what came before. Star Trek should be the name of the program, not what it's actually about. Star Trek trek is most interesting what it's about something other than itself.

Was four years too short? Yeah, mainly because they didn't get their heads out of their asses soon enough, but really, it would never have appealed to the masses. Only the die hards if they got the details right.

 

Because by that point it was too late.
The show should have grabbed audiences by the jugular from the very beginning.

Kor

 

Something I wondered about ENT. It was cancelled at 98 episodes. At 100 though, a show hits syndication. I wonder why no one at Paramount tried to shop ENT around to another station? Scifi, CBS or some other station.

 

I'm not sure why, but my speculation is that it was partly due to the creative direction of the UPN/CW network, partly due to sheer burnout on the part of the production team, and partly due to an attempt at preserving the value of the brand.

 

I sure didn't think so when it was first run, because I bailed during series 2. It was too much recycled Voyager. Years later, I saw the outstanding series 3 and the good series 4 and wished it hadn't been cancelled. My bad.