I think you initially raised two points, lack of establishing shots of the ship and no act breaks. And both phenomena play into the same issue, I believe, that you're having with SNW: structure.
Sometimes (not always!) the SNW scripts feel like they're not going anywhere, i.e. they don't have much of a point except maybe some soapy relationship business. That has been my main point of criticism this past season. Back in the TNG days, Michael Piller was credited for improving the show's quality in season 3 by always demanding to know of writers pitching ideas "What is it about"? What is the core idea, message, development... that this story will revolve around? I don't see that all that much these days.
Now to your observation: it does not explain away issues in storytelling of course, nor would changing one change the other too, but my sense is that TV writers of the network era were faced with more constraints simply on a formal level. Episodes could not exceed, say, 42 minutes of runtime incl. credits because otherwise not enough commercials could go into the show's (fixed) timeslot, which of course was exactly 60 minutes. The number of distinct ad blocks within the hour determined how many acts the series needed to have.
(Fun fact on the side: while TNG and DS9 had a five-act structure as a result of the above, VGR was going to have a four-act structure because it was not on first-run syndication but a network, where four acts were the norm. Stephen Poe describes this in his "A Vision of the Future" making-of book. But there was some reluctance among writers and producers, who had been used to the five-act structure. And eventually, some of the early scripts written as 4-act - I believe he discusses "Eye of the Needle" specifically - had to be rewritten to do 5 acts anyway.)
Now writing an act will give you a certain narrative unit, arising originally from the banal and extratextual need to break up the episode to accomodate ads within its hour, but network writers turned this into a strength, because not only was the fact that an act had to end on an exciting 'mini-cliffhanger'-type situation to keep viewers glued to the screen through the imminent commercial break, but its side effect was that these episodes always had at least 5 rather exciting moments, one at the end of each act, and one at the end of the teaser before the opening titles. If acts are further supposed to be roughly the same length, these moments are distributed rather evenly. So even if you watch the series, as we do now, without ad breaks, this constant sense of being entertained well, and that something interesting is always happening, remains. The current streaming shows don't have these restrictions, neither on overall length of the episode nor on a particular structure, and perhaps this results in some indulgences that couldn't have worked in a network show.
As to the lack of establishing shots, I believe they may sometimes not see the necessity for them. In network TV, one can notice that episodes more often than not come back from commercials on a shot of the Enterprise, Voyager, Defiant/Deep Space Nine, etc. to do precisely what the name of the shot says: to establish or reestablish not just where the action takes place, but also that the commericals have ended and we're back on the actual show.
So in short, I see the same phenomenon you do, and I attribute it fully to the streaming environment. But I also agree that this isn't just an aesthetic quibble, but a symptom of a larger problem that sometimes plagues the modern shows, a lack of storytelling discipline.
Sometimes (not always!) the SNW scripts feel like they're not going anywhere, i.e. they don't have much of a point except maybe some soapy relationship business. That has been my main point of criticism this past season. Back in the TNG days, Michael Piller was credited for improving the show's quality in season 3 by always demanding to know of writers pitching ideas "What is it about"? What is the core idea, message, development... that this story will revolve around? I don't see that all that much these days.
Now to your observation: it does not explain away issues in storytelling of course, nor would changing one change the other too, but my sense is that TV writers of the network era were faced with more constraints simply on a formal level. Episodes could not exceed, say, 42 minutes of runtime incl. credits because otherwise not enough commercials could go into the show's (fixed) timeslot, which of course was exactly 60 minutes. The number of distinct ad blocks within the hour determined how many acts the series needed to have.
(Fun fact on the side: while TNG and DS9 had a five-act structure as a result of the above, VGR was going to have a four-act structure because it was not on first-run syndication but a network, where four acts were the norm. Stephen Poe describes this in his "A Vision of the Future" making-of book. But there was some reluctance among writers and producers, who had been used to the five-act structure. And eventually, some of the early scripts written as 4-act - I believe he discusses "Eye of the Needle" specifically - had to be rewritten to do 5 acts anyway.)
Now writing an act will give you a certain narrative unit, arising originally from the banal and extratextual need to break up the episode to accomodate ads within its hour, but network writers turned this into a strength, because not only was the fact that an act had to end on an exciting 'mini-cliffhanger'-type situation to keep viewers glued to the screen through the imminent commercial break, but its side effect was that these episodes always had at least 5 rather exciting moments, one at the end of each act, and one at the end of the teaser before the opening titles. If acts are further supposed to be roughly the same length, these moments are distributed rather evenly. So even if you watch the series, as we do now, without ad breaks, this constant sense of being entertained well, and that something interesting is always happening, remains. The current streaming shows don't have these restrictions, neither on overall length of the episode nor on a particular structure, and perhaps this results in some indulgences that couldn't have worked in a network show.
As to the lack of establishing shots, I believe they may sometimes not see the necessity for them. In network TV, one can notice that episodes more often than not come back from commercials on a shot of the Enterprise, Voyager, Defiant/Deep Space Nine, etc. to do precisely what the name of the shot says: to establish or reestablish not just where the action takes place, but also that the commericals have ended and we're back on the actual show.
So in short, I see the same phenomenon you do, and I attribute it fully to the streaming environment. But I also agree that this isn't just an aesthetic quibble, but a symptom of a larger problem that sometimes plagues the modern shows, a lack of storytelling discipline.
