A Cause for the Decline in the Trek Series

[Noname Given]

misskim86 said:
When DS9 came it brought Star Trek several steps forward with its highly serialized concept, what characters did had consequence, they introduced a big war lasting several seasons with incredible character developement and Star Trek development with things like Section 31.

Um, you do realize the ratings drop STARTED with DS9 and continued at about the same overall rate through ENT, right. If DS9 was a 'step forward'; one would expect it to GAIN in viewership, not start to bleed them continually after the pilot, as it did.

The fact is - the 'better writing' or 'better cast' arguements are weak because that's not the only thing that keeps the general populace watching. The fact is, TNG had a cast and a style that was very popular for it's day (although is all honesty, that so called 'popularity' wasn't really there until the end of the 3rd seaso start of the 4th).

It's just a fact that no other Star Trek series had the mix/appeal of TNG (and BTW I'm not a big TNG fan myself - I rank it 4th behind TOS, ENT, DS9 and TAS - I gave up on VOY all together after The 37's and it was Enterprise that got me back to watching a Star Trek show on a regular basis).

And as has been already brought up above - TNG ran 7 years, and Star Trek in some form stayed on TV another 12 years after that (19 years of 'new' Star Trek in total)- and NO TV series or spinoff has gone beyond 10 to 12 seasons (generally). Add to that 10 feature fims; the original series (rom 1966-1969) and 24 half-hour episodes of an animated series; and I don't see how anyone can believe that with 'better writing'; it would just go on and on enjoying a high level of general audience popularity.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Any discussion like this has to take into account the overall decline in ratings for any given show that has occurred since TNG debuted. No Star Trek series will ever get TNG's ratings again due to the proliferation of competing entertainment options on TV and off.

TV is going nichier and nichier - which would bode well for Star Trek, which has a non-mass-market but very loyal audience. Forget the common-denomenator TNG approach and think DS9. You'll never get big ratings, so you need to make your audience worth more, thru ancillary revenue (paid downloads, DVD sales) plus international revenues.

Ad revenues are becoming less and less important part of the economic mix. A lot of folks get on Rick Berman's case for creatively destroying Star Trek, but for my money his real sin was in not taking care of the financials and figuring out how to survive the increasing balkanization of entertainment and even profit from it (one DVD-buying fan is worth a whoooole lot of ad-watching eyeballs). He was supposed to be the bean-counter guy, wasn't he? That's where he fell down on the job.

Like everyone, I have my opinions about what series were best, and why. But when it comes to Star Trek's financial survival, I'm not at all convinced quality had much to do with it.

 

[Balthier the Great]

Well, yeah serialization would have helped (though not to the degree of 24 where missing a single ep can wreck a season for you), but even that doesn't help if the stories are the same old thing. Reset buttons are only part of Trek's autistic decline. The other side is that the stories don't relate to anything relevant outside that universe. Trek #1 captured the cold war, fear of self-anihilation, vietman, and so on. Voy I'll give a pass to, but Ent was post 9-11 and rather than deal with terrorism and the notion of a 5th column in Starfleet (for example), we got more bumpy heads, time travel, and Vulcan tour guides. That's why most scifi fans who aren't trekkies would rather see BSG than anything Trek -- BSG deals with trying to survive after a surprise attack. It deals with a few cylons living on the galactica, and the consequences of that.

pluss in 1966, we had 3 channels, in 1988 and in 2002 we had hundreds.

 

[Moocey]

Starship Polaris said:
I think the Trek series declined because most of the people who watched TNG became bored with "Star Trek" after a decade or so. Period.

I think it might have something to do with the sharp decline in overall quality (other than production value) after DS9.

 

[Anwar]

ENT DID deal with a sneak attack, but they did it years after 9/11, and I suppose it wasn't in an enough "direct" way like how nuBSG did it.

 

[ktanner3]

The reason for Star Trek's decline is simple. The shows sucked. They became redundant with recycled story lines and inconsistency with characters.One week Janeway will risk her ship to save a crewmen, the next week she doesn't. One week she's strict on following the prime directive, the next week she isn't. Enterprise was supposed to be before the time of Kirk yet we have holographic technology,cloaked ships,Vulcans who act like Romulans,time travel etc.. The writing went to shit, so the show went to shit.It's really that simple.

 

[Anwar]

Yes, and WHY did the shows go to shit? That's what we're asking.

And no, it wasn't because of B&B, that's too simple and easy an explanation.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

BSG at its best never got the audience that Trek did at its worst. So how does that prove people want to see serialization or relevance?

I have seen way too many examples of great shows getting bad ratings and bad shows getting great ratings for me to believe that quality determines any of this.

Star Trek suffered from the balkanization of enterainment and the unwillingness of many audience members to tolerate seeing weirdness on TV like blue aliens or people with funny foreheads.

Look at Lost for the counter-example: it's definitely sci fi, yet doesn't throw it in your face. The characters are all people you could imagine bumping into at the mall (maybe a mall in LA, but still). That gives them the latitude to be wierder and more complex in their storytelling than Star Trek has ever dared to.

And even then, the audience has varied between about 14M and 23M, which is still a piddly little number in a nation of 300M. Even a big hit like Lost is a niche show, it's just a biggish nice show.

 

[EnsignRicky]

I think the decline of Star Trek is simple over saturation.
When you have hundreds of new episodes and a bunch of movies all come out in the space of a dacade, it's bound to get a little overwhelming and repetetive. Star Tek viewers are a little different than the average beer chugging sport fans, we look for more in our entertainment than the exact same thing with the same predictable outcome, ( unless, I suppose you care who wins) week after week after week.

 

[TremblingBluStar]

Lighting??? What?

The Trek movies had some very dark ship sets from TMP onward, yet nobody can argue that the decline of Trek started with the movies!

This is a rather baseless argument. If the writing on Enterprise/Voyager/most of DS9 were up to par, there wouldn't have been a decline. The cause was laziness on the part of the writers and producers who felt that Trek fans would stick around no matter what.

 

[EnsignRicky]

Another major cause for the decline had to be when Star Trek stopped trying to be Star Trek. At first things were great, The Next Generation was essentialy a carbon copy of the original format. Then by the third outing, the writers bagan to lose sight of what made the show so good. Star Trek is basically an anthology, the characters, though certainly important to the show, are merely there to bridge the viewer to the strange new worlds they would encounter each week. Now suddenly you had Deep Space Nine trying to be Babylon 5, Voyager trying to be a cross between Lost in Space and Battlestar Galactica and Enterprise trying to take on the whole Prequel Trilogy. At this point, a re-imagining/reboot was inevitible.

 

[FalTorPan]

Kegek said:
Oversaturation of the market... conservative approach to formula...

I agree with these points.

 

[Holytomato]

"Dark! Star Trek has never used the Dark tm! "

"DS9 suuuuuuuuuuuuuucked! "

 

[Balthier the Great]

Temis the Vorta said:
BSG at its best never got the audience that Trek did at its worst. So how does that prove people want to see serialization or relevance?

I have seen way too many examples of great shows getting bad ratings and bad shows getting great ratings for me to believe that quality determines any of this.

Well, it does depend somewhat on the audience you're trying to attract. You'll never get the people who think American Gladiator is top-notch entertainment to watch Trek, no matter what you do. But for Sci-Fi fans, which should be the target audience, you do have to put substance into the storylines. That probably means a serialized storyline like B5 and BSG, and an attempt to deal metaphorically with the issues that go on in the wider culture.

No show can get everybody watching. I'd settle for sci-fi fans.

Star Trek suffered from the balkanization of enterainment and the unwillingness of many audience members to tolerate seeing weirdness on TV like blue aliens or people with funny foreheads.

The problem wasn't so much bumpy forheads as that every alien and every storyline was convservative. Nothing truely "out there", just rather tame and predictable aliens doing predictable things. Occasionally they'd have a conventional storyline about how Data/EMH/Seven just wanted to be human and understand humanity, or a mechanical failure that any person who's watched the show for a season knows how to solve in ten seconds flat.

I'd love to see a truely weird and incomprehensible alien. Metrons or the little dwarf alien, whatever. Other than the forheads, you probably could find a person like a Kazon or a Klingon or Vulcan in your local mall. You'll never find a Metron or a Q or something like that. Imagination is needed.

Babylon 5, Farscape, and Stargate never seemed to suffer for
having odd looking aliens. They just happened to have the balls to make them weird enough to be interesting.

Look at Lost for the counter-example: it's definitely sci fi, yet doesn't throw it in your face. The characters are all people you could imagine bumping into at the mall (maybe a mall in LA, but still). That gives them the latitude to be wierder and more complex in their storytelling than Star Trek has ever dared to.

Yes but if the entire genre has to hide what it truely is to get an audience, there's really no point. At the end of the day, Trek is science fiction in space, and I don't see how you can make that work as "I-can't-believe-it's-not-scifi" such as Lost or X-files. I want space scifi, but I want one that's not afraid to actually be that. That doesn't mean tame stories or predictable plots. Just good writing.

 

[illfigure]

TremblingBluStar said:
Lighting??? What?

The Trek movies had some very dark ship sets from TMP onward, yet nobody can argue that the decline of Trek started with the movies!

This is a rather baseless argument. If the writing on Enterprise/Voyager/most of DS9 were up to par, there wouldn't have been a decline. The cause was laziness on the part of the writers and producers who felt that Trek fans would stick around no matter what.

My original idea behind the post was a comment on how I found the the darker appearance of the ships to be a negative change in format. Something as subtle as lighting can make a big difference. It changed the entire look of Trek. But as you can see this topic evolved into the larger point of the decline. Your comment that this is a baseless argument is a baseless argument because you missed the point of the original post.

 

[Kegek]

Temis the Vorta said:
But when it comes to Star Trek's financial survival, I'm not at all convinced quality had much to do with it.

Well, let me put it this way: Voyager didn't do the TNG routine as well as TNG itself. And Enterprise didn't do the TNG routine as well as Voyager. I don't think quality was the most important factor, but it was a factor. Oversaturation, of which even DS9 was guilty, was more important. I remember the 1990s. There was an episode of DS9 and VOY every week! Not to mention the reruns of both shows and TNG & TOS. Trek ruled the airwaves, and in retrospect, it was already on its way out.

 

[stj]

The decline in popularity was inevitable. As decades go by, Trek is no more plausible as a possible future than Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Trek grew increasingly retro. Retro is a minority taste. The ratings therefore declined. Dare I say---QED?

The decline in quality is illusory. From the beginning there was an extraordinary variation in "quality" with some episodes being tedious nonsense, some campy fun and some serious drama or humorous action. Personally, I could never accept Data, so I didn't watch TNG.

But Berman's Trek, from DS9 improved consistently. DS9 was pretty dire. Voyager was much more watchable although, like Star Trek pretty inconsistent. Enterprise was much more consistent and overall a pretty accomplished version of Berman Trek.

I prefer Roddenberry but that's me. Still, although technically Enterprise was getting pretty good, the outdated scientific perspectives of decades of Trek forbade more interesting, more relevant stories.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

If over-saturation is what did it, then by now the market should be desaturated if not outright hungry and it's "safe" to put Star Trek back on TV. Should be a big hit. Where is it?

Voyager didn't do the TNG routine as well as TNG itself. And Enterprise didn't do the TNG routine as well as Voyager.

The first time you see a TNG episode, it's good. The second time you see it, on VOY, not so good. The third time, on ENT - feh! I'd probably have liked ENT much more if I hadn't seen the other two first (and after DS9? forget all three of em!)

But for Sci-Fi fans, which should be the target audience, you do have to put substance into the storylines. That probably means a serialized storyline like B5 and BSG, and an attempt to deal metaphorically with the issues that go on in the wider culture.

If you're just talking space opera, there isn't much to go on. BSG definitely does the best, but that's in a field that includes Stargate, Doctor Who and Flash Gordon - which all seem to get the same miniscule ratings on Skiffy, last time I checked, probably one to two million viewers apiece (I dunno if Flash Gordon is even doing that good).

The bigger story here is that none of them would survive on a major network, and that doesn't bode well for Star Trek either. So I guess you're right that the dark and serious approach gets the best ratings in the small sample of space operas we have to choose from.

But the modern day/Earth-based sci fi approach is the one that has the chance to survive on major networks. Lost and Heroes are the obvious examples, with audiences that are more than 10M-12M+ vs 2M. Chuck is a moderate success, playing around the 7M-8M mark. Sarah Connor (so far) is also at that level. But slip a little below that (Journeyman, Bionic Woman) and you're in the danger zone.

The problem wasn't so much bumpy forheads as that every alien and every storyline was convservative.

DS9's stories weren't conservative. It didn't do much better than VOY. Why is that? And having Lost and Heroes around is certainly better than not having them, so "stealth" sci fi is hardly a worthless approach.

The real issue is: is there any way to put a space opera on a major network and get the 10-12M needed to survive? This is a separate topic really, so I've made a thread for it in SF&F.

 

[Yeffrey]

Star Trek went into decline not because of poor lighting, but bad writers (Brannon Braga, Nemesis, Voyager), producers that didnt give a rats ass about the franchise and never listened to the fans (Berman), and poor ratings.

 

[Anwar]

Here we go, another convert of the "B&B are twin Satans" beliefs, while the real criminals go unpunished.