Discovery Showrunners fired; Kurtzman takes over
- Thread starter StCoop
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When it is set absolutely matters he it comes to non fans, setting it in the TOS era allows them to use the "10 years before Kirk and Spock" line to advertise the show, "100 years after ..." doesn't have the same effect. Kirk and Spock are iconic characters, they are widely known outside of the fanbase, being able to connect the show to them is an advantage (at the moment it's just via timeframe and by adopted sister but they have the option of actually casting them), it immediately creates a frame of reference for many people.
They can use the Delta shield in every time period, they can name drop Vulcan or klingons or drag a constitution class out of a museum in the 25th century but that's not as effective as using the characters, audiences almost always feel more connected to people than to places or objects.
Trek is about Humans being the best they can be without radical transhumanism and change, and depending on themselves...the A.I in Trek for the most part is either external, or a threat because it cannot ever work as well as humans. Transhumanism is a no no, beyond medical prosthesis..,it’s part of Treks DNA.
At least in the TNG times, the large starships had hundreds of labs and computer core areas. Plenty of uses for AI in analysing data from the sensor arrays. Answering queries asked of the Computer. All of this would be integrated into the LCARS system, without having to be referred to explicitly, and so well established that it is just part of everyday computer usage.
Ones with the Borg in.
And love it or hate it, Netflix is the biggest broadcaster, covering the whole planet. Amazon Prime is just behind that.
Berman era Trek is popular with us ...kids. *cough*
It did for TNG, which was pretty successful really. Meanwhile Enterprise went to a new time period and ended up cancelled after falling ratings. The time period in which a series has been set has not generally been an indicator of either quality or viewer interest. The general, non Trekkie, audience just need a bit of light branding, and they're then just looking for a show that captures their imagination or interest. The setting is relevant only to the extent that it affects that.
Not really - it has global scope which is a great position for it to be in, but it still has half the subscribers that Sky does in the UK, and obviously is completely eclipsed by the free to air channels. It isn't the market leader in broadcasting on any of its territories.
Well; it was mentioned a lot in the ninth year afterward
I will say something that somethings that might seem like it's two fan fic like doesn't have to come off as bad fan fic. Their are ways to embrace canon and continuity without feeling like it's something only the hardcore fans understand. If you wanted to tell the story about lets say the the fall of the Federation post Dominion War. You don't need to really need to know what the Dominion war was or even really what the Federation is. All you really need to get across to the audience is that society has fallen apart and you have this spaceship trying to fix it or whatever the main setting and concept of the show is.
Jason
Jason
TNG was created by Gene Roddenberry, that's a very strong TOS connection right there and the initial promos made sure to mention him, it also indirectly referenced TOS by not being TOS, being different worked in their favor but that only really works the first time you do it, once the audience gets used to things being different the effect is lost.
DS9 featured O'Brien, had Picard and the Enterprise in the pilot and included the Borg. Voyager used DS9, Quark and the Maquis plot the other shows specifically set up for them, Enterprise tied into First Contact and had Cochrane appear.
They all made sure to feature elements they thought people would be familiar with, these days that's Kirk and Spock and the TOS era. Maybe TNG is popular enough to be attention grabbing if it's used in advertising but simply setting a show in a random timeframe with no direct references outside of places is not a risk the studio wants to take and I get that.
The Picard facepalm that rides across the internet says this analysis is not entirely correct. Kirk and Co have been pop culture icons for longer, but that does not preclude the possibility that the later series (or indeed the movie era version of TOS) does not in fact also carry a similar weight. Wrath of Khan is only five years older than TNG, yet carries weight. The whole of the eighties and nineties are becoming cultural touchstones in precisely the way the sixties and seventies did...and Trek was absolutely a part of that. Your definition of niche is interesting in regards to what qualifies, but since Charmed is getting a reboot, I think your overall assumption is flawed...if the ‘also ran’ to Buffy is not too niche to be considered culturally relevant to modern audiences, then TNG certainly isn’t.
It is also time to consider the use of the term spin off in context....if TNG and co are indeed spin offs, not simply part of the whole, which can be an inference, then they are spin-offs in the way Frasier or NCIS are spin offs....they ran to greater success and for a greater length than their progenitors. I am not saying that means that they now over-shadow TOS, but they did eclipse it for a time, and the balance of interest is way more complex than a simple ‘TOS is Best’ assumption can reflect. TOS seems dated to me....and I am in my late thirties, goodness knows how it looks to younger people who are currently in the throes of an eighties/nineties cultural revival. The later shows, VOY in particular, are more likely to be viewed as something modern and fit in well...VOY, for all its faults, is possibly the most timeless piece of Trek ever made from a visual and casting perspective.
The love in for sixties Trek is perfectly understandable from many perspectives, but it is not necessarily what people think it is. This is why Chris Pine is playing the young version of movies era Kirk, and not a version of Kirk as he was in the sixties. The memory of a thing, even in culture, is not same as what the thing truly was.
This part of the problem the showrunners had on DSC. Trek has had ‘minority’ groups in positions of actual power and as show leads before there was a hashtag to stick on them, so it’s a hard sell to use it as a thing in DSC. This political slant doesn’t offend me by disagreeing with my political views (as it doesn’t) it does offend me by being stupid and dishonest....I followed Sisko through the wormhole, and Janeway across the Delta Quadrant, so this whole ‘woke’ thing depends on a cultural obfuscation of Treks past. But that’s modus operandi for some areas these days....Ghost Busters has to be reframed as a misogynist text in order to sell a reboot (it isn’t, it just mostly stars dudes of the time, which is not the same thing) that wasted its cast on a terrible story...the original Charmed is somehow not as ‘feminist’ as the new version, when I think most people who watched the original would happily point out that that is very possibly an impossible thing for it to be. (I won’t even mention The Craft, which is very obviously Charmeds greatest inspiration, or early Buffy, given Whedons recent revelations and how Buffy went a bit meh after series five or so.)
We have to reframe the past as something it is t to make the present seem ‘better’ by comparison...and this is a technique that does not work when (a) stuff is still in living memory and (b) it’s available to actually watch. It’s a strange world when even Sex And The City and Friends are under attack (though friends I can kind of accept...I always found the lack of African Americans odd, but then my extremely limited recollections of The Cosby Show suggest American TV had a serious segregation hangover. But hey, I am not American, so all the characters are The Other to me anyway.... )
This is why I am glad there will be a change in show runners...because the current ones didn’t know if they were rebelling against a rewritten history, a real history, or cosying up to either the truth or the lie for brand recognition. Then they tied their colours to a very shaken mast. It’s possible they found out that the better Trek in terms of audience share gains wasn’t TOS after all, because that nostalgia market audience doesn’t necessarily embrace streaming T.V.
We will see.
Oh definitely, but Netflix probably also skews to a younger demographic, and has lots of hidden subscribers (those who share accounts, those who are perpetually on a free trial of some kind, those who got x months free with their phone or through virgin media etc.)
It’s certainly made itself known culturally in the younger demographics, and isn’t some niche thing...like say YouTube Red, or even some of the individual channels we get on freeview or on our Sky boxes (Netflix is like channel five versus 1-4. Amazon Prime is like watch or UK Gold perhaps, and everything else is basically The Horror channel at best. This is a very vague ranking system.)
DSC though wil never be the Wednesday tea-time viewing of choice for a nation, because it’s (a) on streaming and (b) totally not family viewing. It hasn’t even been edited down like something like Buffy was to grab that audience. A trick has been missed. DSC is probably doing less well here in the U.K than Torchwood did. That’s...depressing.
Netflix is the platform that a lot of us watch Discovery on. It is also the platform that shows an audience that prefers Voyager
There was a few articles about it a few months ago. Top ten watched trek episodes on Netflix are basically the Borg episodes, and Voyager keeps showing up on ‘Trending now’ for people.
So I suppose one could infer that the data really means they should do a Borg movie.
Huh. Funny that.
Huh. Funny that.
Endgame was the top of the list of ten, (both eps). Worth noting that it was for 're' watches. Time and Again is there too and I personally hardly ever think of that one.
Who the heck is watching and rewatching time and again? With those weird santas workshop elf aliens. I think I can count on one hand the amount of times i've watched that episode since Voyager first aired. Maybe they are stuck in a time loop?
I came back to Voyager a few years ago after drifting off in series three. I have a sneaky suspicion that time will judge it very kindly indeed. It’s everything DSC wants to be, which is why they have filed the serial numbers off of so much of it for DSC. (Pick a DSC main character, and odds on there’s a deep core of a Voyager character winking out at you. or a concept.)
I really love the extended fan edit that was up on YouTube actually. It was really nicely done, especially retconning a seven/Harry story in. I was always fine with the onscreen relationships, but it really made the Harry stuff work.
