Brutal Strudel said:
^^^That's for sure. And they pretty much lost interest in TNG, too--they weren't exactly champing at the bit for the last two movies.
Taking TNG off of television was the biggest mistake made with the Franchise since NBC cancelled TOS.
At the time, it obviously looked sensible to the studio - costs rose every season, the interest of local stations in back-end syndication had an upper limit, and so forth.
At that time and in the following years, of course, it became increasingly common for successful shows on the networks to stretch their runs out past ten years even in the face of mounting costs; many of these shows went into back-end runs while still in production.
And no one at the time anticipated big bucks from DVD sellthrough, either.
TNG could have evolved - there could have been cast changes (similar to shows like "M*A*S*H" or "E.R.") as necessary to keep it going.
Now, again, at the time this probably didn't seem desirable - ratings do tend to decrease over time, after all, even for the most successful of long-running shows ("E.R." became a shadow of what it was) - but that was because Paramount believed that the alternative was to launch follow-on shows (starting with DS9) that might be as successful or more successful than TNG. After all, the property could be tweaked and "improved" in ways intended both to simplify production and control costs and to enhance the drama of the setting.
That didn't work - not commercially, at least. The first sequel series started losing viewers within a few weeks and never stopped. Most TNG viewers just liked TNG, not "Star Trek."
The second mistake in judgment was the assumption that TNG could segue into films successfully. The studio was looking to TOS as the model - no one seems to have asked themselves "how many
other successful TV shows have an afterlife in movies?"
It's hard to get the majority of people to pay to see something in a movie that they've been getting for free (more or less) every week in their living rooms. It happens rarely, with shows that have been out of production for quite a number of years - not shifting from a free medium to a pay venue in
less than a year.
Let's see how the "Sex And The City" movie does. I'm sincerely interested and unprejudiced about the likely outcome, though I've never paid any attention to the show.
TOS may still be a unique phenomenon in TV history. TNG most definitely was
not - it was simply a very successful TV series with a loyal following, and what happened when it went off the air was what happens to the audiences of almost all successful TV series when they end...the viewers go elsewhere and forget about the show. These days, maybe they collect it on DVD. Maybe they sample sequel series featuring one or more of the characters, maybe they sample new series featuring one or more of the actors playing
other characters. Neither of those strategies has a very high success rate. For every "Frasier" there are dozens of shows like "AfterMASH," "Phyllis," "Joey" (not to mention however many pilots were made featuring the supporting cast of "Seinfeld" before Julia Louis-Dreyfus managed to keep a show on the air for more than one season).
Addendum: let's remember that the movie-going public wasn't champing at the bit for the last two TOS movies, either. One bombed and the last was a disappointment to the studio, which hastened the switch-over to a new strategy (the TNG movies). So TOS, "iconic" as it was and is, managed only two more movies than TNG before it crashed.
