I thought that people watched The West Wing and still watch 24?
How should the franchise have been developed after TNG?
- Thread starter Captrek
- Start date
That's disingenuous in the extreme - people relate to shows about spies and politicians that take place in more-or-less contemporary time the same way they relate to cop shows where the police almost always quickly make good arrests in major cases: as taking place in "the real world" despite their unlikely elements.
Most of them don't and have no interest in trying to transfer that credulity into the Spandex-wearing "Trek future." This is why such shows fail to gain or hold an audience of any size. So, no Trek sitcoms.
After DS9 I wouldv'e done a nostalgia fuelled prequel show set during TOS with wacky alien planets, miniskirts, 60s colour schemes... after the relative 'darkness' of DS9, the show should've gone back to it's roots.
Voyager was a good idea badly executed, so I would've taken the Lost in Space aspect and applied it to the above.
Voyager was a good idea badly executed, so I would've taken the Lost in Space aspect and applied it to the above.
Oh please.
Claiming that The West Wing and especially 24 portray anything in any way similar to the real world, would be disingenous in the extreme. Whatever the actors are wearing. 
In fact, by pretending that they take place in the "real world", they are only that much more unlikely and fantasy-based, since we know that the reality is different. I find it much easier to suspend disbelief about stuff that happens in 24th century or on another planet - hell, for all we know, this could possibly happen - than about the crap that happens on 24 that involves references to the countries and events of the real world, but presents them in a way that is completely removed from the reality. That's where I can't stretch my suspension of disbelief anymore. For all I know, someone from another planet might be called Worf and have a bumpy forehead and be all about honor, or be called Elim Garak and have a reptilian-humanoid appearance. But, there sure as hell aren't likely to be any Serbian people of the late 20th century with the names like Viktor, Andre and Alexis Drazen (and I should know, because I am Serbian), it's extremely unlikely that they'd have either the motivation or the means to conduct a terrorist operation to kill an American president, and there most certainly would not have had the backstory that 24 gave them, since it makes no sense at all, whatever time period you place season 1 of 24 in (CIA operatives working in Kosovo?! When? Before, during or after the 1999 NATO campaign? Doing what exactly? 
) I'm aware that this kind of rubbish can fly with people who don't know anything about the real world events referenced, but when you know, it becomes really ridiculous to watch.Personally, I always could relate far more to the storylines about politics and war in DS9 or BSG than on 24, and found them truer to real life.
So if the entire problem is about what people wear, hell, just give them conterporary clothes. Wait a moment, didn't people in TOS pretty much wear conteporary clothes and hairstyles (maybe even too contemporary, when it comes to women
)?
Oh, I don't know. Like I mentioned in another thread, Kings is about a fictional government (A Monarchy existing in modern day) and it's a great show. Of course it doesn't have aliens or whatnot..
It's also a canceled show.
Trek actually means a journey to a destination - a migration to a certain place with the intent of settling there, and without necessarily being interested in anything along the way. The one thing Star Trek has never been about is "trekking.".
Okay, lets play that game:
I'm going with 4 and will say that VOY meets the latter part.
Furtados_Feet
Lieutenant
Yeah...kings was a flop in the extreme.
@DevilEyes, please don't try and convince anyone that people would be as willing to watch a show about a government of a completely fictional future as one which relates to modern politics and issues.
Yes, but that was mainly due to poor advertising and being given two of the crappiest timeslots out there for NBC. If it got the ER slot like originally intended and decent advertising it would've been renewed.
But again, being canceled does not equal lack of quality. In fact these days it's the opposite...
Yeah. You know what? Most of the people who watch those shows make exactly that little "suspension of disbelief" and if you think that most of them would do it for a goofy Star Trek show not set in the present day you're kidding yourself. Which is just why such a show's never been successfully done and won't be.
No, it got cancelled because not many people watched it. Almost every cancelled show has a following of folks who believe that if the network or channel had treated it "properly" it would have been successful. I'm a member of one or two of those followings, myself, but such if-frogs-had-wings hypothesizing is meaningless.
Never said it did.
Studios, networks and advertisers don't want quality, they want viewers. Quaility is just gravy.
I like "Kings." I tivo it every week.
This I have to agree wth had TNG continued like ER did with new cast members every so often it'd probably still be on the air today. Making the movies was a bad idea and hrutful to TNG as a whole.
Ah, okay then. Well, seeing how quick I've been to point out the budget-related reasons for a lot of stuff in Trek I'd be dumb not to agree with the viewership thing, so I will. Still makes me mad over Kings though.
I agree with Anwar, some of the best Sci-Fi shows were cancelled. I think after TNG, DS9 should have been allowed to finish it's run before Voyager started. Voyager should have been more like New Battlestar Galactica in that the crew shouldn't have been so buddy buddy and the ship should have barely made it to Earth if at all.
In TOS, Kirk, McCoy, and to a lesser extent Spock were always arguing over right and wrong. It's human to disagree and have your own opinion. If everyone agreed with each other like on TNG & Voy series life and the TREK BBS would be very boring. In TNG and Voyager everyone fell in line too quickly and easily. On Voyager more characters should have been like Seska and the crew of the Equinox. There never was a "Dr. Smith" on Voyager, a character willing to do anything to get home.
For Enterprise, it should have stuck to a Trek prequel and started where season four began after the two part Coldfront story. They could have had some minor time travel related stories but not to the extent of the temporal cold war.
As for the chart showing the drop off in Trek series, I've seen it before and as someone else said you have to take into account what was going on with television during this time period. During TNG, cable TV and syndicated shows exploded onto TV. Then the new networks showed up (WB, UPN, Fox,TNT,TBS, Tribune Syndication, etc.) so there was far more to watch. DS9 had competition from Babylon 5, Time Trax, Hercules, Xena, and the Roddenberry shows Andromeda and Earth, The Final Conflict. I remember trying to watch DS9 during it''s first run and it was constantly bumped for local programming and baseball and hockey games. Some episodes weren't even aired at all and I was surprised to see what I missed when I purchased the DVD season sets or caught episodes when Spike used to air them.
Look at the ratings sci-fi shows get today, some of them would be happy to get the ratings DS9 and Voyager used to get.
In TOS, Kirk, McCoy, and to a lesser extent Spock were always arguing over right and wrong. It's human to disagree and have your own opinion. If everyone agreed with each other like on TNG & Voy series life and the TREK BBS would be very boring. In TNG and Voyager everyone fell in line too quickly and easily. On Voyager more characters should have been like Seska and the crew of the Equinox. There never was a "Dr. Smith" on Voyager, a character willing to do anything to get home.
For Enterprise, it should have stuck to a Trek prequel and started where season four began after the two part Coldfront story. They could have had some minor time travel related stories but not to the extent of the temporal cold war.
As for the chart showing the drop off in Trek series, I've seen it before and as someone else said you have to take into account what was going on with television during this time period. During TNG, cable TV and syndicated shows exploded onto TV. Then the new networks showed up (WB, UPN, Fox,TNT,TBS, Tribune Syndication, etc.) so there was far more to watch. DS9 had competition from Babylon 5, Time Trax, Hercules, Xena, and the Roddenberry shows Andromeda and Earth, The Final Conflict. I remember trying to watch DS9 during it''s first run and it was constantly bumped for local programming and baseball and hockey games. Some episodes weren't even aired at all and I was surprised to see what I missed when I purchased the DVD season sets or caught episodes when Spike used to air them.
Look at the ratings sci-fi shows get today, some of them would be happy to get the ratings DS9 and Voyager used to get.
My favorite image in all of Trek is Uhura’s hair in TMP.Wait a moment, didn't people in TOS pretty much wear conteporary clothes and hairstyles (maybe even too contemporary, when it comes to women
Continuing TNG with a new cast is pretty much what they did with VOY, and it wasn’t very good. You think transferring the setting to the Delta Quadrant is what killed it? Aside from that, it’s basically TNG with a new cast.
Not in any important sense. TNG ended and most of the folks who tuned in every week to the show said, "oh, TNG ended" and got on with the business of living. A minority of them continued to watch DS9 and sampled "Voyager," but none of them confused either show with TNG.
That's just how it is with all spin-offs. Of course the more successful ones like the CSI and L&O shows pull it off by being mainstream and not sci-fi. We do have to remain confined to the genre and not confuse Trek for mainstream. Even Abrams hasn't done that, he just made Trek popular sci-fi again.
From that POV, TNG was just TOS continued.My favorite image in all of Trek is Uhura’s hair in TMP.Wait a moment, didn't people in TOS pretty much wear conteporary clothes and hairstyles (maybe even too contemporary, when it comes to women
Continuing TNG with a new cast is pretty much what they did with VOY, and it wasn’t very good. You think transferring the setting to the Delta Quadrant is what killed it? Aside from that, it’s basically TNG with a new cast.
TNG was a mainstream show, one of the differences between Star Trek and those other franchises is that the others didn't change the original show's format. But that wasn't the case with Star Trek. And once TNG ended the masses went to other shows like The X-Files, Babylon 5 and even Seaquest by the time Voyager had come out people found out that the other shows were producing shows as if not better than Star Trek in some cases.
JJ Abrams made the new movie appeal to the mass audience by not allowing the focus of the movie to be on what the fans want or what they think the fans want.
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