I see a lot of negativity towards the new Trek on here and from other Trek fans. I guess I want to ask, why? While the new shows are not TNG and DS9 quality, I do find them better than Voyager and Enterprise. The most hated show seems to be Discovery. I like it. I think Lower Decks is fantastic. I really enjoy Prodigy, eventhough I am way older than the targeted audience. Picard was a little disappointing, but still a very good Trek show. The first season looks like a masterpiece compared to TNG's first season.
Why so much negativity?
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A fandom typically hates the current product and will not acknowledge any positives until after it has ended and the next iteration comes along. This happens all the time with Star Trek, fans hated the TOS movies because they were different from TOS itself until TNG came along. Then TNG was hated until DS9 premiered, rinse and repeat with Voyager and Enterprise, which were not accepted in fandom until the Abrams movies came along and were hated, and now there's a whole crop of new shows to be hated by the Fans until such time as they end and something new comes along.
Other fandoms are similar. In Star Wars the prequels were hated until the new Disney films came along, and now they're hated and the prequels have become accepted. Doctor Who fandom actually acknowledges this process as an integral step of enjoying the show, in that a final opinion of an episode is not officially determined until five years after it aired where it can be rewatched and be determined to be not as bad as everyone thought at the time and much better than the "crap which is currently airing."
This is the Way.
Other fandoms are similar. In Star Wars the prequels were hated until the new Disney films came along, and now they're hated and the prequels have become accepted. Doctor Who fandom actually acknowledges this process as an integral step of enjoying the show, in that a final opinion of an episode is not officially determined until five years after it aired where it can be rewatched and be determined to be not as bad as everyone thought at the time and much better than the "crap which is currently airing."
This is the Way.
I'm not that old, but I bet there was negativity from certain TOS fans when TMP first came out.
It's Human nature
Because it's a quite blatant example of a company burning an intellectual property to the ground using scorched earth tactics.
This is like being confused why people are mad when a property developer burnt down a forest to build a McDonald's.
I love me some cheap fast food, but not when it requires burning down a forest to make it happen.
It doesn't hurt when McDonald's lovers won't admit a Big mac has the nutritional value of a donut.
Star Trek Discovery in the most generous of terms is something that appeals to a very very limited demographic appeal.
STD represents the people who watch twitch streams while old fans prefer books.
Star Trek Discovery does some very obvious blatant things to turn off old fans.
And again the biggest frustration is that it seems to be so obviously driven by corporate politics. Bryan Fuhler is a highly competent writer, his work on Hannibal was a master piece.
Yet he didn't want to turn star trek into star wars and he had to leave. Instead we got a crew of producers who aren't capable of producing high quality art.
You're not gonna get a pyscologist to sign off on the idea the STD crew are well adjusted people. They all suffer from a number of personality disorders/flaws in their professionalism. Star trek up until that point was basically the opposite. For whatever magic of mental health starfleet officers were able to keep it together and act like disciplined adults.
At best people like seeing people with mental health issues running a ship. I don't have a problem with this if its battlestar galactica(a show I love) but that isn't star trek.
The studio got what it wanted, eye candy, with some teen drama elements to capture a younger audience.
It's fundamentally an immature show, there's nothing wrong with that, I don't take myself that serious.
But again why did you burn down a forest to build a McDonalds!!!!!
Some people play the waiting game, whether they intend to or not. I'd rather enjoy what's coming out while it's coming out. And if I don't enjoy it, I don't watch it. I've stopped watching before and I'll stop watching again if the situation applies. But a lot of people can't help themselves. I used to try to reason with them, but I've given up on that more recently. It's a waste of time and a waste of energy.
I'm not that old, but I bet there was negativity from certain TOS fans when TMP first came out.
It's Human nature
Yeah, last year somebody posted an article form a Star Trek fan magazine released shortly before TNG was released and that article was dripping with vitriol towards the new Star Trek series that dared to "replace" the old crew. (It also claimed Geordi would be the new Spock and that everybody on board was a commander i.e. Commander Yar, Commander LaForge etc.)
THough I think it's too easy to just dismiss all criticism of new Trek as "people just don't like the new instalment"
I, for example, love Lower Decks and while I don't *hate* Picard and Discover, I do find them non-enjoyable for me personally, and that wouldn't change even if they were from the middle of 90s Trek.
Looks at date on birth certificate and room full of books.
People just like what the like and dislike what they dislike.
Can't we all accept this?
Can't we all accept this?
I'm not that old, but I bet there was negativity from certain TOS fans when TMP first came out.
It's Human nature
I don't even know what a twitch stream is. So congrats on knowing more about that stuff than I do.
I'm 42, BTW, and have been a fan for 31 years.
Everyone has opinions and many will argue about them - it's human nature !
I've been a fan for getting on for 50 years and love DS9 above all else, but enjoy TOS and TNG very much too. Even Voyager and Enterprise have a place on my DVD shelf.
I love Discovery and Picard too, and am looking forward to Strange New Worlds and Prodigy. The only show I can't stand is Lower Decks - it's the only one I just can't watch, and the only one that contradicts my general viewpoint of "more Trek is a good thing".
I hope that's not too much negativity !
Fans always hate what’s new because it’s not like the old stuff was. Right now it’s because today’s Trek isn’t like 90s Trek. Back then it was because TNG wasn’t like 60s Trek. And in the future it will be whatever show is new because it isn’t like today’s Trek. Fandom history simply repeats itself, over and over. It just seems more shrill today because social media makes people even louder now and they no longer have to sit down and write and then send angry letters to Trek magazines, they can just quickly scream about it on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube.
Generally, I'm bored with the CBS live-action fare.
Which is a fair cop.
This is borderline trolling.
You've shown little evidence this is actually the case.
People like myself who hate nu trek, were initially quite open to it, most of us can directly state when we had to check out of the property. Personally I spent 40 hours or more trying to reedit the first season of discovery so it was more tolerable. It wasn't actually that hard, which goes to show how poorly things were constructed in the first place.
You don't spend 40 hours editing something you've already watched twice over if you think it bad simply because its different. You also don't spent that much time splicing scenes and not see how poorly things were thought out and spliced together. You can claim a 3 second interval of garbage was inserted into the episode for absolutely no reason, but I actually have done the editing.
I'd add most of the people with my line of thinking, were more than open to "new, brand new shows" like the Orville, The Expanse, For all Mankind, Raised by wolves etc.
Additionally a solid number of us didn't even watch a lot of these treks in their initial runs. Or alternatively have only recently watched shows like Farscape/BSG/Babylon 5 in more recent years, shows that show non treks can be good.
FYI we have good reason to suggest that 90s trek was far more popular on netflix to people who weren't around in the 90s in nu trek. Which is likely why international netflix dropped nutrek.
It is entirely probable that Netflix is paying CBS something like 500 million a year to keep 90s trek on their services. Meanwhile nu trek is likely making a 10th of that money.
Enterprise has dramatic flaws in 10-15 episodes of its first two seasons. This hasn't changed. What has changed is the ability to skip these episodes or simple binge past them.
It's radically different than it was in 2001 when you had to sit through crap for months of the year. When you didn't know if you were signing up for pure crap or a master piece episode.
Voyager is still fundamentally flawed, time hasn't changed that in any shape or form. It still has fundamental strengths, time hasn't changed that.
This is just dishonest. The prequels are objectively bad. It's like trying to say the sex pistols were musical genius with perfect pitch with a metronomes sense of timing. When in reality everything was off time and out of tune. You might like music that is off time and out of tune(I do myself) but that doesn't mean it's not inherently flawed.
An actual neuroscientist could sit down and chart out the facial expressions and vocal tonnes of the actors in the prequels. It was just plain out of sync with what we call acting.
The prequels were bad, but they were bad because the man making it had no understanding of acting. This is something carrie fisher/harrison ford have been stating since the 80s.
George Lucas made a film for himself and it shows. He had no interest in anything that was outside of special affects and the space opera concepts that he personally enjoyed.
You can respect the sequels because they represent one mans artistic vision, a man who brought us great things and still had a love of his project.
The sequels were a product of corporate meddling. You can't pretend the narrative jumps between the 3 movies didn't happen. Johnson made one thing, Abhrams did something entirely different.
What you like is subjective. Your subjective feelings doesn't mean a stone sculpture is made out of plastic because you feel it to be the case.
If you don't study music, don't play an instrument you're not expected to know when something is out of tune or off time. But when someone who actually has an interest in the thing tells you this is the case, your subjective feels don't supersede the effort they've put into a thing.
It's very easy to stick electrodes to your brain and watch a new hope and contrast it with the last skywalker It's high rates of stimulation, large amounts of tonal shifting, and not much else.
Doctor who is an entirely different beast.
It's really not. I've seen it over and over again on various bulletin boards since 1996 and I know it went on before that. Just change the name of the series. DS9 and VOY used to be huge targets on this board. I would know. I was one of the first members who registered here.
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