2005: Star Trek 'died' when Enterpise ended 2009: JJ Abrams 'revives' the franchsie on the big screen 2017: Star Trek returns to TV with Discovery And the big wheel keeps on turning, but is anyone else a tad overwhelmed and struggling to keep up (not that I don't appreciate it)? (I love a list, me) TV SERIES - IN PROGRESS Star Trek: Discovery [Season 3 in production] Star Trek: Picard [first season days away from debuting] Star Trek: Lower Decks (ready this year) Star Trek: Nickelodeon (Prodigy? Also far along the line) TV SERIES - IN DEVELOPMENT Section 31 (next in line) Starfleet Academy (showrunners in place) Khan miniseries (could have been by Nicholas Meyer, unknown status) Pike Enterprise (overwhelmingly asked for on social media, CBS are aware) MOVIES Very much development hell. We potentially have: Noah Hawley - writing and potentially directing a new idea Tarantino Trek - QT doesn't want to direct but it doesn't mean Paramont could get it made by someone else Another idea - SJ Clarkson's film kind of dematerialised. Something else??
Struggling to care about most of the new shows... They just haven't managed to catch that "lighting in a bottle" thing.
I don't have a problem keeping up with things, but then I don't worry too much about stuff in development. So to me, there's just DIS, PIC, and things being talked about or put together later down the road...
This has to be great news. More developments of Star Trek projects show DISCO is a major success, and the Picard series will be as well.
They will. So it's a case of enjoy the next 2 years as much as possible before it all comes crashing down. 90's fan: Remember when there were 2 Trek series at the same time? 20's fan: Take your meds grandpa, we had 5.
I'm not in any way invested in the movies or animated shows but am certainly engaged by the other stuff coming to TV. Is there a danger of oversaturation ? Movies only come around every two or three years at most. The TV shows and animated series look like an attempt to have new content all year round to keep people signed up to the streaming service. At most we should be looking at one new something most (if not all) weeks. That doesn't seem too bad considering that 'Back in the day' we had TNG and DS9, then DS9 and Voyager running full 20+ episode seasons each year.
But season 2 was refined (to the point there is no unanimous consensus that it was awful and I say it's underrated), with season 3 being the bottled Essence Eau De Electrostatic Discharge everyone was wanting since season one. DSC has yet to be bottled. It's more a curate's egg and not everyone's favorite omelet either. But, yeah, not knowing at the time how seasons 2 and 3 would transpire, many viewers of the time would wonder if the show would actually get better or just recycle more of the same.
Market? In a conventional sense (though my definition is probably outdated)? This is more like a library where Trek, in all 6000 incarnations, is still very small compared to the total quantity sections and items within. Or maybe it is a market, one pays into it... but given advertisements are paid for by sponsors, who then raise the prices on every consumer item sold as well as boring us with condescending commercials, and most people do buy the commercial-laden rental, we're paying for it whether we want to or not so it's not really a market. At least for the basic rental subscription cost. May as well throw the money down the toilet.
I'd actually argue TNG's first season improved dramatically over its run as well. Out of the first eight episodes of TNG, there's only one decent episode (Where No One Has Gone Before) and one mediocre one (Encounter at Farpoint - where Q rescues the awfuk planet-side plot). Everything else was garbage - from the silly reprisal of a mediocre TOS episode in the second episode racist episode with the planet of black people, to the disastrous first introduction of the Ferengi, to Wesley getting condemned to die for falling into a flower patch, etc. Then, beginning with The Battle, season one gets...okay. It's still very flawed, but only Angel One descends into the depths of awfulness that the beginning of the season had.
I'm taking it as it comes. Discovery was ok, but not on par with the best shows of the past 15 years of golden age TV on HBO, etc. Picard is up next, the day after tomorrow. I am a little more up for this, as I remember watching Encounter at Farpoint in 87. The Trek world got a new crew and a new Enterprise. But the first couple of seasons of it werent that great. Still, I am cautiously optimistic about Picard, we'll see. As for the rest, I can wait.
It wasn't oversaturation that "killed" Trek no matter what Paramount tries to say about that era. It was keeping two people in charge of the franchise (Rick Berman & Brannon Braga) to the point they got so burned out; they were recycling some of the the exact same stories from TNG to VOY and ENT. At the end berman had been in charge for 18 years and 25 TV seasons (the majority of which were 26 episodes when the majority Network TV hour long prime times series at the time were doing 22 episodes a season. As long as they don't repeat THAT mistake (IE Keep Kurtzman and Co. way past their burnout date) - Trek should be fine. TNG Season 2 was crap, plain and simple. TNG didn't start getting near watchable until well into Season 3.
Braga was pretty honest in his comments that they were literally running out of stories to do by the time Enterprise was on. I mean if you start with the following precepts: Little to no serialization - meaning very little character growth and almost no stories predicated on what came before. Conflict between members of the main cast are kept to a minimum. Story partially or entirely takes place on a ship Story must find some way to utilize all of the ensemble cast, even if in very minor ways What are you really left with? Basicallt trying to come up with some new wacky sci-fi premise for the story of the week you haven't used before. In contrast, DS9 largely avoided this straitjacket, and as a result, it never really ran out of stories to be told. Looking at the last season, and even discounting the final serialized arc, basically every "standalone" they did that season in some way tied back to plot elements which were established in earlier seasons. They were not afraid to deepen and build the story over time. It might not have helped that much in terms of ratings, but it helped in terms of keeping the series fresh.
By that same argument - Once B&B handed ENT off to Manny Coto - we got new and interesting takes on things and saw situations presented somewhat differently. ENT was running on all cylinders by Season 4 - and if not for an upper management shakeup a year earlier, might have gotten a season 5.
Here’s how I would break down what we know about the upcoming movie projects: Star Trek 4 Director - S.J. Clarkson Kelvin Timeline - yes Chris Pine - yes Status - dead after failed renegotiation with Pine Untitled Star Trek Sequel Writer/Director - Noah Hawley Kelvin Timeline - no Chris Pine - no Quentin Tarantino’s Untitled Star Trek Project Writer - Mark L. Smith Kelvin Timeline - no Chris Pine - yes Status - QT doesn’t think he will direct, but expects this screenplay will still be made
Fyi, I've decided the official term for the overload of new Star Trek we'll be experiencing in 2 years' time is Trekkake.