I'm not interested in anything that sucks the fun out of Star Trek. I don't want Star Trek to be "realistic". When I want realistic sci-fi I'll read Baxter and Clarke and others.
If we're losing "Qpid", I'm passing. Ditto for "Tribbles", "More Tribbles", "Even More Tribbles", "I, Mudd", "Shore Leave", etc.
I'd be game for less outright camp, for sure. The "God-being" trope was passable as SF in the Sixties but, in no small part due to Trek's own efforts, feels much more stale today; and likewise stale is the idea of The Standard Episode Featuring the Crew in Costumes Borrowed from a Community Theatre Production (Robin Hood in space! Romans in space! Apaches in space! Stage Irishmen in space! Moriarty in space! The Mafia in spaaaace!), which AFAIK were the product of costume budget shortfalls. As part of classic Trek these things are indelible, but they had their time and they're not part of Trek's core appeal for me. [EDIT: And pace BillJ, I think it's a false dichotomy to say it's a choice between losing the outright camp and losing the "fun." Trek's distinctiveness lay in its making an effort to raise the dramatic stakes from the basic run of pulp SF of its day. Any new Trek should be trying to do the same in its context, not aping old tropes Because They've Always Been Done; this should by no means indicate that it should be humourless or that you couldn't have more sophisticated versions of things like the Trouble With Tribbles.] [EDIT 2: Hey, you know who was great at injecting humour and fun into a setting which -- though it was technically a camp -- was the antithesis of Camp? David f---n' Milch, baby! .... Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?]
Yes, one key thing about action scenes -- doubly important in Trek -- is that action scenes need to come from the story organically, with steps taken to get to that point. They can't be arbitrarily thrown in there just for the sake of eye candy (Agents of SHIELD, I'm looking at you), because then you don't care about the characters and there's zero tension. I would think that with Trek, action scenes come with the territory and thus whoever wrote it (Sorkin, etc) would naturally take that into account. Just hire someone else to write the action scene itself with the beats that you want and then you're good to go. Though, frankly, I'd be really curious to see Sorkin's version of Q-Pid, tights and all. Our heroes were already cynical and annoyed once they were transported, but add in Sorkin's dialogue to the cynicism and we could probably get some verbal gold. Edit: Now that I think about it, while there was definitely a decline in exploration in Trek, there was also a decline in that sense of awe and wonder. Fantastic situations are great, but it's pointless if all our heroes do is stand there without a real sense of curiosity -- Picard's lip service is sometimes just that. Even Star Trek V had a brief moment of wonder when the ship was about to enter the center of the galaxy (but it lasted all for a moment, and that barrier wasn't so impenetrable after all). What I would like very much are: 1. a return to exploring the great unknown 2. the sense from the crew that they've truly gone where no one has gone before. A healthy mix of bravery, fear, surprise, intrepidation, and most of all, curiosity. Anyone can concoct a situation, but it takes a real writer to have people with realistic reactions when coming face-to-face with what's out there.
For me, part of the enjoyment of Trek is the fun. The fun of the captain fighting a guy in a rubber lizard suit, the fun of the captain matching wits with a "God". I find so much of TV today such a joyless affair. I think you've hit squarely on the head why I think going further into the future with another crew is such a massive mistake. Space exploration would be old hat for them after four-hundred years.
You're probably right. I keep picturing West Wing's Josh and Toby running around in tights and Leo being thoroughly unamused.
Since I only watch the TV of today very selectively, I shan't dispute that, but I'm just saying that fun and cheese don't have to be the same thing. Bring on the bizarre aliens and strange life-forms, the more the merrier, just don't ape the cheesy workarounds that circumstances forced on older shows*. Push boundaries for our times the way they pushed boundaries for theirs. (* Which brings something else to mind. One of the workarounds of Trek was that the Enterprise could only visit "M"-class planets -- plainly a budget constraint, and an understandable one. But why not broaden exploration to visit the sorts of truly weird environments we now know to be really out there in space?) In a way this makes a good case for a genuine reboot. To reach the level of comfort in space that allows for travelling routinely between star systems -- and over distances of hundreds of light years or more -- a series further in the future makes sense (to allow a sensible span of time for fully exploring our own system and developing reliable means of travelling to others, and for humanity to then expand out to a thousand interplanetary settlements or so)... and yet with a reduced cheese quotient, that series could take travelling to the edge of the galaxy (or even to the edge of the Local Bubble) vastly less casually than became problematically common for Trek.
Nonsense. BigJake is right on the money, here. Rebooting Star Trek and setting it further in the future, in order to make the depicted advances seem more plausible, makes perfect sense. Whether audiences would accept and go for something that radical is another question.
That reminds me of high school English in the late 90s, when we were assigned to read 1984. A kid in the class yelled out, "Ahh, our OLD future!"
Indeed. In 1966, Star Trek was supposed to be a (relatively) plausible projection of life 200 years in the future (from an Americentric perspective, since that was the most important audience from a sales perspective). If a new series wants to begin from a similar place of (again, relative) plausibility, the year 3000 might be a good place to start (and, for the same reasons that the original series was so Americentric, I'd expect a new program to be designed with broader, international appeal in mind).
Well, it was some rather expensive market research in Europe and Asia that led to Into Darkness being less futuristic. .
Me, too. As for market research, I'd heard that it contributed heavily to the overall formula of the NuTrek movies thus far, but come to think of it I'm not really sure where I heard that and at any rate that formula goes well beyond whether something is more or less "futuristic."
What do you need the reboot for then? You can set the show in the 25th or 31st century. So much will have changed since the 23/24 century that it won't matter which timeline you're in. It's what Roddenberry did with TNG, he moved ~100 years into the future, changed whatever he wanted, and explained it all as the advancement from TOS.
Given Sorkin's abysmal record with writing female characters—his haven't their own agency and are obsessed with men (and Middyseafort can speak to this better than I)— no.