Yeah I don't know if I would confine it to one planet a season or anything like that. I would just put much more of an emphasis on the exploration aspect, and maybe have them explore places that actually feel somewhat unique and alien.
But the point is that it wouldn't be confining. How many hundreds of years did it take to explore Earth's surface fully? And even today, we've barely begun to chart the ocean depths. Sci-fi TV has brainwashed audiences to believe the lie that a planet is a single, tiny, uniform place with only one climate, one city, one culture, and one language. That's a ridiculous, totally artificial oversimplification. A planet is an immense and complicated place -- just look around at the one we're on. A single, plausibly developed alien world could host multiple distinct cultures as different from each other as, say, Ferengi are from Klingons, even though they're the same species. And it could host a whole range of different climates and environments as distinct as Tatooine and Hoth (which, of course, are just based on different regions on our own planet). A series that spends a whole season on one planet could really explore the true vastness and complexity of an entire world rather than dumbing it down to a single monolithic neighborhood. The characters could get involved in the ongoing politics and cultural conflicts between the planet's different nations or classes or religions, and really develop the world in-depth -- as well as having the opportunity for a wide range of adventures in the planet's various natural environments -- jungle, mountains, ocean, you name it.
Of course the problem is Trek technology makes exploration so incredibly easy and convenient, since you can scan the entire planet from orbit and beam up to the ship the second there's any real emergency. So that kind of makes it harder to create any real sense of drama.
I've never understood the glib assumption that the only conceivable way to create drama is by putting lives in danger. No -- that's just the crudest way to do it. A better way is to get the characters invested enough in the lives of the people on the planet that they don't
want to just run away from their problems. And that's something that would be more likely to happen if they stuck around for a while. Or if they get involved in the cultural clashes, then the drama could come from the moral and philosophical dilemmas they might face.
Enterprise's "Dear Doctor" is a good example. That's a whole episode where there's no violence, no fighting, no mortal danger to the cast, just a challenging moral question arising from their interaction with the natives of the planet they visit. Imagine if they didn't just wash their hands of the moral issue after 42 minutes and move on to the next thing, but stuck around to see the impact of their actions.
