There are waaaay too many bad shows on TV that do well in the ratings for me to ever believe that quality = success.
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.
Game of Thrones is on HBO and
SGU was on SyFy. And that, much more than the category, premise or any other factor, is why the former is great and the latter sucks. If only HBO, Showtime, AMC or FX would do a space opera...
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.
I agree with that - the argument that
Star Trek needs to "lay fallow" to build up demand is nonsense. Demand does not simply come out of nowhere; it is manufactured by a corporation that has a product to sell.
When Paramount had a
Star Trek movie product to sell, directed by JJ Abrams, they generated demand for it. And fortunately the product was good enough that word of mouth didn't kill it off, but the lack of
Star Trek in the theaters or on TV right now is not somehow magically increasing demand. Just the opposite, if anything awareness and demand is diminishing as people find other things to occupy their minds with, in the absence of any well funded demand-generating campaigns.
When Paramount has the next movie to sell,
then we will see an upsurge in demand. That would be the smart time to launch a TV series as well, to ride the coattails of Paramount's efforts.