Discovery was panned out as a flagship show for their new streaming service. The whole franchise was supposed to artistically align with Discos new look and way of storytelling/character depiction.
1) Who said that the whole franchise was supposed to align with DIS's design aesthetic? I don't remember anyone ever saying that, and I don't think that's a legitimate
a priori assumption even if it's an aesthetic that's universally beloved.
Star Trek died in 2005 because it had spent too much time being creatively stagnant in all sorts of ways, just constantly trying to replicate the success of TNG in VOY and ENT rather than trying to innovate. So, no, I don't accept the idea that other
Star Trek shows should imitate DIS's design aesthetic, even if DIS had achieved
Stranger Things or
Wednesday levels of streaming success.
2) "New way of storytelling/character depiction?" None of it was new.
Star Trek: Discovery was using a variation of the prestige TV-style serialized character drama format used extensively in high profile dramas for most of the last ten years. It's not
Star Trek: Discovery's fault if a certain segment of
Star Trek fans haven't kept up with the times and feel threatened by change.
We all know how this turned out to be.
Five television programs in production simultaneously, more than at any other time in
Star Trek's history; one of those programs immediately being replaced by a new one as it's ending; an variety of storytelling formats larger than any
Star Trek had previously enjoyed.
And we get to see some of the most accomplished actors of the modern era on
Star Trek these days -- Anthony Rapp, Wilson Cruz, Bill Irwin, David Cronenberg, Doug Jones, Jason Issacs, Shawn Doyle, Rainn Wilson, Aldis Hodge, H. Jon Benjamin, Alison Pill, Ed Speleers, Orla Brady, James Callis, Peyton List, Todd Stashwick, Amanda Plummer, Mia Kirshner, Tawny Newsome, Jack Quaid, Noël Wells, Phil LaMarr, Lauren Lapkus, Paul F. Tompkins, Jason Mantzoukas, Daveed Diggs, Jameela Jamil, Celia Rose Gooding... and now
Academy Award winner for Best Actress Michelle Yeoh! This is seriously an amazing lineup of incredibly accomplished actors and performers that
Star Trek would never have had the chance to feature in the past.
You don’t drastically change the tone and setting of a successful tv series.
Star Trek wasn't a successful TV series. It had died of creative stagnation twelve years before
Star Trek: Discovery premiered.
Also, change is not bad! Change is, in fact, good! As T'Pol herself put it in "Terra Prime:" "Neither of our species is what it was a million years ago, nor what it'll become in the future. Life is change."
Placing Disco in the 32nd century wasn’t planned, when the writers first created the series. It became a necessity due to the many canon violations which clashed with the writers wishes for a fresh start.
Did it though? Has a writer or producer actually said, "We decided to change the setting to satisfy the people who were upset that our computer screens looked too advanced?"
Discovery is widely considered to be the least attractive iteration of all Star Trek live tv shows,
Oh really? By whom?
5 seasons might be more than average for most shows, but killing off the show after only 2 seasons would have canceled the whole franchise, which surely wasn’t the long term plan of CBS…
Ah, yes, the old "they only renewed the show to hide how unsuccessful it was" conspiracy theory! Pray tell -- why would they
not cancel the whole franchise again if
Star Trek: Discovery had been such a failure? Why would they invest
more money into making a failing franchise? Far more rational to cut your losses if it's been so unsuccessful.
Personally I much prefer Rios to Shaw, but there's a damned obvious reason why they didn't use Rios in Shaw's place--they wanted an antagonistic captain who wouldn't defer to Picard and Riker.
Yes, but the way to do that is to set up an antagonism between him and Jean-Luc in Season Two. And you do that by...
This really doesn't work with Rios. Rios doesn't really care about red-tape, paperwork, and duties. As soon as Picard would've needed him, he would've come up with some bullshit excuse to tell Starfleet and, if he didn't like what they said, he'd blame it on a jammed transmission.
And, elephant in the room, it's Picard. We've got to have that ONE character who reminds us that Picard used to be Locutus. This season it's Shaw.
Okay, so I think this here is part of the issue. You want to have a situation where the antagonistic captain is antagonistic in such a way as to draw attention to Jean-Luc's history with the Borg.
Here's one scenario to do that: You set up a scenario in Season Two where the climax involves Jean-Luc figuring out that Jurati is the New Borg Queen while he's still back in the year 2024. In fact, he not only figures out that Jurati is about to become the New Borg Queen, but he figures out that it has to happen for the predestination paradox to be completed and the denizens of the year 2401 to be saved. And he has to stop Rios from saving Jurati from assimilation.
So, no more Dr. Teresa (much as I loved Dr. Teresa and Sol Rodriguez). Rios and Jurati have to be written as still being in love with one-another from the start of S2, even if they're currently broken up and fighting. We have to buy that Rios would still give his life for her. Since Dr. Teresa is not his driving relationship in S2 anymore, maybe you set up a scenario where it is Rios who spends the season chasing Jurati, trying to save her from the Borg.
But Jurati has to sacrifice herself to save the future, become the New Borg Queen, and lead a new Borg Commonwealth that operates by consent rather than conquest. And Picard realizes he has to allow it to happen, and he has to accept that Jurati is gone, he has to let go -- just like (to tie it in thematically) he realizes he needs to let his mother go, to finally accept that her suicide was
not his fault and he could not have stopped it. Just like he could not have stopped Jurati's assimilation. But Rios can't accept that. And he can't forgive Picard for stopping him from saving her.
Boom. There you go. He's back in the 25th Century, back aboard the
Stargazer, and now he's the last person Jean-Luc wants to go to for help when his own lost love is in danger. And now we have a good reason for why Rios would not be inclined to give Jean-Luc a favor, and why he might even find himself indulging in anti-Borg bigotry.
And, it works better dramatically. It fulfills the Chekov's Gun rule of foreshadowing, since it means
Star Trek: Picard would no longer have gone to the trouble of setting up the
Stargazer in S2 only to not use her in S3. It frankly gives Santiago Cabrera more to do dramatically in S2 and a meatier relationship with Picard to play. It means you don't have to arbitrarily introduce an entirely new character.
Oh, and maybe you have Ensign Elnor posted aboard the
Stargazer to boot.
It's pretty naïve to think actor salaries alone sank STD. The budget per episode of STD is about $8-8.5 million. By contrast a single episode of 1923 is between $30-35 million.
Oh, I agree with you here. Given the kind of pressure all the streaming services are under to start turning profits, I think the days of having budgets of tens of millions of dollars per episode are ending. I think that will be an industry-wide trend, too -- I doubt we're going to see something like
Stranger Things Season Four's budget once the streamers find financial equilibrium.
Star Trek is gonna have to learn how to do more with less again.
more concerned that they hit all the social-diversity-identifiers
Source
And that pretty well sums up my own thoughts about STD. It turns out that letting people make vanity projects that cater to a minor amount of people was a bad idea. Turning around and labeling everyone that was turned off by it as bigots, racists, homophobes, *insert your favorite overused pejorative here*, was an even worse idea.
I'm sorry, but you completely negate your own argument when you quote someone who claims that diverse casting undermined good writing. You're not a bigot for disliking
Star Trek: Discovery -- but if you run around saying or quoting people who say that
Star Trek: Discovery was bad because the producers cared more about diversity than writing, then yeah, my hackles are raised.
Star Trek: Discovery's diverse casting has
nothing to do with whatever flaws it had, and you need to go a long way to prove to me that you're not a bigot when you start blaming diversity for whatever perceived flaws you see.
