TNG Seasons 1 through 3 were particulary dialed into the "humans from the 24th century are not only from a paradise but are going to lecture more primitive societies on how backwards they are while at the same time withholding any technology from those worlds."
Yes, early TNG can get particularly hard to take because of all the self righteous sermonizing about how much more advanced they are than the poor dumb unevolved clods of the 20th Century.
Yeah, part of the problem is that the early seasons of TNG treated the PD like a straitjacket, to the point where the crew sometimes seemed perfectly willing to let cultures suffer and die because any logical form of aid or communication would be considered "interference."
Peter David had a great observation in one of his old "But I Digress" columns in
The Comics Buyer's Guide that Vietnam killed a lot of the fun of
Star Trek. TOS reflected the cockiness of an America that had won World War II and was an unquestioned world leader. On TOS, Kirk would beam down to an alien planet, spend about 20 minutes there, and go, "Okay, I think I've got the gist of how things work here. Here's how we're going to change things..." And it was all okay because Kirk, and by extension the
Enterprise and Starfleet, was almost always right. The Prime Directive was that annoying thing you'd discount in one way or the other, because it got in the way of the fun stuff.
TNG reflected the cautiousness of post-Vietnam America. "We've got to be very careful, and not do the wrong thing here, because we might he wrong and really screw things up, the way we did in Vietnam." Suddenly, the Prime Directive was the thing that was always brought up to illustrate that we
shouldn't interfere, and that was portrayed as the right and proper way to do things, even if it resulted in a planet's suffering and destruction.
