It can and should be recognizable as Star Trek. But it sounded like you were advocating taking Riker, Troi, Tuvok, and other character/actors from the past and throwing them together. And then claiming just because it's a different combination of people on a new ship it's "better". The core of Star Trek is not Picard, Sisko, Janeyway, or even Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The core of Star Trek is an idea. And that idea transcends individual actors. For Star Trek to succeed it needs to stay true to that idea while being modern and relevant. That could mean setting the show in the 23rd century, 24th century, or 25th century. But you can't just throw Berman Trek into a blender, pulse for a second, take some of it out and call it "new".
Oh dear. There's that Berman prejudice of yours surfacing again. A name I frankly never even gave a second thought, before I started reading fan opinion online. Star Trek was a long-running show I watched and that was that. Whether TOS, TNG or the others. The public face of Trek was its actors, and the characters they played. That changed from time to time. If it's not about wanting to see characters we like again, THEN what the hell is Star Trek about? Okay here's the correct answer: It's about a heroic captain and his crew travelling the Galaxy in a really fast spacecraft. But you know what? There's nothing in that answer which means you can't fill your ship, with whoever you like. Let's look at the Star Wars franchise, since people keep saying they want more of that shoehorned in to Star Trek. Ever noticed how in those six films, there are literally hundreds of characters - some of which don't appear for more than seconds apiece. But have whole mythologies built around them, based on nothing onscreen! Why then is it, when the Star Trek franchise has that many creations to choose from, with histories that are much more visually accessible - to try and make the best of that - involve known characters rather than invent new ones that frankly aren't as interesting, that could end up being dismissed as fan wank? That's a double standard if ever I saw one.
They don't seem to be falling all over themselves to capitalize on those rights, but they'd never sell the rights outright. It's not like they're hard up for cash. It's possible they might create a Star Trek series and license it to an outlet where it makes sense, since CBS, CW and Showtime are all problematic in their own ways for placing a series (although a series specifically adapted to the CW or Showtime might work.) CBS didn't "kill" Star Trek, but it's also not obvious how Star Trek fits into their existing lineup. CBS, CW and Showtime all have tried and true approaches to attracting an audience, and a space opera series of any sort doesn't fit any of the three. But look at TV in general - apparently a space opera series doesn't fit SyFy either. What hope does it have anywhere else? The fact that space opera has vanished from TV altogether - despite there being literally hundreds of channels where a series could go - proves that the problem doesn't lie with anything specific to Star Trek. The most important external factor was the proliferation of cable channels, which spread the audience so diffusely that the survival strategy for shows (other than being dirt-cheap reality) was to go very mass-market on broadcast (cop shows, sitcoms) while the specialized genres skedaddled to the safer realms of cable. The fact that HBO can have a big hit in the nichey sword & sorcery fantasy genre demonstrates that niche tastes can survive on cable, especially premium cable, where each audience member is worth more than on basic cable or broadcast and their niche tastes are worth catering to. But Game of Thrones was a big, expensive risk for HBO and somebody will have to make a leap of faith like that to get a space opera show back on TV, whether it's Star Trek or something else. Premium cable is the most promising home for Star Trek, if the name isn't fatally associated with free TV. Showtime isn't going to want that association since it undermines its business model of convincing people to pay for what they used to get for free. Why not try to do the feasible instead? Create a story that appeals to the audience of whatever outlet it will be showing on. Forget catering to "the fans." Forget what came before. The first thing you need to know is your audience, and your audience won't be Star Trek fans because there's no such thing as a Star Trek Fan Channel. The most likely options are CW, Showtime and the Cartoon Network, where the audience is for each very different and expects different things. A Star Trek series could be shaped to appeal to any of those audiences, but until you know where the show is going, you won't know what will work. Certainly Star Trek fans might seek out and watch a show that airs on any of those outlets. And certainly some Star Trek fans already are among the audience for all those outlets. But the audience most likely to find a Star Trek show are the pre-existing fans, so it actually makes less sense to shape a show to their interests vs shaping it to the interests of non-fans and letting whatever existing fans that want to, find the show by their own efforts. But if they see a trailer for a new Star Trek series associated with something they already like, they're likely to say, "hey maybe Star Trek is for ME now! This is what that trailer needs to show, and the series needs to deliver: on CW it's sexy young cadets in love; on Showtime, it's grownup, gritty and sexy dramatics in an exotic milieu; on the Cartoon Network, it's an animated series with lots of action, strange and beautiful alien worlds, actors from the movie caricatured so that they are recognizable, and no sex because the audience is a mix of kids and grownups (The Clone Wars is the template to follow). That's three totally different Star Trek series. So until you know where it's showing, you don't know what it should be. And details like whether we should have turtle-headed Klingons or even which reality to set the series in, is getting too specific. The non-fans who are the potential audience for this show won't know or care about the significance of any of that. The reason Star Trek doesn't work on TV now is because nobody's shaped a series so that the viewers of that outlet will say "Star Trek is for ME now!" That's the one and only thing that any new series needs to accomplish in order to thrive. Whether the resulting series will be for us too remains to be seen. It would be nice if a new Star Trek series stayed true to that idea, but it's not necessary to the series' survival. On the CW and the Cartoon Network, having an "idea" wouldn't be relevant at all. Showtime would be most likely to adopt the idea and shape a series around it, but even there, it all depends on whether the people making the show understand that it's about more than heroic captains and funny-forehead aliens on fast starships, something even people here don't always grasp.
Let me be clear. I've watched all of Berman Trek(and TOS). I enjoyed most of it enough that I kept watching even as the quality decreased. I'm currently rewatching ENT and am experiencing a certain nostalgia for the whole Berman era. If a Titan series launched next year starring Frakes and Sirtis I would watch every episode. If there was a DTV production I would buy the discs. But I am not the mainstream audience. There are not enough mes or yous to support a new production. If you put Frakes, Sirtis, or anyone that reminds the average viewer of the old shows they will simply ignore it. For a new Trek series to survive it will need to bring in new viewers. And that means appealing to more than just the committed few who are discussing Star Trek in an Internet message board.
To be honest I cannot say "The Next Generation" is "Berman Trek" because it was created by Gene Roddenberry who was in control for the first 4 seasons of the show. Rick Berman was a co-producer. Gene Roddenberry stepped in because he did not like the original concept for a new Trek show. Having Cadets running a new Enterprise and handling affairs of galactic importance was not going to work. He even stated in was like "Animal House" in space. I say Voyager and Enterprise were where Rick Berman was more involved controlling with what was going on with the shows. "Deep Space Nine" had several other good producers involved like Ira Steven Behr, Ronald D. Moore, and Micheal Pillar in the production staff and Rick Berman let these co-producers do the work. Several of the DS9 producers did not like "Voyager" and why they left at the end of DS9. Several more left because Rick Berman wanted to do a 22nd century / Pre-Federation show. If I had a choice, I would prefer if CBS tried to get several of these formal TNG/DS9 secondary producers (except Rick Berman) and get them involved with new Trek show or work with JJ Abrams and his writers.
Roddenberry may have been credited as an executive producer until he died, but he wasn't in charge for four years of Star Trek: The Next Generation. His influence seemed to wane each year and by the third season the show was more or less in the hands of Michael Piller and Rick Berman.
there is a relevant article up today: Why Isn’t There A New Star Trek TV Show Already? Saturday, October 22nd, 201 There are three potential reasons: and then each go into detail. i think though we've mentioned a number of these and more.
Occam's Razor time: the simplest explanation is that CBS has other stuff on its plate, and while some folks with clout have expressed interest (Kurtzman & Orci, Bryan Fuller, Seth MacFarlane), they haven't taken the next step to get the process rolling. Yes, a Star Trek series could be a success (especially if it is sensibly placed on cable). But someone actually has to do it for it to happen. Apparently everyone has other stuff they'd rather do instead. When I hear about someone getting a pitch meeting with CBS and being rejected despite making a perfectly viable pitch, then I'll start to think CBS has an unreasoning prejudice against Star Trek. And even in that situation, who knows? Maybe CBS liked the pitch but liked someone else's pitch for Yet Another Cop Show better. The "movie guys" are not working for CBS. If CBS wanted to do a TV series, Abrams & co couldn't do anything to stop them and would not be able to dictate or even influence the subject matter if CBS didn't want to listen. CBS does. Depends on where it's being shown. On CBS, a viable Star Trek series is hard to envision. On the CW, yes, it would lose its Trekness. On cable, especially such places as FX, AMC or Showtime, it could be more Treklike than ever, because those are the places where a series can express ideas without the series' intelligence getting in the way of ratings. That sentence should win some kind of prize for unintelligibly garbled syntax.
The relationship between Paramount and CBS, though legally separate, is probably pretty cozy. A popular Star Trek movie franchise not only means licensing dollars for CBS, but it also means lots of free promotion for their library of Star Trek content. There's a reason trailers for the 2009 movie were in front of each Blu-Ray release of the original Star Trek television series. Why would CBS sink a lot of money into a new series that might water down the brand and/or lose money for them?
Not even close. One of the reasons why CBS and Viacom (which owns Paramount) were separated in the first place was because their relationship had soured to the point where they were working to undermine one another. It's strictly business between CBS and Paramount now (I actually think CBS would sell the rights to make Trek movies to another studio if they could)...
I'd heard they hated each others' guts. But maybe money can smooth everyone's feathers... I'm sure they wouldn't do that, if they could help it. Nobody intends to create crap, do they? But I do hope they'd have the sense to know that Star Trek won't work on CBS or the CW, and that they should make it for Showtime instead, or maybe for an outside channel like FX or The Cartoon Network. As for losing money, that's always a risk, and unavoidable in a hit-driven business like TV. The least financially risky approach is probably doing a show for The Cartoon Network, aimed at adults and kids.
Which was when it got good... I doubt we will be seeing Trek back on TV just yet. Space opera is expensive and not that popular, which is why we keep getting tedious and uninteresting Earth based dross. It's cheap and strangely popular...
I don't think that now is the time to be thinking about another Star Trek show for a few important reasons. 1. The TV market doesn't look very promising given the focus on reality shows and the teen/20something market that is almost certainly not going to sit through a Star Trek show and the tendency to cancel at the slightest sign of difficulty. 2. I don't think there's any appetite for the idea with those parties, CBS or Paramount, that own any of the rights to the franchise. No Executive from either company has said anything publicly to that effect and there's no rumours of serious pitches, major players being involved or Roddenberry Jnr being asked for his take, which would be inevitable and polite if they were really gonna for it. 3. Just because the Abrams movie did will doesn't mean as TV show will. I am inclined to believe that the TV audience and the movie audience were really quite different in a lot of ways. Abrams gave us a scifi blockbuster, something that young people went to as a bit of interstellar escapism that featured some characters that they were somewhat aware of, as apposed to something very Trekky, you know, the kind of slightly ponderous piece that we normally get. Its a really popcorny, MTV-kinda audience, in-essence, people who have nothing in-common with me. Will these people sit and watch a TV show week-in-and-week-out? Doubt it very much? And 4. I doubt that many of the lessons will have been learned from the problems of Enterprise and to a lesser extent, Voyager. People keep saying that the show needs to "get back to exploration", well I thought that was the raison d'etre of Voyager, and Enterprise for that matter. Both struggled in the ratings and more importantly, struggled to be about anything at all, ships meandering merrily from one similar, inconsequential and never to be revisited planet to the next without really advancing the franchise or the genre as a whole one iota. Unless those response for managing the franchise are prepared to take account both of the changes in the communications market (the proliferation of downloading, i-gadgetry, smartphones etc) as well as the changes in the genre itself, how stories are told, serialisation, genuine and lasting character development and such, then not only is now not the time to make another Trek, but there will never be a time to make more Trek and we ought to take pleasure in the 700-hours of Trek and be happy that we've gotten that much because of a lot of things never get past 3 episodes now-a-days.
Yea, # 4 is the whole issue to me, but can you say there's already too much music in the world and we should have stopped after Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, the Beatles? Wow, that's alot of Bs. I have to agree that it has to define itself better yet remain ubdefinable. That's tough to pull off. Things depend on a setup and a pay off. ENT was more goofy than TOS ever was, but Serling said TOS reached too far into the way out and got to far away from being grounded in real, not hard science.
Forbes has an article up about 3 types of possible new Trek TV series http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/10/27/how-to-reboot-star-trek-for-modern-tv/
What's more interesting is the string of linked posts preceding that one talking about the problems with Star Trek airing right now. To save you following all the links from the posts here they are: http://spinoff.comicbookresources.com/2011/10/23/why-star-trek-might-not-work-for-todays-tv-execs/ http://www.themarysue.com/why-no-new-star-trek/ http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2011/10/25/352928/would-star-trek-work-on-television-today/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/26/making-star-trek-for-this-generation/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/10/27/how-to-reboot-star-trek-for-modern-tv/ The one counter I'd make is Terra Nova continues to feel like a classic Star Trek show. It may give slightly more hints at the long term arc/conspiracy and we haven't seen enough to know if they'll try a mix of styles yet, but the first 3 episodes feel like they could have been modified TNG scripts. If Terra Nova can succeed I still have hope for Star Trek(excluding the rights issues). Whether the people on this board would be happy with that or not is a separate story.
In a bad way! Jury's still way out on that one. It might just confirm the hunch that a pricey premise, whether dinos or space opera, that requires expensive SFX, just can't get the ratings needed to survive on broadcast. What we still don't know is how the mediocre (but not terrible) ratings compare with the budget, which has got to be much higher than average. I still think the most likely ways to get Trek back on TV are: use the Game of Thrones model and make it "space opera for grownups" on Showtime; or use The Clone Wars model and make an animated series for both adults and children on The Cartoon Network. And I'm a little surprised that Forbes would do an article on the topic without making even an attempt to address the business end of things: why is CBS apparently not interested in utilizing a valuable brand name? What channel would Star Trek be the most likely to thrive on? Which channel would be the best environment for each of the proposed ideas? Or better: how about an analysis of which channels are most likely to want a Star Trek series, and what concepts would work? What is the likelihood of Star Trek appearing on a non-CBS channel like The Cartoon Network, where the content is more likely to be appropriate? That approach might actually shed some new light on the topic, and would be vastly more useful than a laundry list of series ideas that we can (and have) thought of long before right here. Anyone can do that, but Forbes reporters can get interviews with CBS's honchos.
They're just hashing over a straw-man argument, that Star Trek is too "tonally unpredictible" for TV. Easily solved. Make it predictable. There's no law that says Star Trek must be a mix of drama and comedy, or episodic and serialized structures. A Star Trek series that went back to the old TOS formula of depicting Starfleet playing space cop, space soldier and space diplomat, with missions-of-the-week, would be tonally consistent, and even somewhat familiar to fans of police procedurals. The bigger issue is whether audiences would be too turned off by seeing blue people with antennae on TV. Yet fantasy seems to work well: Game of Thrones on cable, Once Upon a Time and maybe (pending next week's ratings) Grimm on broadcast. Why is that weird stuff okay but sci fi weird stuff is not?
The fantasy/science fiction element really has little to do with it. The issue is the one thing people (see: executives) are never willing to account for: quality. The shows you mentioned are of decent quality or better. On the other hand, most science fiction shows, despite the revelation of fans, have been overwhelmingly mediocre. Or, for comparison's sake, Thrones is an excellent television show; SGU was some of the worst TV I've ever seen. The fact that one is fantasy and and in sci-fi has nothing to do with why the former is successful and the latter is not. People also like to make the "time" argument as a sci-fi series may or may not work. It's total horse pucky. Or more to the point: Nemesis was a failure and ST09 was a success. Time had nothing to do with it. One was a well made film, the other was a giant pile of shit. Had ST09 come out and 02 and Nemesis in 09 the relative success would be the same. On that same token, whether a new Trek series comes out tomorrow or in ten years, if it's good, people will watch, if it sucks, people will turn it off.