Why Didn't DS9 Have as Many Viewers as TNG?

[VulcanMindBlown]

Was the fact that it wasn't happy-clappy, as William Shatner said....???

It did have some really hardcore fans.

Now, pretty much everything mirrors DS9, what accounts for both things to be true....???

 

[Computer Voice]

Probably lots of reasons...
- more sci fi on tv in general
- more tv stations to choose from
- split the audience - some people didn't have time for 2 Trek shows at once
- grittier feel not what people expected based on TNG so may have tuned out

 

[BillJ]

Some people drift away from TV shows, even if they are good or hits. Usually, as a show ages more people leave than are interested in picking up midway.

Sliding ratings many times aren't an indicator of quality, just of people being tired and moving on.

 

[Nebusj]

In my case, I had new obligations --- college, mostly, and stuff like being on the student newspaper --- and it required more of an investment in time to catch episodes. And when there were enough episodes in a row that felt all right but nothing special I realized I wasn't enjoying it enough for the trouble involved. (Not just a Deep Space Nine problem, mind; this is also when I realized I was all right with missing Next Generation episodes too.)

Afterwards when I sampled it seemed to always be some freaking time-travel anomaly nonsense which, Trials and Tribble-ations excepted, I just could not get interested in. Maybe if I happened to catch the show other weeks it would've left a better impression. But that's why I never got into the show enough to be a serious fan.

 

[Paradise City]

Over-saturated market generally and too much Trek on specifically. Making DS9 dark was a good move.

 

[Arpy]

I think TV viewership overall went down over the past few decades. There's a lot out there and people are watching their owned preferred niche shows. DS9 didn't help itself if it wanted big ratings going more melodramatic. I think Berman and executives didn't know what the future was going to bring, focusing more on lighter (and IMHO cheesier) VOY, and let Behr do whatever. DS9 generally got better ratings than VOY, so despite its discordant tone, it was let be.

 

[Paradise City]

DS9 took a long while to "find itself" to flog a cliche. Many of its good/bad early episodes weren't audience friendly.

Also TNG was quite novel when it first came out. It's FX were hitherto only seen (by me anyway) in the cinema. But by the time the show ended, there was a number of shows doing that and the FX novelty had worn off.

Even without watching an episode, going from the Enterprise to a grubby old space station is quite a climb down. So there's a disadvantage there in marketing this to new people even before one episode was watched.

The media landscape was changing meaning that if TNG had started a few years later it probably wouldn't have enjoyed as much success as it did.

 

[chicagodavepsn]

A lot of people might of got turned off because of the show not being set in a starbase and not in a starship. I personally found it be my second favorite show behind tng. Whats interesting is bablyon 5 was airing around the same time i wonder if that was drawing away some viewers.

 

[timtonruben359]

I don't think there is one single reason why DS9 wasn't as successful as TNG in terms of viewership. First off viewership for TNG was already starting to decline somewhat when DS9 first came on the air added to that, the TV landscape had changed and there was a lot more sci-fi/fantasy shows on the air by that point - remember TNG was the show the showed studios and networks the sci-fi could actually become a hit.

DS9 was very different from TNG in terms of tone and style. DS9 was slower paced, darker, and less action oriented than TNG and I think that turned a lot of fans off. DS9 took a few seasons to find its footing but unlike TNG, DS9 had more competition including TNG itself.

When TNG went off the air, DS9 really started improving but fans who had been turned off by the earlier years of the show didn't come back they instead waited for VOY to come out and that hurt DS9 too.

 

[VulcanMindBlown]

TOS and TNG seemed to have caught on pretty quickly for the reasons that you said. Most casual fans have a fleeting knowlegde of those, rather than the people here, who mostly like DS9.

DS9 took a long while to "find itself" to flog a cliche. Many of its good/bad early episodes weren't audience friendly.

I believe that it is called for a TV show to "grow it's beard."

 

[BillJ]

TOS and TNG seemed to have caught on pretty quickly for the reasons that you said.

TOS was almost cancelled after each of the first two seasons. It didn't catch on until syndication in the '70's.

 

[USS Triumphant]

I'd go with a combination of some of the things already mentioned - the station setting rather than a starship and the darker tone weren't what people expected/thought-they-wanted, and TV in general was diversifying so that individual shows were starting to get lower ratings, period - and add: lack of the name recognition from having an "Enterprise" on the show, and the fact that the Bajoran people are BOR-ING. I think the Cardassians-as-Nazis thing worked well, but I think the Bajorans would have worked better if they had been modeled more on, say, the French resistance, rather than... the direction the show actually took. At the very least, not making almost all of their outfits look like various shades of mud would have helped. The station could have been lit a bit better, too - just because the tone was meant to be darker didn't mean the interior lighting needed to be literally darker.

I'm not saying that I'm definitely right, but I would find it very interesting to see how DS9 would have done in a parallel universe where the only changes were a little more light and color, and maybe if the Defiant had shown up a lot closer to the start. Perhaps Sisko and O'Brien could have started work on building it without permission, even, so we could have seen some problems shaken out, and the unauthorized nature of the construction and of them having some of the equipment they were installing on her could have been a plot point sometimes. Might have made Smiley building another one later seem just a teensy bit more feasible, too.

 

[MacLeod]

As others have already mentioned, the gneral decline in viewership as audiances had other things to do, perhaps more stations/shows to choose from.

If it was just about it being set onbaord a spacehsip then "Why did VOY in genreal have fewer viewers than DSN?"

 

[Paradise City]

Well, Emissary got a strong viewership ranking, IIRC. But they plugged the TBOBW angle in the promotion including pictures of Stewart in Borg regalia and people thought it was going to be that kind of action-driven thing, when it in fact unfolded in a somewhat more sedentary manner in the first few seasons.

 

[Lance]

The fact that it was a spin-off was also a factor.

As much as some spin-offs become more popular than the parent shows, or "as" popular, a greater number either under-achieve or crash-and-burn. Viewers do find them wearing, if they don't set out a compelling identity of their own quickly. DS9 certainly did that, but (arguably) took too long to nail that down. By the second or third season they were really cooking with gas, but that may have been too late for some.

Deep Space Nine also had a few hang-ups from the start that some viewers may have found hard to take. Being set in a stationary place gave viewers the feeling of a place where nothing much happens (maybe they should've had the Defiant from the start), and the pre-production buzz talked extensively about it being a 'darker and grittier' Star Trek, which may also have turned some away. It was also the first Star Trek to be made by anybody other than Roddenberry (the TOS-movies notwithstanding, but then they used characters and concepts that Roddenberry had created), so in some ways there was the sense of 'other interests' making their own Star Trek out of whole cloth.

I've often thought Mad Magazine gets things quite right in their parodies, usually made very early in a show's run but in retrospect their analysis proves prophetic. In TNG they made a lot of it's lack of drama among the main cast, with DS9 much was made of the tedium of being on a space station rather than aboard a starship. That was a kind of the 'finger on the pulse' about what the wider viewers at home might have been feeling about DS9 in those early years before it "got better".

The addition of the Defiant immeasurably gave the show more scope (without losing it's core style), and "Way of the Warrior" feels in so many ways like an attempt to redefine the series, almost like a second 'pilot episode' for a whole new phase. Even those of us who love Deep Space Nine would acknowledge there's a night-and-day feeling between the first three seasons the the last four, and it extends way beyond simply adding Worf to the cast. The types of stories they could tell changed.

That said, I believe "Emissary" was a ratings hit straight out of the gate. So if viewership went down, then there may be other reasons.....

 

[Arpy]

I never quite buy DS9's issue was it's stationary setting. The show didn't spend it's time on Bajor or the station any more than TNG spent on the Enterprise, and the series still got better ratings than VOY which never stuck around anywhere too long. I think that's one of those Berman excuses like "there are no new stories to tell" with the franchise overall. What he meant is that the folks running the franchise were themselves struggling to come up with new ideas.

Also, look at the rating chart I linked earlier. Here it is again. DS9 fell rather precipitously after its premier and then continued well below TNG's ratings while both shows were on the air. That wasn't market shrinkage.

Also, look at the pattern for all subsequent series as well. They all begin with major viewership and general audience curiosity but fail to hold on to it after a few weeks. To me that again says TPTB just didn't do a very good job of creating a universe people felt curious enough to revisit.

Come to think of it, look at the finales too. VOY got a little spike for its, but for the most part, general audiences weren't curious to see how most Trek series ended. I think with TNG, it lent itself to being more of a touchstone for the popular culture to create its best hope for the future, and when it ended, people wanted to see where they were as much as the ship was. To its credit, TNG's finale was fantastic and probably better than all its later movies.

 

[locutus101]

Was the fact that it wasn't happy-clappy, as William Shatner said....???

It did have some really hardcore fans.

Now, pretty much everything mirrors DS9, what accounts for both things to be true....???

Ds9's first season wasn't very good. It contained a few clunkers.

 

[Arpy]

Ds9's first season wasn't very good. It contained a few clunkers.

I dunno, the first season got better ratings than all later ones. It may not have been as flashy as Captain Hawk waging WWII In Space!, but there's some really damn good episodes in those first couple seasons. That it had a few clunkers can be said of any series, and, really, any season. For every "If Wishes Were Horses" there's a "Profit & Lace"!

 

[locutus101]

I dunno, the first season got better ratings than all later ones. It may not have been as flashy as Captain Hawk waging WWII In Space!, but there's some really damn good episodes in those first couple seasons. That it had a few clunkers can be said of any series, and, really, any season. For every "If Wishes Were Horses" there's a "Profit & Lace"!

You think "If wishes were horses" is an example of a good show? Really?

 

[φ of π]

The first I'd ever even heard of Deep Space Nine in the UK was seeing VHS tapes of it in my local entertainment superstore. My first thought was "Is this the 9th in a series?"

So I can tell you from my experience that DS9 probably didn't have as many viewers as TNG simply because nobody had heard of it.