Ok. Let's be honest. By and large most Trekkies accept (if grudgingly) that ENT was a missed shot. I mean, something went right with TOS, TNG, DS9, even VOY, which ENT simply did not achieve/recreate. (And then 2017 onwards...) What are the reasons? Was it ham-handed Scott Bakula as Archer? Or T'Pol's (always in the shadow of 7/9) pout? Her body suit? Jolene Blalock hated her bodysuit but so did Jeri Ryan except the latter totally owned it. They were both beautiful fan services, so what went wrong with ENT (except the opening credits... terrible!). Was it the writing? What are your reasons? Why did ENT fail?
All of the main problems can be boiled down to the powers-that-be just not committing to a true "Star Trek" prequel. Whether "powers-that-be" refers to the writers or the meddling executives or both, I'm not certain. But in any case, the first two seasons were clearly more concerned with cheap pandering to what they thought teenage American boys would want, than with the saga of "Star Trek." I must sound like a broken record by now, but here are the specifics of how they failed those two parts of being a "Star Trek" prequel (JMHO of course): The Prequel part: Ferengi and holodecks and Borg, oh my! Shouting Vulcans. Packing an entire series' worth of new alien races with inappropriate foreheads into the Alpha Quadrant, that will mysteriously be gone by Kirk's era (maybe Season 5 was set to explain this by having Archer "water" the sacred landmarks of Denobula, Planet Butterfly-Boobs, etc, unknowingly exposing these races to human diseases that wiped them out) Not utilizing 90% of the races already known to Starfleet by TOS The "Star Trek" part: Science fiction? Diplomacy? Diversity? Emotional humility? What kind of sissy nerds want that? This show is about sex, the South, and good old American machismo cranked up to 11 (thousand) Hey, we have diversity! We let a Black guy and an Asian girl onto the bridge (with the lowest ranks) and even allow them to speak occasionally! Only radical man-hating feminazis would take offense to our only prominent heroine being treated like a sexy hood ornament first and a character second, and most of the other women randomly losing their shirts and bras durring missions, or just being space-harpies. Don't worry ladies, we'll even it out by having the macho guy getting raped and all his comrades laugh at him for it! Equal-opportunity sexism! So your sons can feel just as violated as your daughters when your family watches "Star Trek." Don't drop the soap fellas, ha ha! Wait, we're in space? In the future? Should that affect the characters' basic traits and backgrounds? No, let's just take regional stereotypes from 2001 and plop them on a starship, with no alterations. Why make the engineer a space cowboy when he can just be a literal Texas stereotype. Why tie any "Star Trek" lore into the security chief's background, when he can just be a 21st century British soldier with slightly futuristic looking guns? This is not to say that Abrams or "Discovery" are gold by any means, but Seasons 1 and 2 of "Enterprise" were just a farce. EDIT: I realize I didn't quite answer the question. These are the reasons ENT failed to impress most Trekkies. But it also failed to bring in the new young fans it was aiming for. Here's my speculation as to why that also failed: The "fan service" really wasn't. I recall one male reviewer lamenting that Hoshi's "girl next door" vibe was far sexier than T'Pol. Hoshi also being my dad's crush, I'd hazzard that giving her more screentime would've held more male nerds' attention that shoving fake tits onto the screen all the time. Fan service isn't enough. Seven of Nine's catsuit pulled people in just long enough to see what a fascinating character she was, and get invested in the rest of the cast and show. But someone just looking for boobs could easily find them anywhere in 2001. In that regard, ENT was competing with the entire rest of the media and the newly booming Internet, losing its niche audience in the process. Nothing else new: Besides the sex, everything else was also a rehash of stuff other shows had done to death and done better. "Enterprise" competed with "Andromeda," "Firefly, " "Stargate," BSG and reruns of TNG and "Voyager" by.......doing exactly what they did, but with more sex and less IQ points. Too much space opera competition: With BSG, "Firefly," "Stargate," "Andromeda" and "Farscape" putting their own new twists on space opera, ENT was desperately trying to keep "Star Trek" relevant, by.....putting no new twists on it at all. Except country music. Which scifi nerds are known to be all over. "Enterprise" got "good" when the writers finally got into the 21st Century and realized that story arcs, military scifi, and more elaborate aliens was the way to go for 2000s scifi, but by then it was too late.
There were two reasons why the show failed, and two only (and no, the theme song or the design of the ship wasn’t a factor.) 1. UPN asserted too much creative control over the show, not allowing the showrunners to really do what they wanted with it.* 2. And even in spite of that, the showrunners really had no idea what to do with the show. They had just come off of producing Voyager and they couldn’t break out of that mold. The show was billed as a prequel taking place a century before TOS but ended up looking and feeling like Voyager Jr. Many people also blame ‘franchise fatigue’ for the show’s failure. But that’s simply not true. If UPN or Bermaga had come up with a better or more original show, more people would have watched it. But that didn’t happen because UPN were idiots and Bermaga couldn’t get out of their rut. Edit: the decon-gel scenes and other manner of sexist crap was also cringe-worthy, but not the cause of the show’s failure. *And then once they realized that even with all their creative control the show was going nowhere, they immediately stopped caring about the show and allowed one more season simply so that they could have enough episodes to sell the show to syndication, and then abruptly cancelled it.
The Xindi arc...went on too long and tried maybe too hard to be relevant to where America was politically at that time. The temporal war,so epic sounding and ultimately going nowhere.Having cool old school Vulcans like Spock..and making them hateful baddies. And I disagree about the design aesthetic...I found it dull and uninspiring.Would it have hurt too much to put Bakula in a gold shirt (trade on your legacy guys).
It's not its own show for starters. But, more importantly, it's set long before TNG. It would be like creating an American police procedural 200 years ago and then have the characters using 9mm semi-automatic pistols. The feel and the placement of tech is too similar to TNG for ENT to have its own unique identity in the greater Trek pantheon. Instead, it fell back on TNG style technobabble to solve problems, but without the benefits of some of the characters from TNG's charismatic presentation to sell it.
You're talking about 9/11 are you not? My purpose is to rescue ENT, which i believe, was a good show. All things notwithstanding...
There’s nothing to ‘rescue.’ The show is done and over with. You can either like the show or not like it, but it’s not going to change. You asked why ENT failed, and we’re answering your question.
I say this as one of the most vocal and unabashed ENT supporters on this message board. The show's over. It was a mixture of fantastic and disappointing. It does not need to be "rescued." If we get any further adventures of the NX-01 crew in, say, a Short Treks or another Paramount+ streaming project I'll be the first to cheer but let's not pretend it's a series in dire need of "rescuing." I love ENT. And there are episodes in Season 2 that make me cringe and avoid them like ipecac syrup.
It wasn’t a failure. It just wasn’t as successful as its predecessors. It had two campaigns to bring it back - Save Enterprise in 2005 and the Netflix campaign in 2016. Neither were successful; the former had raised the money to make a tv movie, but the money was returned. In the latter, even though Enterprise was seen by more people than during its original run and its image has been rehabbed as a result, its predecessors still received more views on Netflix. There have always been logical ways to continue it in some form – movies, animated show, video games, comics, cameo appearances in one of the current live actions shows or in Short Treks, etc. But TPTB think otherwise. They had a chance to rescue the show during S3 &S4, by either: a) adding someone to the main cast as the newest crewmember, as TNG, DS9 and VOY had done by their respective 4th season b) killing off a member of the crew and pave the way for a new crewmember as a part of the main cast for the following season, as a reason to tune in c) have a member of the crew move on to a different assignment, even if it was temporary or d) all of the above. Enterprise figured all of this out way too late, as the show was cancelled by then. As much grief “Spock’s Brain”, “Code of Honor”/“Shades of Grey”, “Profit and Lace” and “Threshold”/”Fury” get from fans of TOS, TNG, DS9 & VOY respectively, none of them permanently drove viewers away like “A Night in Sickbay” and a few weeks later “Precious Cargo” did for ENT. The show was past rescuing after that. They could have skipped the Xindi arc entirely and kept doing salacious decon chamber scenes for the rest of the show’s run. The outcome would have remained the same.
Considering that it was the cause of the death of Trek on TV until JJ Abrams revitalized the brand, saying that it 'wasn't a failure, just not as successful as its predecessors' is a massive understatement.