It's like saying Deep Space Nine is dystopian because it comes from the ruins of Bajor under Cardassian occupation and the fallout from the Wolf 359 massacre
Is it time to put Star Trek to rest?
- Thread starter Dar70
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All of these series start in a bad place, sure. But they come out on the other side to a better place. The struggle, the journey back to the light is the story here. If it stayed dark like say, The Boys, then I’d agree that it’s dystopian. But generally, nah. Dark moments sure. But that’s gone all the way back to TOS.
I can't speak to books as the books I (re)read are not new and are often from before my time. I guess I could say the same about music for the most part if I'm being honest. But a blanket claim that movies and TV shows suck suggests to me that maybe you're watching the wrong ones?Lynx said:
"Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact." -- Homer J Simpson
Now wait, I never wrote that Star Trek Academy is dystopian!
That's one thing I can't accuse it for being.
But what I saw in that Youtube clip wasn't Star Trek, it was a parody.
I get the impression that it's a parody who ridicule Star Trek in the worst possible ways.
I did get the impression that you do.
There cannot be light where there are no lights, no candles and no sunlight and the gloom and darkness is compact.
I can relate to them because they are supposed to be characters who live in a much better society than what we have today.
I can't relate to "modern" Trek characters because they are too much like some of the losers I have to encounter every day.
One of the reasons why I watch Star Trek amd like it is to get some diversion and rest from The Gray Universe, not to have The Gray Universe and all its faults thrown in my face again.
I find it dystopian and gloomy just like most of the entertaining in the 2010's and 2020's.
There's no hope, joy or life in it and the characters are troubled, gloomy characters.
I'd sail across the ocean
I'd walk a hundred miles
If I could make it to the end
Oh, just to see a smile
You see it in their faces
The sadness in their tears
The desperation and the anger
Madness and the fear
No hope, no life, just pain and fear
No food, no love, just greed is here
"Childhood's End"
Iron Maiden
Well, I may live in the wrong place but there must be ages since I watched a series or movie that I have liked, not counting re-runs of older movies and series on some channel or my constant home DVD "relaunches" of certain series or movies.
There are simply too many movies I've turned off after about half an hour and too many series I've quit after 3-4 episodes because I don't like them for different reasons.
Back in the days I could watch series like TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, NCIS, NCIS LA, NCIS New Orleans, CSI, CSI NY, CSI Miami, Stargate SG 1, Stargate Atlantis, Without a Trace, The Orville, Hawaii 5 0 and many more.
In fact they were so many that I constantly missed episodes because of other outdoor activities which was a pity.
Now I only watch NCIS occasionally. The stories are still quite good even if i miss the original characters.
@Lynx , you have your right to your opinion and that is of course, fine. And I get that comfort food when it comes to media consumption is a great thing. But I truly believe you are missing a lot of good, challenging, absolutely but optimistic media by tuning out. Shows like Ted Lasso and Shrinking for one are fantastic and absolutely optimistic.
And we can disagree until we’re blue in the face over whether or not shows are dystopian or not.
But I echo @Set Harth here. Maybe the issue isn’t the media itself. But maybe it’s your expectations. Going in with an open mind can oftentimes be hard, but letting a story finish can oftentimes lead to an amazing payoff.
And we can disagree until we’re blue in the face over whether or not shows are dystopian or not.
But I echo @Set Harth here. Maybe the issue isn’t the media itself. But maybe it’s your expectations. Going in with an open mind can oftentimes be hard, but letting a story finish can oftentimes lead to an amazing payoff.
You do have some points here.
I don't know anything about Ted Lasso or Shrinking. It looks like none of those are available in my part of The Gray Universe.
I've always tried my best to be open-minded about things like music, movies and TV series. But I have this gut feeling about most of it. There are certain criteria which must fit for me to like something and if it doesn't, then I just get bored and quit.
The only expectation from that is Stargate Universe which was so bad that I stopped watching it after three or four episodes. However, I actually started watching it again afte one of my colelagues at work told me that he had fallen asleep twice while watching one or two episodes.
After that, the series became a joke between us. It was always "Do you know what day it is?" "Yes, it's Friday and finally time for our favorie show!"
On Monday we used to joke about the recent episode and how bad it was!
I do have a sick sense of humor!
Last year I actually found a DVD with the first season of Stargate Universe for a very modest price in a bargain shop and I bought it just to see if it was as bad as I thought it was back in the early 2000s.
It was!
Anyway, I actually encountered a series called "Hudson and Rex on an obscure channel I have and have watched two episodes of it. It's about a cop and a police dog. maybe a little too light-weight for me but quite nice with likeable characters and at least some excitement here and there.
But that's the one and only exception so far when it comes to recent TV series.
I tend to be stuck "in my decade" if I allow it too much, and then it's difficult to get out of. I don't want to be like the people I mocked when I was young who didn't seem to adapt to anything past Eisenhower. I'm not keen on most popular music that's out there right now, but there is a lot of good new music, if you work to find it. As far as SFA, it's not the star trek of yesteryear, but I am glad to see it's not really trying to be. New people don't want hand me downs and SFA was made for new viwers. But I have found I like it too. I didn't think I would.
This × a thousand.
Ohhh, no, no, no. NCIS can be fun, but it's not a high quality writing.
Don't get me wrong, I have been with NCIS from the start, but it is what it is. NCIS is an average hamburger. It's fine. It's good enough for a meal, you'll have it again, but you aren't choosing this over a nice steak and you've had better burgers.
Of course, good is subjective. I like a nice meal but, then again, I might reject a lot of fine dining.
Yes, NCIS has fun characters. It's also cheesy and predictable. And it plays fast and lose with technology, geography, and legality. In other words, it's alot like Berman era Trek.
So off screen references to wars is acceptable and the terrible toll it takes, but actually showing the horror is too much?
I wonder if there's really an objective metric for what constitutes high quality writing - Star Trek itself is rarely classed by "sophisticated" media-class critics as high-quality, but I'd much rather rewatch TOS season one than The Wire or Breaking Bad. Not just because the latter shows are emotionally heavy or w/e, but because I genuinely find TOS to be about a hundred times more meaningful and compelling.
Lynx's posts are a bit monotone and doom-laden (sorry, Lynx!) but I think he's touching on a fair point, which is that television is uniquely able to embrace the idea of storytelling engines which revolve around competent, likeable characters overcoming situations each week with skill and intellect, whether that's lawyers, cops, spies, starfleet officers, or wandering fantasy heroes. I agree with that and I think the stranglehold that prestige/MFA culture has over streaming output has been toxic in that regard, especially since viewing figures suggest that more people actually prefer the likes of NCIS or Law & Order, not to mention old sitcoms.
There's a space for both models, of course, but streaming currently is in an ideological chokehold which says that ten-hour movies with bad lighting and "dark" themes are the only real way to make fiction, and that breezy procedurals, comedies, or adventure-of-the-week shows are "slop" (despite them being what actually hold up streaming services financially...).
Lynx's posts are a bit monotone and doom-laden (sorry, Lynx!) but I think he's touching on a fair point, which is that television is uniquely able to embrace the idea of storytelling engines which revolve around competent, likeable characters overcoming situations each week with skill and intellect, whether that's lawyers, cops, spies, starfleet officers, or wandering fantasy heroes. I agree with that and I think the stranglehold that prestige/MFA culture has over streaming output has been toxic in that regard, especially since viewing figures suggest that more people actually prefer the likes of NCIS or Law & Order, not to mention old sitcoms.
There's a space for both models, of course, but streaming currently is in an ideological chokehold which says that ten-hour movies with bad lighting and "dark" themes are the only real way to make fiction, and that breezy procedurals, comedies, or adventure-of-the-week shows are "slop" (despite them being what actually hold up streaming services financially...).
Awards? Writing awards? Saturn Awards? Emnys? Sag? Hugo? Nebula?
Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) featured scripts from several award-winning, acclaimed science fiction authors who shaped the show's intellectual,, cerebral, and often darker tone. Key writers included Hugo and Nebula winners like Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, and David Gerrold, along with influential sci-fi writer Robert Bloch.
Award winning authors will write good stories.
And it's also a matter of tone. The Wire might have excellent writing, but it's tone is not overall the same as Trek. You might get away with the occasional episode that fits the same tone, but not the entire series.
Still, I'd like to see a Trek series with such depth of writing.
There is not, at least in my opinion. I don't even consider Star Trek to be the best of for writing. The characters and sandbox setting does it for me.
But, I'm of the opinion that art is something extremely subjective and saying it's "objectively bad" diminishes a personal engagement. Be real, be honest, and note your emotions, not what some check box list says is "good writing." And I include award shows in that as useless. Awards are self congratulatory.
To my knowledge there’s no television equivalents of the Sight & Sound polls for greatest film (which ask critics & academics and directors and assemble a list based on their rankings) but wikipedia does have a list of “tv shows considered ‘greatest’” (Anglophone, obviously) which basically compiles stuff that made it onto major publications’ top-50/100 tv shows of all time and both Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation made it onto top-50 lists. A lot of sitcoms made it on, a bunch of variety shows made it on, and in terms of lighter-toned, competent-cop crime dramas Columbo made it on. There’s not really a critical or artistic bias against anything light.
The thing with a lot of those popular or well-remembered shows, especially procedurals, that didn’t make it on is that they never really sought to engage their audience on a level beyond the events of the episode or the comfort of a routine. One of the things that made Star Trek and TNG popular in the first place and enduring in the long term is that they often do engage on multiple levels (Columbo might be the ur-example of this, actually). This is just a personal value judgment on my part but I’d like to watch something that actually engages me (for lack of a better term) intellectually in some way or has some sort of meaning that reflects on my life (and mark me a dork but that’s why I’m a Star Trek fan).
I think this is leaning a bit too hard on extrapolations from the Kurtzman era of Trek on contemporary TV. Pluribus, was brightly lit, often quite funny, and while it had a very serious high-concept science fiction hook it also had a pretty wide emotional range. Andor is more serious but also spends a lot of time not-in-the-dark, literally and figuratively. Murderbot, which I haven’t finished, has a bright aesthetic and is probably best classed as an action-comedy (so some black humor but a lot of goofy stuff). This is probably an argument that a creative break would be useful, or that my taste’s unprofitably snobbish, but I don’t think the issue is in trying to make something with darker or more serious themes. It’s a matter of implementation (and back to the main subject, probably an argument for at least a bit of creative turnover or a break).
I wonder if I'm a weird guy because I can find meaning in most any media.
This tells you what people who give awards, such as the Television Academy, currently think is good. I don't think that correlates with some kind of objective quality, it's just things which people in certain circles enjoy. Any given viewer could agree or disagree that any given work deserves the award; I don't think they have such authority that someone who finds an award-winning work dull/tedious is an opponent of objecitvely-high-quality fiction.
From your list of award-winning writers, Bloch wrote "Catspaw" and "Wolf in the Fold", both of which I find pretty awful (especially the latter, which seems outright bigoted). His other credit is "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", which is fun, but I wonder if Shatner trying to beat Ted Cassidy with a big styrofoam dildo while robo-Korby glitches out and yells "compute! transmit!" is universally regarded as a benchmark of superb writing quality.
Ellison wrote the first draft of "City" but the final script, as far as I know, was mostly Fontana. Gene Coon meanwhile, who was not an award-winning writer (barring an Emmy nomination) but rather a journalist-turned-screenwriter who was a workhorse on many Westerns and genre shows, wrote a huge share of the best episodes.
I think this is fair but also a bit woolly - "engagement" is surely mostly subjective. I feel engaged by Star Trek mostly because it's entertaining, I like the characters, and I like exciting high-concept sci-fi. I don't think it's engaging in the sense of being intellectually or morally challenging, but I also don't think that's an innately desirable thing that fiction must feel an obligation to aspire to, and a lot of the best fiction ever made doesn't.
I agree but I think there possibly is an argument that a certain set of tonal styles and genre conventions have calcified over the last ten years which have led to a narrowing of diversity in television, with various disparate franchises and subgenres all competing to condense themselves down to match that style.
You're probably 100% right that the landscape is much wider than I'm presenting it as, but I'd be surprised if people can't kind of see what I'm getting at; it feels as if there's a much more narrow "acceptable"/"correct" conception of how to make TV and cinema than there was 30 years ago, especially on streaming platforms.
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Although, there were people making that exact claim thirty years ago.
It’s not necessarily true wrt the broader landscape but definitely so as far as Trek is concerned. The thing with the three shows I mentioned is that they either have AppleTV money behind them (Murderbot), serious professional clout the studio could put their trust in (Andor), or both (Pluribus).
Trek doesn’t have either of those, and I definitely feel like some of the post-Kelvin shows fall into “generic genre” in terms of storytelling conventions, look, etc. I can see how it makes sense to take a proven approach to building an audience. Yet long-run that also means that Trek will not just see the aesthetic difference from its competitors narrow, it will also be perpetually a step behind them.
Now idea of how to solve that, though, that isn’t some form of wishcasting.
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