This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future.

[Gothowitz]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

It's very odd for someone who calls themselves a fan of a show to put down their own show and fandom.

It isn't odd at all. All fanbases have nitpicks, nitpickers and disliked or even outright hated episodes. The larger the fanbase the more it is subject to criticism from within and without.

Star Trek's fanbase was/is/will be viewed as cultishly creepy. The fanbase is perceived to have severe OCD syndrome and a Nerdgasm-Religion vibe, largely due to fans who (over)obsess, often loudly and annoyingly [and sometimes in Klingon no less] about everything.

Films like Fanboys, Free Enterprise, Trekkies and Galaxy Quest (to name a few) illustrate this more effectively than can be said here.

The '09 Star Trek film attempted to tone-down this perception and largely succeeded. Where Star Trek goes from there depends on how well the next movie can maintain that.

I believe, in general, people like Star Trek. They just don't want to be seen (guilt by association) with its numerous and vocal OCD fans, convoluted gobbledygook secret handshake technospeek or to be preached to from some lofty pseudo-morality high ground (especially in an overt politically correct voice) by the show or fans; which combined seem to comprise the majority of the visible fanbase. Star Trek has had decades of that crap and it wore exceptionally thinner each year with fans. Most shows have morality messages in some form or another. Star Trek isn't the first, last and best word given on high from some Galactic Big-Bird down on Corbomite Street. Entertainment is the key.

I'll say it this way: if it is entertaining and non-fans can drink a beer or three and enjoy it in the company of fans who won't annoy the fuck out of them, then it'll survive.
Want to bet they'll even dress up for a convention?

Until then a new series won't be on TV anywhere.

 

[Kemaiku]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

I for one do have clinical OCD and even take medication for it, and love the new film, so that's hardly an excuse.

 

[Gothowitz]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

I for one do have clinical OCD and even take medication for it, and love the new film, so that's hardly an excuse.

Glad you're getting medical assistance.
I like the '09 film too.

The excuse?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that every fanbase has its fringe element. That's accepted. It's when the fringe element becomes the main element that problems arise.

It doesn't matter what the fandom is... Star Trek, Star Wars, Buffy, Twilight, Harry Potter, James Bond, G.I Joe, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Nija Turtles or even Barney the Dinosaur. You name it, the fringe element is there.

It doesn't matter if it's TV, Movies, Books, Comics or whatever medium applies. Each has their own types of fringe kooks.

The excuse?
They often use The Excuse that this (whatever their obsession) is what makes it "real for them".

The conclusion?
If that is what makes it "real for them" then they should probably plan for and seek out long-term therapy.

Those are fandoms that are destined to die deserted and deservedly so.

 

[CaptainMatt]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

I agree that fans should not complain all the time about what they are watching on Star Trek or any other franchise, otherwise they are not really fans at all. Fans by definition LIKE what they are watching.

 

[Frontier]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

I think the only chance of seeing Trek on TV - or even direct-to-DVD - in the next 10+ years is if they got their heads out of their asses and went the animated route.

Warner Bros. has been producing direct-to-DVD DC comics films, targeted for the more adult audience (PG-13 rated films) for the past few years.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, despite being popular with kids and for merchandise, really isn't as dumbed-down as most kid shows.

The Simpsons, Family Guy, et cetera - ok they are comedy, but they're adult-oriented animation that's been tremendously successful. Beyond many, many other live-action sitcoms.

Animation removes massive levels of expense, both for the acting talent and production costs, and allows much more freedom to show things visually that would be cost or logistically impossible in live action.

They should do an animated (CGI or traditional) trek series. Hell, base it off the nuTrek if that's what it takes to open that door. Then they can work back from that success and give the old-guard fans more of what they want too.

 

[E-DUB]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

Wow, great discussion, folks. Here's my two cents. Looking back, some of what I think of as the best of Trek, specifically DS9 and ENT S4 came during an atmosphere of "benign neglect" by the various suits and bean-counters who have, by and large, ruined the medium of broadcast television.

What was achieved, more or less, by accident can be created deliberately. Hire people who know what they're doing and stay the **** out of their way. Case in point, Lost, the guy who green-lighted the pilot was initially fired for approving something that cost so darned much. He was later rehired with profound apologies once ABC saw that they had a monster hit on their hands.

Here's the lesson for Trek: Write a kick-ass pilot, show it twice for word of mouth to break through the "franchise fatigue" and you're on your way.

As for the "start-up" costs, leftover gear from a final movie with the current cast might well provide enough material to render the start-up costs for a new Trek series comparable to any normal non-scifi TV endeavor.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

I agree that fans should not complain all the time about what they are watching on Star Trek or any other franchise, otherwise they are not really fans at all. Fans by definition LIKE what they are watching.

I doubt they complain all the time. Heck, sports fans complain when their team loses or screws up a play. Does that mean they are no longer fans?

 

[Ian Keldon]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

I think the only chance of seeing Trek on TV - or even direct-to-DVD - in the next 10+ years is if they got their heads out of their asses and went the animated route.

Warner Bros. has been producing direct-to-DVD DC comics films, targeted for the more adult audience (PG-13 rated films) for the past few years.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, despite being popular with kids and for merchandise, really isn't as dumbed-down as most kid shows.

The Simpsons, Family Guy, et cetera - ok they are comedy, but they're adult-oriented animation that's been tremendously successful. Beyond many, many other live-action sitcoms.

Animation removes massive levels of expense, both for the acting talent and production costs, and allows much more freedom to show things visually that would be cost or logistically impossible in live action.

They should do an animated (CGI or traditional) trek series. Hell, base it off the nuTrek if that's what it takes to open that door. Then they can work back from that success and give the old-guard fans more of what they want too.

That's been talked about...the writers of 09 are willing, but studios aren't interested. Animation has mostly shoved into the "kid's channel" ghetto in any event. Simpsons/Family Guy are the exception.

 

[MacLeod]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

ST will return to the small screen even if it takes another decade. In some respects a longer wait can be better. I'd much rather they say took a year or so to write scripts, map out storylines, character backgrounds so they launch with a strong first season.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

I'll say it this way: if it is entertaining and non-fans can drink a beer or three and enjoy it in the company of fans who won't annoy the fuck out of them, then it'll survive.

That's not nearly enough for a space opera series to survive on TV, considering it will cost more than other shows, and have an inherently limited audience.

You need to be more precise in what "entertaining" means. What's entertaining to a CBS audience is not the same as to a CW audience or a TNT audience or an HBO audience. All those channels have audiences with different expectations, and what one audience finds vastly entertaining will be tripe or pretentious BS to the others (or maybe both at once).

And why would anyone watch any show with people who "annoy the fuck out of them"?

Fandoms in general are not "dying out," in fact the opposite is happening. Entertainment is getting more and more fragmented into more and more specific and mutually unintelligable niche tastes. The internet is going to accellerate this trend like a motherfrakker, so everyone hang on, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Star Trek's dilemma is not that it's a niche taste. That's the good news. The dilemma is that these niche tastes will have audiences that won't pony up the $$$ needed for the level of production we're used to, because TV is based on delivering mass audiences to advertisers, who don't want teeny niche audiences - not worth their while.

The internet can help by expanding the potential global audience for Star Trek far beyond the level that TV or even movies could ever offer, in a far more streamlined fashion. But the tendency towards internet audiences is to expect everything for free, so we're right back to the money dilemma.

There are a number of creative options for getting around this problem: lower the costs via animation or lower-cost live action (hopefully someday technology will develop beyond the Sanctuary quality level).

Or rework the whole business model of TV, since the mass market ad-based system is doomed anyway. Create a business around selling Star Trek merchandise (toys, books, games) and use the TV series effectively as advertising to drive demand. This strategy would require reaching an extremely large audience, because the percentage of viewers who would buy anything will be low. It's basically the same system as Zynga uses for Facebook games - reach 200 million people and if 1%-2% buy anything, ever, you've got yourself a viable business. Reaching a huge audience is possible if you're giving the core product away free and making it easy to obtain.

In general, I'd be hesitant to suggest that non-interactive media would have enough grabbiness to even get that 1%-2%, but Star Trek is an exception if ever there was one, because it creates more obsessive fans than, say, some doctor show or sitcom. It's already kind of "interactive."

What was achieved, more or less, by accident can be created deliberately. Hire people who know what they're doing and stay the **** out of their way. Case in point, Lost, the guy who green-lighted the pilot was initially fired for approving something that cost so darned much. He was later rehired with profound apologies once ABC saw that they had a monster hit on their hands.

Ever since Lost debuted, broadcast networks have been trying to replicate it, and they've failed time and time again. (They haven't stopped trying entirely - check out The River debuting in Feb I think.) But I think the sensible thing is for the network honchos to admit that Lost was an ingenious creation that like a lot of ingenious creations, is far easier said than done. If simply hiring smart, talented people and staying out of their way was enough, broadcast would be full of Lost clones with kickass ratings instead of one cancelled show after another.

 

[Greg Cox]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

Star Trek's fanbase was/is/will be viewed as cultishly creepy. The fanbase is perceived to have severe OCD syndrome and a Nerdgasm-Religion vibe, largely due to fans who (over)obsess, often loudly and annoyingly [and sometimes in Klingon no less] about everything.

Which, unfortunately, may have created the impression that STAR TREK is inaccessible to the ordinary viewer, that you have to be a hardcore Trekkie and have a degree in Romulan politics to understand the show. More than once I've been told by neighbors or people at book signings that "I like STAR WARS, but STAR TREK seems too complicated."

Now, in fact, I don't think that's the case. Aside from some jargon and techobabble, the average Trek episode is relatively self-contained, but the perception that Trek is for Trekkies only is definitely out there. And, alas, we may have contributed to it by conspicuously obsessing over trivia . . . . .

 

[indolover]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

Doug Drexler said this while being interviewed about Blood & Chrome:

Drexler: It's huge. I worked with Gary Hutzel, who once again is our visual effects supervisor. He is more fun than a barrel of monkeys. We had a blast. In one very important way it was different from anything else I’ve ever worked on. The entire show was green screen. There were no sets. This happened because of the shape of the economy. Building sets for a television show like TNG or the last Battlestar Galactica is just prohibitively expensive. No one wants to take that chance. Besides, the way the networks have been doing business lately, it’s kind of bizarre. They’ll cancel a show after one episode. If a show doesn’t perform right out of the gate, they cancel it. In the day when you thought a show would be kept on the air for a year, you might take a chance because you think it will develop an audience over time. With the current network mindset, there’s no chance of building an audience, when after one or two episodes, it's canceled. It’s just impossible. So, they want make a show as inexpensively as possible, so if it’s canceled after one or two episodes, no one gets their head chopped off.

Note not only the bolded part, but the italicized part of the bolded part.

No network exec is going to look at the performance of Trek on TV over the last decade or so of it's run and front the money for a new version at all. CBS certainly won't, esp under Moonives.

Makes sense.

Sci-fi, relative to other TV genres, is inherently capital intensive. And since sci-fi shows get comparatively small ratings, it turns studios off. The management accountants in CBS are at least doing their work.

This is why there is a glut of reality shows out now, since the main reason is because they're cheap to produce.

 

[Jedi_Master]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

For some time I have stated that the most likely route to TV for Trek would be a premium cable channel ala HBO or Showtime. They have the resources, the ability to absorb smaller audiences due to their revenue stream, and the freedom to incorporate more "adult" elements.

I would be excited to see Trek on a channel that can lavish attention, create expensive sets, and produce small numbers of high quality episodes.

 

[Capt Bob April]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

I think it'll all come down to how good a pitchman Seth McFarlane is the next time he runs into Les Moonves.

 

[Gothowitz]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

Star Trek's fanbase was/is/will be viewed as cultishly creepy. The fanbase is perceived to have severe OCD syndrome and a Nerdgasm-Religion vibe, largely due to fans who (over)obsess, often loudly and annoyingly [and sometimes in Klingon no less] about everything.

Which, unfortunately, may have created the impression that STAR TREK is inaccessible to the ordinary viewer, that you have to be a hardcore Trekkie and have a degree in Romulan politics to understand the show. More than once I've been told by neighbors or people at book signings that "I like STAR WARS, but STAR TREK seems too complicated."

Now, in fact, I don't think that's the case. Aside from some jargon and techobabble, the average Trek episode is relatively self-contained, but the perception that Trek is for Trekkies only is definitely out there. And, alas, we may have contributed to it by conspicuously obsessing over trivia . . . . .

This.

A usurped and overt sense of entitlement and "true fan" syndrome factors in too.

Sometimes I wonder if it really isn't a "Star Trek is for us Superior Intellect/Left-wingers only" mentality.
Which in itself is highly amusing because many shows are far more intelligently written and liberal than Star Trek.

I think the '09 film stripped some of that away by perceptively making it accessible to the public again and it really upsets some of the vocal fanbase.
Personally, I think the more complaints the greater the perception of success.

Perception is everything.

As I said, I think people generally like Star Trek, just not the nonsense baggage that it has/had accumulated over the decades. The next movie will demonstrate if that perception has changed or not. If so, maybe then something might be risked for TV. Until then I believe the TV Studio perception is of a closed and limited viewership unworthy of production costs for many reasons.

Then there is also the movies themselves to factor in; that really need to be made to further widen the gulf between past and future perceptions of Star Trek to make it viable for a TV audience again.

In plainer terms, the end of the usurpation.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

CBS risks a flatline if somebody beats them to the punch with a rip off.

Star Trek fans will be satisfied with a "rip off"?

Not likely. Otherwise "Space: 1999" would still be a viable franchise.

 

[Jedi_Master]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

One of the great elements of the 09' movie was that it made the technical aspects of the Star Trek universe feel real and accessible. Countless subtle touches made the future feel like the present. (one great example - Kirk's bike had keys!)

Any future Star Trek TV show would do well if it embraced that mindset.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

One of the great elements of the 09' movie was that it made the technical aspects of the Star Trek universe feel real and accessible. Countless subtle touches made the future feel like the present. (one great example - Kirk's bike had keys!)

Any future Star Trek TV show would do well if it embraced that mindset.

Yep. That movie is the future of the franchise, despite the more negative critics and their ilk.

 

[plynch]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

There never has been a massive dedicated Trek fanbase sufficient to keep a series on the air.

Several series ran seven years, didn't they? How long does anyone here want? Seven is plenty.

 

[E-DUB]

Re: This is why there will be no new TV Trek for the forseeable future

I'm somewhat tired of the thought process that says Star Trek has a left-wing bias. They did do some episodes that had quite the starboard tilt to them. (Omega Glory and the TNG "Say no to drugs" episode, to name a couple.

NuBSG also played both sides of the street, being at the outset a military-themed drama then later seeming sympathetic to the means, if not necessarily the goals of terrorists.

Besides, where is it written that one can't enjoy entertainment that doesn't coincide with ones own political views. Despite my being a bit (some would say more than a bit) of a lefty, I enjoyed Dragnet and 24, both shows with a strong conservative perspective. I've also known plenty of conservatives who enjoyed MASH and The West Wing, despite the liberal mindset driving both of those shows. If it's well done and entertaining, the audience will be there regardless.