Allow me to explain what I mean 
The TOS movies, whatever their faults, recognized something about the move from TV to the big screen, and that is a need to go to new places with these old characters. TMP touches on it (despite alleging to take place within only two years of the end of TOS, despite being filmed a whole ten years later), but TWOK really runs with the idea that these are the same characters from the 79 original television episodes, but older, and therefore different. It revels in the opportunity to ask the questions, who is Admiral Kirk so many years later, how have all these characters changed? And the following movies all follow suit. The characters grow and progress. There's a seeming acknowledgement that movies have to approach these people in a way that episodic TV can not. All of them evolve in some way over those six movies, yes clearly the same crew we seen on TOS, but they are not the same in TUC as they were at the beginning of the movies. There have been events across those movies that have fundamentally changed some of them, and they're much more richly defined as a result. Heck, some of the things from the film series actually serve to retrospectively add flesh to the characters we saw in TOS, in a way that the episode-of-the-week, reset-button structure of the 1960s show never allowed.
TNG is a much more mixed bag.
I'd argue Generations actually starts out with some noble intentions here. The writers admit that after seven seasons of needing to keep some sacred cows intact, they enjoyed being able to kill them. Picard loses his family and is forced to face his own mortality. Data's quest for emotions comes to an end, and instead begins his quest to understand the emotions he's now got. Insurrection follows up with the resurrection of Riker/Troi that is finalized in Nemesis.
But otherwise it feels like these characters are essentially in stasis. In fact apart from Riker/Troi, several of them actually regress. The writers introduce "game changing" concepts like Data having emotions or the Enterprise being replaced, then do their damnedest to get back to the status quo as fast as possible. Data can turn his chip off and on in FC, it's no longer fused into his neural net and can be safely removed in INS, and one line in NEM makes it seem like he had never had emotions at all. Worf is kept strictly undeveloped for fear of contradicting anything about his arc on DS9. Picard becomes... well, he examines several important things about himself, but only on a movie by movie basis and by the end of NEM there is little to indicate he's any different than he was in "All Good Things". In fact, most of the characters had better growth on TV, and their growth stopped dead in the movies.
I'm at a loss why this should be. I'd like to think it's because Rick Berman and co only thought about each movie on its own and weren't so concerned about creating a progression between them, but the TOS movie makers basically admit they never had a grand plan, they worked on each movie as an individual piece but simply worked from an assumption that movie sequels by their nature don't exist in a vacuum and that events in one movie should be reflected in the next.
What do you all think?
The TOS movies, whatever their faults, recognized something about the move from TV to the big screen, and that is a need to go to new places with these old characters. TMP touches on it (despite alleging to take place within only two years of the end of TOS, despite being filmed a whole ten years later), but TWOK really runs with the idea that these are the same characters from the 79 original television episodes, but older, and therefore different. It revels in the opportunity to ask the questions, who is Admiral Kirk so many years later, how have all these characters changed? And the following movies all follow suit. The characters grow and progress. There's a seeming acknowledgement that movies have to approach these people in a way that episodic TV can not. All of them evolve in some way over those six movies, yes clearly the same crew we seen on TOS, but they are not the same in TUC as they were at the beginning of the movies. There have been events across those movies that have fundamentally changed some of them, and they're much more richly defined as a result. Heck, some of the things from the film series actually serve to retrospectively add flesh to the characters we saw in TOS, in a way that the episode-of-the-week, reset-button structure of the 1960s show never allowed.
TNG is a much more mixed bag.
I'd argue Generations actually starts out with some noble intentions here. The writers admit that after seven seasons of needing to keep some sacred cows intact, they enjoyed being able to kill them. Picard loses his family and is forced to face his own mortality. Data's quest for emotions comes to an end, and instead begins his quest to understand the emotions he's now got. Insurrection follows up with the resurrection of Riker/Troi that is finalized in Nemesis.
But otherwise it feels like these characters are essentially in stasis. In fact apart from Riker/Troi, several of them actually regress. The writers introduce "game changing" concepts like Data having emotions or the Enterprise being replaced, then do their damnedest to get back to the status quo as fast as possible. Data can turn his chip off and on in FC, it's no longer fused into his neural net and can be safely removed in INS, and one line in NEM makes it seem like he had never had emotions at all. Worf is kept strictly undeveloped for fear of contradicting anything about his arc on DS9. Picard becomes... well, he examines several important things about himself, but only on a movie by movie basis and by the end of NEM there is little to indicate he's any different than he was in "All Good Things". In fact, most of the characters had better growth on TV, and their growth stopped dead in the movies.
I'm at a loss why this should be. I'd like to think it's because Rick Berman and co only thought about each movie on its own and weren't so concerned about creating a progression between them, but the TOS movie makers basically admit they never had a grand plan, they worked on each movie as an individual piece but simply worked from an assumption that movie sequels by their nature don't exist in a vacuum and that events in one movie should be reflected in the next.
What do you all think?
Sadly true 
