First let me say that I enjoy TOS and TNG. I've recently started rewatching the reruns of TNG on the sci-fi channel and I'd forgotten how much I loved the show. That said, I think that Star Trek started going off the rails the moment it started looking backward instead of forward.
TOS and TNG are good on their own merrits, but they represent a particular time and place. Their quality and success are the result of a number of planned and unplanned decisions/chances. Despite their similarities to one another, the two shows are fundamentally different. When you go back and look at TNG from its inception, you realize that it was never trying to be TOS. In some sense it was the exact opposite of its predecessor. TNG took the Trek franchise in a fundamentally new direction from TOS and its subsequent movies. GR and the producers never tried to make it TOS (which earned them a lot of flak from fans intitially). Yet TNG found its own voice and added to the larger tapestry of the Trek Universe.
DS9 was always envisioned as something of a radical departure from either series. It was intentionally designed to be something new. Again, the producers were looking forward and trying fundamentally new ideas. Interestingly enough, DS9, rather than "boldly going," took the pre-existing trek universe and gave it depth. Instead of exploring new races and ideas every week, it took ideas shown in both TOS and TNG and explored them to their logical conclusion. It was the same trek, just in a different direction.
I think that Star Trek started to really go wrong when this meme of "recapturing TOS or TNG" started to take hold. Thus Voyage and Enterprise, two shows that should have felt nothing like anything that preceeded them, felt more like warmed over Trek. The characters would not have seemed out of place on the Enterprise (more precisely the Enterprise D).
To me, for any spinoff to be successful, it needs to offer viewers something new. It can have hits of familiarity, but must take the show in a new direction. Star Trek stopped doing that, and instead scrambled to make a product reminicent of what came before. Risk was avoided at all cost (its sad that Enterprise only started taking risk when it was on choping block).
TOS and TNG are good on their own merrits, but they represent a particular time and place. Their quality and success are the result of a number of planned and unplanned decisions/chances. Despite their similarities to one another, the two shows are fundamentally different. When you go back and look at TNG from its inception, you realize that it was never trying to be TOS. In some sense it was the exact opposite of its predecessor. TNG took the Trek franchise in a fundamentally new direction from TOS and its subsequent movies. GR and the producers never tried to make it TOS (which earned them a lot of flak from fans intitially). Yet TNG found its own voice and added to the larger tapestry of the Trek Universe.
DS9 was always envisioned as something of a radical departure from either series. It was intentionally designed to be something new. Again, the producers were looking forward and trying fundamentally new ideas. Interestingly enough, DS9, rather than "boldly going," took the pre-existing trek universe and gave it depth. Instead of exploring new races and ideas every week, it took ideas shown in both TOS and TNG and explored them to their logical conclusion. It was the same trek, just in a different direction.
I think that Star Trek started to really go wrong when this meme of "recapturing TOS or TNG" started to take hold. Thus Voyage and Enterprise, two shows that should have felt nothing like anything that preceeded them, felt more like warmed over Trek. The characters would not have seemed out of place on the Enterprise (more precisely the Enterprise D).
To me, for any spinoff to be successful, it needs to offer viewers something new. It can have hits of familiarity, but must take the show in a new direction. Star Trek stopped doing that, and instead scrambled to make a product reminicent of what came before. Risk was avoided at all cost (its sad that Enterprise only started taking risk when it was on choping block).
