Do They Try To Hard To Make Each Star Trek Series Different?

It seems to me that all of modern Star Trek has seen the producers, show runners, trying to make each of their Star Trek series different from the previous ones and that Star Trek itself has suffered for that..

ST:TNG actually was not made to be different from TOS. It was basically "TOS if Gene Roddenberry had bigger budget, better effects, and no network interference".

And TNG was the most successful of the modern Star Treks.

Deep Space Nine made a radical move by not setting the show aboard a starship. I believe this was a huge mistake as evidenced that the series basically had to be reinvented more than once. Not to say it didn't have a bunch of great episodes due to fine writing. Overall I believe change for the sake of change hurt the show at many points.

Voyager likewise moved the next starship series to an entirely different setting. Needless to say, I hated Voyager and from what I've heard many fans felt the same way.

Enterprise returned to the regular Trek environment and even on a ship named Enterprise but moved a century prior to TOS. I couldn't stand Enterprise.

Now Discovery has made a point of changing a whole range of established things and while the jury is out I'm not optimistic.

What is wrong with following a formula? Other television series do it all the time to great success.

 

No, they don't. All the shows are very similar. Even DS9 brought a ship into the mix.

 

That was kind of my point. DS9 had to reinvent itself by introducing a starship as a regular setting. Which shows the original change of setting was a mistake.

 

Voyager followed the formula the entire series and Enterprise followed it for the first two years, all they changed was the premise. DS9 also started out following it, only broke the formula later in the series.

If you want your franchise to last decades and keep entertaining people you need to find a balance. Keep enough of the original to have it feel like the same thing, but move it far enough away that it doesn't get tired and boring and feels like it can still surprise you and has new things to say.

I think TNG and DS9 both managed to do this, and Ent figured it out eventually.

Now we have a Trek series that errs on one side and a Trek-like series that errs on the other.

 

Can you explain that in more detail? I know which ones you are talking about but not beyond that.

 

If anything, the Star Trek shows are all too similar to each other. It's all basically variations on TOS, just done a century in the future or a century in the past, on a ship stranded away from home, or on a space station.

DS9 was probably the one that tried to be the most different, which it should have. When it premiered TNG was still on the air, it would have been a mistake to make another show about the adventures of another starship's adventures, there'd be nothing to differentiate from TNG, a complaint many would later have about Voyager and Enterprise.

A shared universe franchise like this should be making its various facets different. Just look at the MCU and how its various series differ: Iron Man is typical action movie fare, Thor is fantasy, Captain America political thriller, Guardians of the Galaxy space opera, Doctor Strange covers mysticism, and The Avengers is where everyone meets up. Star Trek has two basic modes, exploration and war.

 

Setting DS9 on a space station was, for my money, a good thing, as it meant that Our Heroes couldn't just warp away from any problems they created in the course of a single episode, but rather would have to deal with them on an ongoing basis. I much prefer DS9's arc-based storytelling to a more episodic format.

 

DS9 had the best overall story arc because the characters had to face the consequences of their actions and the impact their decisions made in their little neck of the woods.

So long as the characters are well written and presented then I wouldn't have a problem with ever Trek show being about a ship heading out on a mission of exploration and discovery, but if you can't get behind the people that are the focus then there's no hope for the show.

 

Short answer No.

TNG was an updated version of TOS
VOY has been referred to as TNG-lite or TNG 2.0
ENT at first was like the aforementioned shows it wasn't until S3-4 that it tried to be different

DSN was the first to try a new setting (and they had starships i.e the Runabouts to go places before they added the Defiant)

as for DSC it's a little to early to say wich way they'll go.

 

Bingo.

 

Herman Zimmerman & Michael Okuda failed to imbue the 24th Century STAR TREKs with any kind of eclectic quality, whatever. Every ... friggin' ... alien ... uses the exact same graphics found on the Enterprise-D bridge. It was so uninspired ... so monotonous to look at ... there should've been different Art Directors for each series with very different tastes. Borrowing where they had to, in order to give STARFLEET a unified look, but come on ... even ancient alien ruins used those friggin' LCARS!!! Had DS9 decided to revisit City on the Edge of Forever, the Guardian of Forever would've been festooned with LCARS ...

 

I think it also had a pretty different style, particularly the captain being less bellicose, the cast a big ensemble and the plots more contemplative drama than good vs. bad action.

Voyager was about as similar to another show, its immediate predecessor TNG, as any spinoff should be and it often suffered from often feeling too similar and and familiar (in too many episodes the different setting and the characters' backgrounds felt pretty incidental). The feel and type of stories in Enterprise were also often criticizied as too similar to TNG and/or Voyager (although there was also some criticism that they weren't similar enough to the original).
When you've already made or seen well over a hundred episodes of a type of show, to get more interest it's pretty necessary to be pretty different, otherwise you might as well just wait and watch something else until you want to rewatch episodes of the older show. If you don't change the setting/environment you're too likely to get episodes that feel too much like what you've already watched.

 

It's a balancing act. You have to thread the needle between "Hey, this isn't like the old stuff!" and "Hey, this is just the same old stuff!"

Easier said than done, but you can't expect people to stay excited for more of the same, even if there's nothing particularly wrong with whatever you're serving up..

That's a point that possibly needs to be stressed: Complaining that something is, say, "too much like TNG" isn't necessarily a criticism of TNG. It's just an acknowledgment that, inevitably, what was fresh and new and exciting back in the day is not going to have the same effect thirty years and four TV series later.

Trying telling somebody a joke. It may be the funniest joke in the world, but tell it week after week for thirty years and you're not going to get as big a laugh the 700th time you tell it.

Which means you probably need to freshen it up a bit--or get some new material.

 

Not hard enough.

 

The first two Harry Potter movies and maybe The Force Awakens (and maybe Voyager although most critics said too similar rather than the same) seem the only examples of when that reaction was fairly widespread (and even then they were successful). In general being pretty retread-y seems, especially more recently, to be the far safer, more popular approach.

 

Isn't similar a synonym of same?

 

No. Same means identical. Similar means having some things in common, but not all things.

 

I beg to differ according to oxford dictionaries smiliar can be used as a synonym of same

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/same

 

Screw the Brits.