Eh, still a somewhat valid question, I think. Regardless of the obvious example. The MACOs were a neat addition to Enterprise, but they were a side story, their main character less than a main character. To run a film squarely on that kind of group would be interesting.
Would TPTB dare retool NuTrekSeries into something more realistic by removing the Command crew from the top starring spots, limiting their role to Bridge Operations and allow crew members from the lower decks to fulfill mission mandates like the modern branches of Service? The "Stars" could inhabit other divisions such as Diplomatic, Scientific, Medical and Engineering. When it all breaks down and goes to hell then the Muscle is called into action. Could fans deal with such changes?
Do any shows focus on the peons? Roy in accounting has an important job in NCIS but I doubt it would translate well into dramatic television.
Star Trek doesn't focus on the peons because what they do is boring. No one cares about Ensign Duffy and the Jefferies Tube maintenance team.
It's about making the personalities engaging so much so that you care about them and then dumping them into apocalyptic scenarios or scenarios that would really test them and terrify us if we found ourselves in such scenarios. You got that, you're in business. And you could do that with anyone whatever their rank.
If it's about the characters, and it's well-written, then it doesn't matter if the person's day job is boring or not. Kor
In Grimm, Sleepy Hollow, Limitless, and many other PP's, for examples, peons do the work while their 'Captains' mostly fly their desks. In the Navy, do ship Captains man the guns or fly sorties or do they simply give orders to peons who execute their orders. Anyway I really don't care one way or the other. It just seemed the logical direction to go with the thread next based on the newly added link above.
They dealt with DS9 just fine, which was a marked change. Granted, some would argue it wasn't the strongest at first and the addition of the Defiant made it more like other shows. But, it still managed to survive. I agree with this point. I don't mind watching lower ranks on any show (beat officers, lower level officer, etc) as long as the characters are engaging and interesting.
Cool. Treat the bridge the way the bridge treats Starfleet Command: contact them only when they need orders to disobey.
I'd like to cite a non-Trek example. Imagine a show about some corporation in New York, where all they show is people who sit at their desks, get up for a coffee break a couple times a day, answer phones, hold business meetings, type up documents, work on projects, and then get on the bus to commute home. Now contrast that with Mad Men. Good drama is about people, not the minutiae of their particular professions, whatever those may be. Kor
MadMen revolved around Draper, who did more whoring than he did creative. The show wasn't about what happened in the office. It was "Where will Don put his dick next?" Like mentioned somewhere else (this thread?), I don't know if I would like a show about the underlings. The lower in rank you get the more specific your job gets. The Captain is in charge of the ship. The LtCdr is in charge of security. Ensign Ricky is in charge of polishing the phasers on deck 11. So to show any sort of cohesive drama you'd have to have a cast so large (and each one adjusting their own cog in the machine) that you wouldn't really care about the 20 ensigns because they'd only get a few minutes of screen time a piece. You only get so much time to tell your story before the credits roll...thats why the same 8 people do everything.
Plus the most common thread of Star Trek isn't a ship, it isn't exploring or free love or whatever - its a CAPTAIN. One person with the weight of the show on his or her shoulders. What's the iconic names in Trek? Kirk, Spock, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer Spock gets in that list because he's SPOCK, but the rest are the captains. The person in the big chair, the head honcho. That's what Star Trek is built on.
You forgot "Enterprise" - the other character. Star Trek *is* a ship ... of characters. It's implied in the title.
Foundation man, foundation. The foundation (what the show is built upon) is the captain. Not Ensign Foley with her very interesting job of running the ship's botanical gardens.
I don't know. As noted, cop shows and medical shows and legal shows get away with making the older authority figure a secondary character all the time. "You heard me, Detective Foley. You're off the case!" The problem you run into on TREK, however, is that the issues at stake are often larger than catching one killer or saving one patient or winning one court case. If an entire planet is at stake, or the Klingons are on the brink of war, or there's a thorny Prime Directive issue to dealt with, those decisions are properly going to fall on the captain's shoulders most of the time. Unless you keep contriving circumstances in which Ensign Foley has to make First Contact with an potentially hostile alien species and, week after week, can't communicate with the captain . . . . Plus, unless it's made very clear to them from Day One that they are NOT the star, the actor playing the captain is going to want to get their character in on the action more and not get stuck worrying on the bridge every episode while the rest of the cast get all the good scenes!
In essence, you would have to make the stories smaller and more compact if you were going to focus on the "Lower Decks" characters. I don't think the Trek framework would make those stories interesting enough to hold a traditional audience's attention. Now at some point I imagine the new show will have an episode centered on one or more of the secondary characters, but that will by necessity be after the central or main characters have been developed - especially the captain or commander.
Do you think that's also a necessity of Star Trek? It has often been that way, particularly in the movies, but does it have to stay that way? Will people tune out because the stakes aren't high enough? Or that the only dangers are to the main characters, and not some much larger population?