I can't speak for Stargate, as I've never watched any of those shows, but I have to say that IMHO, Voyager would have been better had they not stuck to prior canon. The whole point of the show taking place on the other side of the galaxy was so that they could tell any story they wanted to without Starfleet, the Federation, the Klingons, Romulans, etc. having a thing to do with it. That's obviously not what happened, but that wasn't the fault of the premise.
Difficulty there is if the technology is too advanced, the show is incredible boring. People need to be the one find solutions to the episodes problems and mysteries, not machines SGU's problem was hopelessness. As constructed, there was no hope for success, no chance to win. Right up through the last episode what the audience took from the show is the fact that everyone was eventually going to die. In SG1, the show was old fashion good guys fighting bad guys, and eventually the good guys won. SGA was along the same lines, the "heroes" were the good guys. In SGU, there were no heroes, and with only a couple of exceptions, no good people in general. It was dark, gritty, and depressing. One of the reasons people like cop shows is, even when there is a small amount of darkness in the main characters, they are "the good guys." They (usually) defeat the bad guys. And we (the audience) get to win through them. We also, symbolically, are being protected. Look how long Law and Order has been on the air with NBC. The same with NCIS on CBS, the character of Gibbs had more than his share of darkness, but he is still the "good guy' hero. Which is what I think about ever time someone brings up Star Trek needing desperately to be "dark and gritty." In season three, when Enterprise got all "dark and gritty," it lost me as a viewer. Some people will wish for a Star Trek that is "D and G," but how far can the show go down that particular path before the audience simply walks away. DS9 lost rating every single year as I understand it, as would happen with Enterprise, when DS9 became a endless war only show, I turned the VCR off. In SG, the heroes won steadily over the course of years. With DS9, it was a event, basically a surprise. One of my favorite shows is Burn Notice, not exactly a cop show, the three main character are technically criminals. But they are good people too, and they defeat worst people. And through them the audience wins. Star Trek is about good people, doing good things, it can not be "too" dark and gritty. But aren't you suggesting a recycling of the late 24th century, is there any room there for any stories? There is a lot about the 22nd and 23rd centuries that we know nothing about, the "big events" are a mystery. In terms of the general (non-trekkie) audience, setting the show in the new alternate universe, or the original universe would make no difference. The new series isn't going to have the movies actors aboard the giant Enterprise, and the general audience would not know which universe the new series is set unless you go out of your way to tell them.
Stargate's problem is the same one that Star Trek used to have - being in the hands of creatively burnt out hacks. Either franchise could be great when returning to TV, in the hands of the right people.
If Star Trek ends up on TNT or (shudder) SyFy, I can see it being a cop-show-in-space similar in tone to Burn Notice. If it's on FX or AMC, make that Justified. HBO or Showtime, make that Homeland. It all depends on where it lives.
The more I think about it, the more the CW sounds possible. Say there's an emergancy on Earth that ties up the bigger starships and the more higher ranking officers and they have to send cadets out, or they are they only ones to escape, to find an answer to the problem or manipulate events remotely by exploring the cause of the attack on Earth, etc. They are the only ones who can stop it by getting to it's source to find out why the aliens are attacking.
Don't be too glad. The people who are in charge pretty much think like he does, because that's how they make money and keep their jobs. If they thought differently, they would lose money, get fired, and be replaced by people who think like he does. In other words, we're talking about a system with its own internal logic that is self-perpetuating. I see no viable way out of it, so the trick is, how can we get the best results from the system as it exists?
Why would teenage girls want to watch that? Needs more sparkly vampires. At the very least there should be two hot guys (at least one of which is a sexy, angsty alien - helloooo Vulcans) who are fighting over a female cadet (Marissa Amber Flores Picard would be an excellent name) who is the main focus of the show. They can be sent out on cadet training missions where Marissa gets in trouble and the boys rescue her. Also, the Vulcan character is actually a Romulan in disguise but he can never share his deep dark secret with anyone! Except Marissa, of course. This draws them closer together, and the other guy gets insanely jealous and... I could go on, but maybe I should have pity on all of you.
And that's the sad part. Everyone WANTS the Enterprise and her crew, but with the following of the 2009 film...It's not going to happen, people. Unless, it happens after Picard...Yes, they did it with TNG, but would a network be willing to chance it again?
None of the broadcast networks would touch space opera in general, so that rules out Star Trek. It's too expensive/too nichey. The financials won't work. It would most likely end up like Terra Nova - an expensive albatross that depends on fancy SFX that the audience levels can't justify. I can see cable networks possibly being interested in reviving a famous brand name like Star Trek. If HBO can have creative and financial success with Game of Thrones, that same approach can definitely work with space opera, and premium cable can afford an expensive series. Space opera is no more esoteric as a genre than high fantasy. However, it would be crafted to what premium cable audiences demand. Anything reminiscent of free TV or the bland broadcast approach would be an anathema. So there will be no connection to TNG at all, or to any of the other TV series. Maybe there would be a connection to JJ Abrams' movies, just to piggyback on the publicity, but even that is probably not necessary.
That would have been the logical thing to do after Nemesis and the writers who served the Berman were still in charge. The same with regards to a VOYager movie. The ship has sailed and the tide is now in JJ's court. And he prefers TOS rebooted.
Jonathan Frakes is too old and too fat unless he's lost a lot of weight since the last picture I saw of him. Not that that would matter, he's still too old. They'd have to recast the role with someone sexier but why bother, since Riker isn't a very interesting or memorable character to begin with? Just make up some new character and hire a hot young actor of the Chris Pine type.
Takes more than a hot, young actor. It's like remaking the Maltese Falcon with Johnny Depp as Same Spade, just the idea of that makes me cringe. It's amazing how age is becoming more and more of a factor now. And I liked the character of Will Riker.
While I thought the idea of a Titan series as being somewhere between zero and not ever, I did think hypothetically they could have surrounded Frakes and Sirtis with a young cast of hotties, including a first officer that would have reminded Riker of how he was when he was younger. Riker would have found himself exactly in Picard's shoes when TNG began.
Well yeah, but it helps a whole lot if the lead is young and hot vs old and fat. Star Trek already has a lot of obstacles to getting back on TV, so it's going to need to grab onto every advantage possible. Don't give them any ideas. But Depp is hardly young, isn't he pushing 50 by now? Riker is a generic character type, the blustery, semi-macho military guy. Not particularly distinctive or unique, very easy to re-create with an entirely different character.
They need to ignore us and pay attention to the audience they need to cater to, namely, the audience of the channel where their show is appearing. [/QUOTE] UPN did this. That's exactly why ENTERPRISE got cancelled after only four years.
ENT got cancelled because it ignored changes in the whole TV business, starting with one hurdle that they could never have overcome regardless of what kinds of episodes they aired: the channel they were on was merging with the WB to become the CW, which was aimed at young females because the people in charge thought that appealing to advertisers in that demographic was a good way to compete with larger, entrenched competitors (a perfectly valid approach btw). And the fact that ENT's ratings dropped over the four years they were on UPN belies the notion that they were catering to UPN's audience. Clearly, they were alienating the audience, otherwise the ratings would not have dropped. The only way ENT could have weathered the transition to the CW was to somehow morph into a show that appeals to young females. That rules out sci fi as a whole. Maybe there's a way to do a non-sci-fi Star Trek, but it's beyond my powers of imagination. Beyond that, the whole TV business was shifting under their feet. Syndication was becoming unviable and all broadcast channels were losing audience to cable, which could offer more specialized content. Broadcast responded by desperately trying to hang onto the ebbing mass market with the most mass market and cheap genres - cop shows, sitcoms, reality, etc. So broadcast as a whole become Now the pendulum is swinging back some ways, as the broadcast channels realize they're in a death spiral if they can't figure out any way to compete on the same quality footing as cable. Starting this year and especially next season, there have been some more aggressive moves to create cable competitors. Some have worked out okay (Once Upon a Time) and some not so well (Terra Nova, Playboy Club, Pan Am). There are more shows coming midseason (meaning now and in the next few weeks) but next season will be the real test. However, even in this environment, space opera is a tough sell on broadcast and even on cable. It's a less attractive niche than fantasy and horror. Star Trek has just been unlucky to get caught up in larger trends that are very hostile to it. This is the environment that Star Trek needs to adapt to, if it's going to re-emerge on TV. The environment that was current when ENT went off the air is gone, and will not return. Even if that was successful for ENT, it would no longer be relevant.