Also, a coherent ratings point: I've seen the ratings charts for all the Trek shows, and accept that they all have a decline. But I haven't seen a control group--how do VOY, DS9, and ENT stack up against other shows? What's the expectation for a TV show these days?
That's an excellent question.
Well, let's consider
Friends, a successful show that aired during the turn of the millennium. That's what a successful show looks like: overall, it
added viewers.
ER is another example of success. It had a steady run for ten seasons, including over the millennium, and started on its downward trend only in its eleventh year.
Expectation is another matter. Most shows aren't successful, so by definition expectation would be failure. But if you mean, what would be expected in order to be considered successful, or in other words what's the difference between success and failure, the basic answer is
ya gotta pay the bills. It's pretty well known that science fiction shows present unique problems in terms of budget that other types of shows don't have to contend with, so other shows might be able to get by on less. It's pretty clear, though, that a steady decline in viewership is unsustainable.
Trek apologists like to point to competition from cable and the Internet to shift blame for the ratings decline away from
Trek's shortcomings. The fact is, as demonstrated, there were
successful shows with increasing or steady audiences that aired during the same period, so competition from other sources was not an
inherent problem in the television market at that time. Given what a success looks like, perhaps such competition was only a factor for the failures.
Another one of the popular whipping boys for
Trek's failure is franchise fatigue, AKA an oversupply. Unfortunately, the data doesn't really support that, unless by
an oversupply one means "an oversupply of shows that people don't want to watch".
One can't even blame science fiction. Here's a third example, this one from science fiction:
The X-Files. The ratings for this show have a more ballistic trajectory. Unlike the post-TNG
Trek shows, its ratings actually went up for the first half of its run, and they didn't significantly dip below where they started until the final season. I'm not an expert on The X-Files, so I can't offer well-informed explanations for why it peaked in the middle, but drop-off in the final season is fairly clearly due to the departure of Duchovny. I would suspect ossification of formula as the most likely suspect for peaking in the middle, though.
By the way, adhering to ossified formulas is one of the main problems with all TV
Trek, from late TNG onward.
