Twin Peaks is a trip and a half, but I hope you enjoy it!
You want trippy... today in the Trader Joe's parking lot, there was a car with Twin Peaks logo, zig zag lines like the Blu ray discs, and a quote that Google says is from David Lynch!
When did Star Trek ever have any sort of humour like Orville has?
The Orville toned down most of it's over the top humor after getting picked up by Fox (granted the exception of the porn virus holodeck episode held over from season 1). Seth sold Family Guy in Space, Fox got a Star Trek homage. I know this isn't the book forum, but Peter David's New Frontier series more or less had Orville type humor and it worked in universe. Whereas Lower Decks never seems to reach fully believable in universe humor. And, speaking of tv shows that could be parallel universes to Star Trek, Ron Moore's For All Mankind gets well regards. Maybe March will be my AppleTV month... but March also has the long awaited return of Party Down, so Starz kinda has that month occupied, especially if I end up liking Bryan Fuller's American Gods.
So we kind of know there are shakeups happening, Goldsman doesn't have to pull double duty where he clearly focused on SNW. While over on Picard Matalas has written several very good TV shows himself, is a huge Trekkie and was even production assistant on the final two seasons of Voyager which most people say are the best seasons. He was there when Trek was "as it should be" and seems to understand the weight of responsibility on his shoulders with this final season.
STP 201 "The Star Gazer" is the only "baseline Star Trek" live action episode I've seen under the NuTrek regime that could easily slot into 1966-2005 Star Trek without raising wait, what questions. JJ Abrams already did a Star Trek reboot. The other option is doing a The Next Next Generation.. which Picard season 3 is opening the door to. Apparently Akiva was devoting more time to Titans than SNW. but that may be charging with Zaslav canceling the former... In trying to be both a reboot and a non-reboot, SNW constantly knocks me out of episodes. It's like... watching the news. I can see what's going on, but find it impossible to get into the story with essentially anti-canon mixed with member berries.
Trek at its heart is very formulaic to truly work and you have to be damnably good to be able to change that. DS9 managed it, by proving longform storylines can work in the Trek setting, but it needs streaming services to really work and it only seems to have been since the series got put onto Netflix, then Paramount+ to truly be appreciated, same with the new wave of appreciation of Enterprise, even though that tries to follow an amalgam of the TOS and DS9 "formula".
You can do different settings, but they often wear out their welcome within an episode or two. How long would a show on one of the tiny border stations work, or a science vessel on long range research missions?
Trek novels have managed to push many boundaries while still keeping to canon and maintaining verisimilitude. But in general, it has been argued that Star Trek at least in the Berman era was a period piece set in a future coherent shared universe, reflecting modernist secular humanism, timeless allegorical stories informed by current events, characters as competent professionals, and optimistic about the future and human nature.
I'm thinking stuff like "Exploring the Mirror universe" which felt like it dragged on for way, way too long despite being what oh-so-many of us have wanted to see and explore since the very idea came about. Sometimes NOT getting what you want is a better move.
One of the best "how you fix Discovery" arguments I've heard is that at the end of season 2, instead of going into the "future", they should have jumped to a parallel universe and had arcs in multiple alt realities. They could still do their post-Apocalyptic thing without all the added baggage.