"The masses" never went anywhere near Babylon 5 - the ratings were tiny.
How should the franchise have been developed after TNG?
- Thread starter Captrek
- Start date
24 does not relate to modern politics and issues. And please don't try to convince me otherwise. I actually find that some of those future-based shows relate to the modern politics and issues more. So if people like watching 24, they obviously like shows about completely fictional governments that have nothing to do with real politics or issues, except in name.
Oh, it absolutely does.
There aren't enough people who give a crap about the politics of the Federation to support a television series that cost a broadcaster or cable channel more than twenty-five cents an episode to buy, air and promote.
I see this debate evolving something like this:
"It does!"
"It does not!"
"It does,too!"
"It so does not!"
Hm, maybe it's better to leave it here...
I'ts got nothing to do with "suspension of disbelief". It's got all to do with image. It's been proven that huge numbers of people will watch the most SciFi-based show with the craziest events and most fantastical premises possible, only if it manages to disguises its genre for a suitable period of time before everyone gets hooked (Lost).
Yeah. You know what? Most of the people who watch those shows make exactly that little "suspension of disbelief" and if you think that most of them would do it for a goofy Star Trek show not set in the present day you're kidding yourself. Which is just why such a show's never been successfully done and won't be.
The problem is that this can't really be done when you have Star Trek in the title... So you have to do other things to make it look 'cool' for the audience and convince them they won't be "nerds" watching "goofy" stuff.
This much is true. I had one friend who absolutely refused to go out with a group of us to see Star Trek because, guess what, it was Star Trek. The same guy thought the world of transformers and the matrix though. It just goes to show that image is everything
It's still about 4 million less than the Star Trek could've have in that time period.
Voyager didn’t fail because it was sci-fi. It failed because it wasn’t very good television. (I’m kind of stretching the definition of “failed,” admittedly. It did do well enough to stay on the air for a full seven seasons and convince TPTB to attempt yet another spinoff. But it was definitely “nichey,” to quote Temis.) Its biggest failure is that it wasn’t well written, which I believe to be at least partly due to the fact that these people had already been writing the same thing for seven years and were running out of ideas.
A Star Trek: Capitol series could have been very successful if it had been written as well as, say, The West Wing. S1 ratings would have been highly dependent on the success of the marketing, but once word got out, people would have tuned in for it. A nice feature of the concept is that a much lower special effects budget might have meant more money with which to attract top quality writers. (Or actors, but I don’t think that was really the problem with VOY.)
Another nice feature is that the concept pretty much would have forced the show to focus more on drama and less on gee-whiz sci-fi, which would have made it less “nichey.” People who weren’t ordinarily interested in Star Trek, and perhaps more importantly people who were getting burned out on Star Trek, would have been more inclined to give it a chance when they found out it wasn’t about phasers and starships and space battles and malfunctioning holodecks and a danger-of-the-week that threatens to kill everybody but obviously won’t because they’re regular cast members.
It would have been a much fresher approach. There’s no guarantee it would have been successful, but I think it would have had a better chance than Voyager.
They should have! I think it actually did quite well in Britain, but the point is that Voyager faced more competition from other sci-fi shows. What was TNG up against? Quantum Leap and that's about it. I'm not sure how much the ratings reflect the quality of the show - DS9 was, in my opinion, far better written than Voyager most weeks, but it still had nothing like the ratings of TNG.
I really must disagree with those who think TNG should have gone on forever with an ever-changing cast. By ending it while it was still good it's become a fondly remembered show, whereas I think the other way it would have slowly become a running joke: Star Trek - The Next Several Generations. Doctor Who had a premise that allowed it to do this (and even it experienced some decay eventually), TNG didn't in my mind. To me TNG was about these characters, and I'm glad it always will be.
Furtados_Feet
Lieutenant
I can't even imagine the plot lines for "Star Trek: Capitol" before falling asleep.
I liked DS9 and ENT, VOY was lame and destroyed the Borg for everyone. I would have been with no VOY at all or at least not so not weak as the concept is neat.
Furtados_Feet
Lieutenant
The Kazon were horrible, just horrible villains. Voyager somehow managed to never get out of Kazon space for two years and the ships managed to keep up with them despite Voyager being far more technologically advanced.
They also looked simply embarrassing.
People liked the Vidiians, I don't know why the Voyager writers didn't use them more but remember that Voyager had to leave their space at some point.
The Krenim? They were never meant to be anything but a villain for a two parter, UPN stopped them from being a season long villain.
The Hirogen were just stupid.
8472 - The Voyager writers destroyed them in "In the Flesh".
The writers fell back on the Borg because they were crap at thinking up good villains.
^What he said.
I don't think you can really blame the fans if they didn't like the new aliens. After all, TNG's first attempt at creating a big new alien threat (the Ferengi) failed miserably, so they went back to the drawing board and created more credible enemies like the Cardassians and the Borg themselves. It surely wasn't beyond the wit of man to come up with a threat that was both new and popular with fans. DS9 did it after all.
DS9 gets a free pass for whatever reason. Also they could create and enemy that could match or exceed the Federation because they had access to the entire Trekverse for their stories. How the heck was VOY supposed to create antagonists fans would like and still make them weak enough that VOY could escape/beat them all the time? If they made an enemy as powerful as the Dominion VOY would've been toast in like 3 episodes.
So it's the choice: Make a powerful enemy and VOY gets fragged really easily, or make an enemyt hat VOY can survive against and they get hated by the fans.
So it's the choice: Make a powerful enemy and VOY gets fragged really easily, or make an enemyt hat VOY can survive against and they get hated by the fans.
That’s OK, you wouldn’t be writing for the series. Presumably it would be written by people who are much better than you at thinking up dramatically compelling plot lines. Hopefully better than the people who wrote Voyager, too.
At the risk of provoking one of those "who could beat who" geekfests, surely the Borg were at least as powerful as the Dominion?
And in order to accommodate the fact that VOY couldn't survive a powerful Empire on its own, the Borg were depowered somewhat (it's nowhere near as bad as what the haters say, but there was a degree of depowering). Like I said, VOY couldn't create powerful enemies and survive, they had to be weak enough to defeat/escape. Which means the fans were ready to tear up the VOY races from the onset.
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