Did TNG take itself too seriously?

[2takesfrakes]

STAR TREK: The Next Generation is the best series in the franchise, is it not?

7 seasons, highly rated, not unceremoniously cancelled or petering out, still very popular. The TNG subforum seems to attract the most haters; even that says something.

These words please me.

That would actually be TOS, however TNG does come in as a solid second place, followed by Voyager, with DS9 and Enterprise tied for last.

These words please me less so.

* * *
After TNG, the rest of this franchise is just gravy to me, really. In fact ... one "complaint" (ha!) that certain very vocal fans have about STAR TREK: Voyager is that it follows the TNG format so closely. You know what I say to that? "Sounds GOOD!!!" And it is good! I mean ... it's very recognisably STAR TREK and there are episodes of it that I'm very fond of. But VOYAGER can never be what TNG is to me. The Next Generation took the best aspects of the original series, cut out the hammyness and the cheese factors and delivered STAR TREK as Gene Roddenberry had always intended. Does that mean it "took itself too seriously"? Not in my opinion, no. Like the bowl of poridge that satisfied Goldilocks so completely ... TNG is Just Right!

 

[Orphalesion]

"I'm Important and You Should Watch Me Because I Am Important!"

Then you must have HATED Ron Moore's BSG. If ANY show said that, it certainly did.

Well I hated the remade BSG and to me it didn't say that, but it said "Look how dark I am! Everything is dark! Everybody is at their core amoral and selfish! Optimism and altruism are cildish lies!
Now watch me kill this little girl to prove how edgy and dark I am!"

TNG, for all its faults (which it had, nothing is perfect), at least was optimistic and idealistic, it gave you hope that one day we as a species might outgrow all our lower/meaner instincts, a mindset that has sadly been lost over the last few years.

I think people who have problems with the idealism of TNG are people who don't want to better themselves and who don't want anybody to show them how much they would need to improve.
Of course it was hammy at times and especially the first season had a lot of cheesy moments, but it still stands as a vision of what we might become.

And why shouldn't a fictional series about space exploration in a utopian future take itself seriously?
Doesn't the Lord of the Rings take itself seriously for a series of novels about Elves and Dwarves and Hobbits (oh my?)
Of course the LOTR are still very lighthearted books, but TNG also had its lighthearted episodes like "The Offspring"

TNG had its problems,w hich were largely problems of the time: the episodic nature of its stories (a lot of them would have done better as multi paters or ongoing plot-lines) a lack of development or meaningful relationships between the cast and some special effects that haven't aged well.
It is however, as others have said, still the best Trek has to offer. Voyager and Enterprise had potential they squandered, DS9 was decent, especially when it comes to its female characters but was too bound to the station and I didn't care about the Dominion War. TOS....was a product of its time and the reboot seems to lack the optimism I love about Trek.

 

[Lance]

^ Yeh, chalk me up as another person who generally disliked the New BSG. The original show had a certain charm, the remake was utterly charmless. And Ron Moore started believing his own press too much during the making of it too IMO, his braggadocio got way out of control.

 

[T'Girl]

And why shouldn't a fictional series about space exploration in a utopian future take itself seriously?

I believe the OP's question concern the show taking itself "too seriously."

If the intent of the show was that the 24th century was to be a representation of a utopian future, then the answer would be yes.

The show did show a future filled with technological wonders, but it also was a future of never ending conflict and wars, very real monsters, and populations being killed on a massive scale.

Sisko did say that Earth was a paradise.

Earth was more like a nice neighborhood in a really bad city.

 

[Stoo]

Well I hated the remade BSG and to me it didn't say that, but it said "Look how dark I am! Everything is dark! Everybody is at their core amoral and selfish! Optimism and altruism are cildish lies!
Now watch me kill this little girl to prove how edgy and dark I am!"

TNG, for all its faults (which it had, nothing is perfect), at least was optimistic and idealistic, it gave you hope that one day we as a species might outgrow all our lower/meaner instincts, a mindset that has sadly been lost over the last few years.

They are both excellent TV shows. There is no need to pit one against the other as they were each aiming to do something very different.

New BSG showed us some hard-hitting drama and mirrored real world social problems. TNG showed us an unashamedly optimistic view of humanity exploring the stars.

I guess TNG took itself quite seriously, don't see a problem with that!

 

[MakeshiftPython]

The biggest difference between TOS and TNG when it came to humor was the music. In TOS, when a comedic moment happened, somebody played up the whimsical score, sometimes to great effect, others to agonizingly obvious *cue the stock clarinet solo*.

For TNG, it was practically non-existent, which certainly added to the "dryness" of the show for better or worse. Maybe that puts off a lot, but I think it works for scenes like Data's poem and this:

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6_bZOglUw0[/yt]


What sells the comedy are the performances, and by miracle, the cat's reaction to Worf. No need for music to emphasize the humor, it works fine on its own.

 

[2takesfrakes]

When it comes to TNG, it isn't "work" that makes it work.
Let The Magic Do the Work for You™.

 

[MakeshiftPython]

A reason I could never get into the original BSG is because its premise and tone clashed so much, and I ultimately couldn't get into the characters as they were too one note. For a show that was about the holocaust of humanity, it's pretty off putting for me when it tried to do cliche sitcom gags like Starbuck trying to pull off two dates at the same time without either woman knowing (OH HO HO, THAT STARBUCK IS AT IT AGAIN!). Ron Moore's take, love it or hate it, at least tried to be more consistent and earnest with the premise and for the first two or three seasons I think he largely succeeded. That's not to say I think one approach is better than the other, I only mean that Moore did a better job with his approach than Larson did with his own. A better example of the kind of space opera that Larson went for is, of course, STAR WARS. If the show was as good as those films, I'm sure it would have found a larger audience and I would have ate it up.

 

[Orphalesion]

^ I do agree somewhat. I remember watching the initial miniseries of the re imagined BSG with a friend and complaining about the scene where they leave ships full of civilians behind because they are not FTL capable (the aforementioned "watch me kill this little girl" scene) Insisting that the old series (which I had seen as a kid) was never this dark.

Thing is...after rewatching the old series last year.....it kind of was. You don't see them leaving civilians behind for lack of transport, but it is conveyed in dialogue (rather graphically). Likewise people starve and are slaughtered all the time even in the old series and vegetate in horrendous living conditions.
The old series just kind of....distracted you from all that with robot dogs and Starbuck's hijinks and space hookers in pretty orange dresses. It was a very odd jumbling of lighthearted and grim which in my adult mind I would even call jarring.

However for my taste the new series went too far off the grim-dark end, realistically portraying the struggle for survival is one thing, but you can still choose to make it into a series where hope still exists and where catastrophe brings out the best in people (or at least some of them)
I never liked the new series much, but it lost me completely with the introduction of the Pegasus and Helena Cain where we learn that she gunned down the families of their conscripted personnel because the Pegasus had no room for them and their personnel didn't want to leave them behind.....that's a bit too dark, even for such a setting.

Also, while the old series was pure 70s cheese, it did have more charm than the new one and some interesting ideas I'm very sad they didn't pick up for the new one. It had aliens and even mutated/evolved strains among the human population of the fleet.
How cool would it had been if the new series had picked up these two woefully underutilized concepts from the old show (especially the mutant/variant humans!) and explored them more?

What I understand the problem was that the show was simply to expensive for the time, forcing them to extensively make use of stock footage and backlot sets, forcing them to abandon the rather strong and interesting storyline of the first few episodes in favor of things like a low-fantasy pastiche with Starbuck helping a bunch of kids on unicorns fight Psylons and two Western episodes. It was popular enough for a failed revival in the early 80s, which apparently sucked majorly and was quickly canceled again.

 

[MakeshiftPython]

I think the lack of aliens really emphasized how desolate the universe is and how it was extremely difficult to find a planet like the twelve colonies. It made the struggle greater. It also helped keep focus on humans and Cylons. Also, there is optimism, it's just a lot more adult in its approach (like most of the show). The best example I think is in the first episode "33" where Roslin, always subtracting the number of people on that whiteboard due to so many dying, gets to add one after being informed of the first baby of the fleeing being born.

 

[Orphalesion]

I think the lack of aliens really emphasized how desolate the universe is and how it was extremely difficult to find a planet like the twelve colonies. It made the struggle greater. It also helped keep focus on humans and Cylons. Also, there is optimism, it's just a lot more adult in its approach (like most of the show). The best example I think is in the first episode "33" where Roslin, always subtracting the number of people on that whiteboard due to so many dying, gets to add one after being informed of the first baby of the fleeing being born.

You are right. There more I think about it and reading your arguments it becomes clear to me that the new BSG did a rather good job executing its premise (which was rather grim after all)

I think my extreme negative reaction to it stems from me having been too young when it was first aired, only remembering the fun bits from the original series and thus experiencing mood-whiplash, and me simply not being a fan of war fiction, military scifi or hard scifi. I need my wonder, aliens and exoticism in which BSG (out of necessity, in order to stay true to its premise) was very low supply.

To bring it back to the topic of this thread:

The New BSG took it self (for my taste) too seriously, while I understand it had to, because of the gravitas of its premise, it was dark and, for the lack of better word boring in its visual design to alienate me.

The Old BSG, however, took itself not seriously enough. Considering its premise and that we DID get scenes like starving, homeless children begging Apollo for food he did not have, it was rather jarring how the show seemed to quickly forget those issues in favor of showing the audience Starbuck's misadventures in dating Athena and Cassiopeia at the same time or Boxey playing with his robot dog. It was almost bi-polar in that sense.

TNG? Juuuuuuuuuust right. There were lighthearted stories and serious ones, there were stories with hopeful, uplifting or sentimental endings ("Hollow Pursuits", "The Bonding", "Measure of a Man") and there were stories with ambiguous, "sad" or even open endings ("The High Ground" "The Hunted", "the Offspring") And it had a lot of wonder and "shiny" things.

 

[MakeshiftPython]

TNG, like most Trek, had the benefit of being versatile because of its episodic nature allowed writers to do all those different stories. BSG's premise, however, narrows down the kind of stories it can tell (the last remaining humans on the run from Cylons, with only the rag tag fleet between them), so it would naturally feel out of place to suddenly have the characters walk into a western town on some alien planet. Both the 1978 and 2003 versions worked best when staying close to the premise and making the most out of it. VOYAGER had more room to be as versatile as its sister shows, but when the ship is shown to be pristine from the pilot to the finale as if it nothing ever happened, it feels false.

 

[2takesfrakes]

I watched the 1st Season of Battlestar Galactica, having been attracted to its visual style and the show's premise sounded promising. In The End, it bored the living shit out of me, to be absolutely honest with you, but not before I fell for Starbucks. Now, that woman knows how to hold a cigar! Though I am not into blondes, really, Starbucks was simply too beautiful to ignore. So ... she managed to keep me watching, for a while. But I never became a fan and the show did seem to be trying too hard to me. Like everything seemed "forced." And Truth-Be-Told, it didn't satisfy ... not like TNG always has and does.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Not using aliens and POTW adventures was a deliberate choice on the part of nuBSG's creators. They were trying to break away from the Trek paradigms that were so prevalent in the various sci-fi series on the air in that era.

 

[Anwar]

No, they just had "ship of the week" adventures wherein the other ships in the fleet were used as random planets instead.

And instead of holodecks they had those random hallucinations people on that show tended to have.

And instead of aliens they just had people of the other ships who acted as stand-ins for aliens.

 

[Orphalesion]

^I think everybody understands that it was a deliberate choice. However "new" and "different" does not automatically mean "better' or even "interesting" in the eyes of everyone.

And I don't say that they should have run into aliens every episode, but come on, it's scifi, show me something interesting/exotic to look at! Even the culture of the Twelve Colonies was painfully Earthlike.
Again I understand that this has merit in its way, I just can't get into hard scifi.

One way they coukd have run into aliens without undermining their premise would have been for the fleet (or part of it) to seek refuge among an alien nation. And because nothing can be nice or hopeful in the BSG universe, the aliens would have forced the humans into a state of menial labour/almost slavery (or full slavery) which would lead to tensions between the humans and the aliens, allowing the show to make a statement about the fate of refugees in the real world.

No, they just had "ship of the week" adventures wherein the other ships in the fleet were used as random planets instead.

And instead of holodecks they had those random hallucinations people on that show tended to have.

And instead of aliens they just had people of the other ships who acted as stand-ins for aliens.

Lol....true.... But saved them a lot of time and money since they didn't have to design alien cultures. Just put some guys in suits they bought at the gap and we're good.
SciFi? What's SciFi?

It hink something like that would have worked.

I watched the 1st Season of Battlestar Galactica, having been attracted to its visual style and the show's premise sounded promising.

Interesting, the visual style was certainly one of the biggest reasons I could not get into the show. Tere was very little interesting to look at, just a lot of steel and metal and people dressed in 100% earth like business clothes.

Why would I want to see a SciFi show in which people are dressed like people today? It makes no sense that a culture from the far flung corners of space would have the same aesthetics as our own.
Again I understand why they did it, I just disagree with that choice.
I still find the culture depicted in the old Series, as drenched in the 70s as it was, far more interesting, visually and what little we learned about it.

 

[MakeshiftPython]

Goofy pajamas don't make sci-fi, it's the ideas. Do the ALIEN films suffer because the characters from that future wear clothes that are more reminiscent of contemporary styles? The wardrobe choice was deliberate to reflect our post-9/11 world and let viewers feel like it's an extension of our own world (which it kinda is anyway). I thought that approach worked fine. Not every sci-fi needs to go balls out with costumes like THE FIFTH ELEMENT (a major crime that didn't get an Oscar for best costume, let alone a nom!)

 

[Orphalesion]

Goofy pajamas don't make sci-fi, it's the ideas. Do the ALIEN films suffer because the characters from that future wear clothes that are more reminiscent of contemporary styles? The wardrobe choice was deliberate to reflect our post-9/11 world and let viewers feel like it's an extension of our own world (which it kinda is anyway). I thought that approach worked fine. Not every sci-fi needs to go balls out with costumes like THE FIFTH ELEMENT (a major crime that didn't get an Oscar for best costume, let alone a nom!)

I had the impression that Aliens was not too far into the future. Ans that culture was based on Earth, so it made more sense. Also in Aliens the crew of the star ship wore very utilitarian clothes, which are more likely to change less than things let's say politicians would wear.
The twelve colonies were a culture that never had anything to do with Earth, so it's ludicrous for them to dress in late 20th century fashion.
If it had been Earth humans fleeing our planet in the late 21st century it would have been less grating, however they had a culture at their hands that was, for all purposes, an alien civilization, I find it very uncreative to make practically everything about them so earth-like. It wasn't just the clothes, it was the names (why couldn't characters in a serious show not be named Apollo or Cassiopeia? Still not exactly alien, but easier to swallow given the mythology of the series than Lee or Sharon) the culture, everything.

As I said, I understood why they did it I just disagree. Besides a metric ton of fiction back then was a reflection of "our post-9/11 world" which is another reason I got sick of the new BSG the moment I saw it. I needed hope and reaffirmation back then, not "dark! dark! dark!"

TOS also had enough Cold War influence, without beating the audience over the head with it. the new BSG was consumed by its real world allegory and the general pessimism of the early 2000s and, in my eyes it suffered for it.

 

[MakeshiftPython]

Except the colonies do have something to do with Earth, they're supposed to be our ancestors that set on Earth as their new home. Even the original show had characters wearing clothes that were reminiscent of Egyptians. BSG isn't supposed to be like Star Wars set in an entirely fairy tale universe, it's set in the very distant past (well, except Galactica 80, which everyone hated). Of course, a lot of it requires suspension of disbelief, like the colonies on both shows literally have the characters use English, spoken and written.

And TOS didn't "beat you over the head" with the Cold War because that's not what the show was about. Hence my earlier post about that show having a more versatile premise.

 

[Mojochi]

No, it didn't take itself too seriously. It did take itself seriously though, because at the time TNG happened, Star Trek in general was at the height of being taken seriously, whereas prior to its success in the cinema, it was enjoyed in a less serious way, especially during its 10+ years in reruns.

I mean, TMP is the most seriously made Star Trek film of them all. There's almost no feeling of levity in that film. It took itself very seriously