I'd say it became far more relevant when studios started to reboot everything. Before then, no one really cared. It started becoming contentious when prequels were a thing (Phantom Menace, Enterprise, etc...) and then became blown up by the time reboots got thrown around.
Other way around. "Reboots" (i.e. remakes) used to be the rule, not the exception. Nobody cared about continuity back then; even in ongoing film or radio series, the continuity from one installment to the next was cursory at best. And when an older work was remade or a series restarted, there was rarely any continuity with earlier versions. Even if they kept the same actors, they didn't bother with story continuity -- e.g. when Universal revived the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes film series, they updated it from a Victorian setting to the present day and had Holmes fight Nazi spies and saboteurs. Once TV came along and you started to get TV series adaptations of movies, they were almost never in the same continuity as the movies, even when they superficially pretended to be. Either they'd just restart the story from scratch, as the
Logan's Run and
Planet of the Apes TV series did, or they'd pretend to be sequels to the movies while altering the continuity of the movies freely to fit the show's needs, as
Starman, Alien Nation, and
Stargate SG-1 did. Sometimes they'd just be loose approximations of the movies that inspired them, like
M*A*S*H, the sitcom
Alice (loosely based on the film
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore) or
The Dukes of Hazzard (loosely based on the film
Moonrunners from the same creator).
Sure, sometimes you'd get a feature film that was a direct continuation of an ongoing TV series with the same cast, like
Batman (1966) or the two
McHale's Navy films or the two
Dark Shadows films; but they often had a borderline connection to the shows' continuities at best, insofar as the shows even bothered with continuity.
By the '70s, we had multiple TV "shared universes" of shows and their spinoffs, and then in the '80s (if not earlier) we started to see "Next Generation" revivals of classic shows like
Star Trek and
Kung Fu and TV-movie revivals/reunions of things like
Perry Mason, Columbo, The Rockford Files, The Man from UNCLE, McCloud, the bionic shows, etc. -- but they also tended to play fast and loose with the details of past continuity such as it was, retconning in new backstory or inventing "returning foes from the old days" who'd never actually appeared in the original shows. Few people would've batted an eye back then if ST:TNG had turned out to be a soft reboot only superficially pretending to be in continuity with TOS but freely rewriting the details of the universe; indeed, it's been reported that that's what Gene Roddenberry intended it to be, and that it was later, TOS-fan producers like Ron Moore who brought it more closely into line with TOS continuity.
I have an interesting take on this; if not the episodes, then I like for the characters themselves to be serialized. (IMO) One of the weaknesses of the episodic style of Trek is that it tends to leave characters limited with little growth.
Not really. TNG and a lot of shows that followed it demonstrated that you can effectively balance episodic plots-of-the-week with ongoing character growth and evolution. There's a difference between whether a specific
story continues and whether its
effect on the characters continues. The problem with TOS was that once its stories were over, the characters forgot about them by the next week, so they had no long-term consequences. But in TNG and other later shows, the stories came to an end but their effect on the characters was allowed to endure. Picard remained haunted by his Borg assimilation. Worf's discommendation had a lasting impact on him. Tasha's death had a lasting impact on Data. And so on. The plots were resolved but the characters were changed by them.
I personally consider that an ideal balance, and it's been somewhat lost in the modern obsession with plot serialization, where the emphasis on plot twists and big mysteries and secrets to be unfolded has elevated plot too far above character and theme.
In
Voyager season 2, the writers tried to do a serialized story arc with Michael Jonas spying for the Kazon, but it didn't work out as well as they hoped, and I remember Jeri Taylor (IIRC) saying in an interview that their mistake was that they chose to do a plot arc that came from outside the ship instead of a character arc that came from within. Maybe that's why the biggest serialized threads from then on were character-driven -- Seven of Nine's evolution from Borg to human, Paris and Torres's romance, the Doctor's pursuit of personal growth.
Before I started watching DS9, TNG used to be my favorite. Then one time while watching reruns I noticed everything happens the same way. They usually have an adventure, save the day, then forget about it and off to the next one next week. Sometimes it's so crazy a red shirt is mutilated or something and they're laughing at the end of the episode.
They have what is supposed to be very serious relationships, and then by the next week it's totally forgotten and never mentioned again. Serious, crazy incidents happen and are rarely talked about again. It's like the characters have a constant memory reset button.
That was the norm in TV writing for decades. Episodes were designed to be aired in any order and to be comprehensible to viewers who may have missed previous episodes. TNG came along at a time when we were starting to see more continuity in the sense that events from one episode would more often be remembered and called back in later episodes, but it was usually an intermittent thing -- one episode might have a sequel a few months down the road (like the Klingon politics thread), or a recurring villain (like Q) might come back once a season. Of course there was stronger serialization in nighttime soaps like
Dallas and
Knots Landing or dramas like
Hill Street Blues, but action-adventure shows preferred a more episodic format where the continuity was more an occasional thing.
Rather, it's being remade with Matthew Rhys in the title role. It's been reported already that it's sort of a "Young Perry Mason" origin story with Perry as a private detective, and it sounds from that article like Lithgow's character will employ young Perry in the same way the older Perry employs Paul Drake.
I think canon became a hot button issue when DSC was set in the Prime timeline. They could've avoided all this by setting it in the Kelvin verse (or another alt-timeline). For sure, some were unhappy with Enterprise and it's alteration of canon, but nothing like the anger over Discovery.
No, it was
exactly like the anger over
Discovery -- probably even worse, because it was the first time fandom had to cope with a prequel so it was more unprecedented. I was there the whole time, and I remember how fierce the outrage was from the purists.
And no, they wouldn't have avoided the hate by setting it in Kelvin, because the purists hated Kelvin just as fanatically. Just as the purists back in the late '80s loathed and condemned TNG. We've already been through this a dozen times in this thread --
nothing about this is new. It happens every single time Star Trek
is revived.
