Or they could do something like the Twilight Zone, where the entire series is a series of vignettes that tell little stories about the Star Trek universe. I think that'd be terrific.
Depends on what you mean by character-driven. By my definition (the characters drive the plot, the characters are not pawns of the plot), DS9 was almost entirely character driven and when it wasn't (Dukat S7), it went off the rails. Look at most of this season of Heroes for an example of the carnage wrought by a plot-driven show, where the characters go in and out of character to fit the demands of the plotline, and we end up not being able to recognize them anymore. There's no way I want Star Trek to imitate that. (PS, Heroes has gotten a lot better lately now that there's a new sherrif in town who has put the characters back in the center of the action where they belong.) That said, I have no objection to a show where anyone can die. When you have fan-favorites who are immune to the axe, or get killed and then brought back so often it becomes comical, viewers rapidly lose respect for the show. The reason characters cannot be killed is because viewers often watch simply for favorite characters, so you have to worry about the damn Nielsens. A major death every couple years is probably as daring as you can be without losing viewers. Once again, Heroes will be an interesting test case. I think on next Monday's finale Spoiler: Heroes season finale Nathan is going to be killed for good and I've already seen people stomping their feet and declaring that they're never going to watch the show again because of this outrage. But there's still a core of fan-favorites (or maybe writer-favorites) who are untouchable - Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Locke and of course Ben. The hard thing is for a show to kill a character who is a known fan-favorite. And the ones who are crucial to the story are never killed - Jack, Locke and Ben are going to survive till the final episode. It's similar on Heroes, where there's an ongoing chorus among fans of KILL SYLAR ALREADY but he's too central to the story because without him, the characters have no antagonist and there's no focus to the story. Plus the Trek XI publicity tsunami. It's unrealistic to expect Sylar to die right now anyway. The way TV shows get written is all the proof we need. TV writers and producers act like characters are the driving force behind viewer interest. Could be a self-fulfilling prophecy but let's see what happens to Heroes fandom after Monday.
Law & Order is not a character driven series. In fact, the writers often go to considerable lengths to not reveal anything about the backgrounds of the main characters. And Law & Order is headed toward being the longest running one hour dramatic television program in U.S. history
I could be wrong. But I do remember the comments by Majel Roddenberry at a convention where she worried about ST:TNG ending after the 4th or 5th season because of rising actors salaries. Of course, Majel might not have known what she was talking about. She was an actress not an accountant.
Well they went ahead and did that spoiler thing on Heroes and guess what? The fans are in a frakkin UPROAR! "I will never watch this piece of shit show ever again, they are Satan incarnate" etc. Moral of the story, people can say they don't watch shows for characters, that they wish shows would have more guts and make us think they'd kill anyone, but when a fan favorite goes down for good, watch out Nielsens! Trek would have to be very foolish to think they can have a No Sacred Cows policy. All successful shows have sacred cows. On police procedurals, the sacred cow is the procedural format but on other shows, they're characters that keep people watching.
I don't know, I mean the franchise is about to recycle the original characters from 40 years ago for its "new" take on the Star Trek universe. They can't even relaunch without including one of the original actors to boot.
I think Star Trek TNG onward leaned too heavily on the "ensemble cast" character drama aspects. Lt. Noname is one-quarter Andorian and enjoys building model railroads in his spare time. But in the end it doesn't really matter because he's still generic Federation officer #63. Yawn. That's boring, lets introduce a borg character with big tits. The best aspects of Star Trek, to me, was always based around strong central characters who stood on their own and really didn't need a complete backstory.