Why was Enterprise received so poorly?
- Thread starter dcm
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No, it doesn't.This is a show, post-WW3, post-UE, but you have two big Americans, a British guy, a Japanese woman, a spacer (of unknown background, granted), a weird alien doctor, and a vulcan attache to represent the spearhead feeler of Earth, in the real-life context of post-9/11 reactionary politics and America swinging its big stick around (which as we saw lead it to itself in the face, hard, for the next twenty years).
It was pointed out when ENT came out and holds true now. Shove Phlox out the airlock, replace him with a Earth doc from somewhere and few would care if Archer or Reed (or both) were also jettisoned for more varied billings. What did we get from Phlox being a weird alien? UE doesn't have a love affair with Denobula (C-12 not withstanding, being a nice piece of worldbuilding even if it was for the augments, ugh) and we get a list of war crimes and ethical questions.
Calling out the disproportion of white and male as 'racist' however is a dog whistle for yourself, if anything. Oh champion of the white man, save your crocodile tears for Twitter or Truth.Social.
As for Enterprise, I still maintain having, in addition to a more varied crew and anything but the Akiraprise or anything looking remotely 23rd or 24th century - hemming it in for more 'local' affairs - which it did do, in spades, but could had fleshed out SolSys and its colonies more - would had helped, axe the Klings entirely, the Romulans should be the big mounting threat, not the xindi or Suliban or TCW, with a sub-antagonist to replace the xindi being a more local race - maybe Kzinti, maybe not, but something of that nature.
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We know.
My young wife who is plumbing the past for old movies she's never seen before, just asked me if "House Party" is any good?
Are you sure this was meant for me? I've never heard of 'house party'.
House Party is a 90s movie with an almost completely black cast, some might even call it a black movie, which is true but sorta racist language now.
It's the other side of the spectrum.
Kid n play and Martin Laurence.
Good movie.
Although House Party may have aged just as poorly as 16 candles, it's been a while since I saw it last.
Who said otherwise? But that's an irrelevant point considering that nobody in the ENT cast was both white and Latino.
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House Party is a 90s movie with an almost completely black cast, some might even call it a black movie, which is true but sorta racist language now.
It's the other side of the spectrum.
Kid n play and Martin Laurence.
Good movie.
Although House Party may have aged just as poorly as 16 candles, it's been a while since I saw it last.
Sure, but I don't want the other side of the spectrum either. The NX-01 should had represented Earth by being a myriad crew, not a homogenous one.
Even in a speculative nuclear war that wipes out the Global North, the powers that'll arise could be everything from Argrentine, Brazilian, West, South and East African, Indian, Iranic, South East Asian, Indonesian....
We know that the Global North(west?) sort of comes out of Star Trek's WW3 okay while the east is hammered to shit , and while I can assume and concoct a lot of excuses for that, Enterprise as a series had the best position so far to explain what happened and why Earth and Starfleet is like it is, but frankly it feels like it doesn't.
10 years of canabalism globally.
Maybe Black people taste better than white people?
After 10 years of exclusively eating your friends and neighbours, suddenly Space Vegetarians show up and suggest a popular change in diet.
Space potatoes for all!!!!
What about the actors who were cast for their roles because of their talent and artistry? Don Bellisario said that he picked Scott Bakula, then a virtual unknown in Hollywood, because of his audition. His talent. By the time he was chosen for ENT, he had a slew of awards and a reputation as one of the most likable and professional actors in the business. And a hit sci-fi show on his resume, and a loyal, demographically desirable fan base.
It's not always, only, about discrimination or bias. The performing arts are about artistry. Star Trek was always conceived to celebrate diversity, which was alien and groundbreaking in the 60s. Were they perfect at it? Are they now? No. Perfection is an ideal to shoot for, not a practical reality. Hollywood is a business too. At least they're trying to shoot for it. That's why Trek has always stood out. The biggest message Trek delivered, right out of the gate, was hope for a better future. And IDIC.
Why was ENT "received so poorly," as the OP put it? I would give most of the blame to intrusive network suits who messed with the concept, being stuck on that network with its non-Trek demographic viewing audience, horrible advertising and PR, constant preemptions so the show couldn't find its audience when it was hitting its stride, being on the air before DVR ratings were counted, complacent showrunners and writers (not Manny Coto, he rocked), a lame-duck 4th season where they tried to jam in all the cool moments they had planned for the next 4 years, and dropping a lot of good storylines in the process.
Plus, happiness = reality divided by expectations. It didn't fulfill the promise of its premise. But it was going in the right direction. I would have loved seeing 3 more seasons, the Romulan War, Trip and T'Pol figuring out how to be happy together, Hoshi taking the conn more, Mayweather doing anything more.
For me, ENT was not a poor show. (Go watch one episode of "Green Acres" on MeTV, I dare you.) I enjoyed ENT, even with its flaws. I think it had some outstanding episodes, and great character moments. I love TOS too, even with the cringe sexism - it's a creature of its time. That show teaches us now what society still needed to learn, back then. It was also "received poorly" in 1966, called absurd and weird, and the ratings sucked. Go figure.
They always say that, and then they cast white guys at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the population. Forgive me if I'm skeptical.
And what desirable demographic is that?
By the time ENT premiered in 2001, UPN had been home to a Star Trek show for over six years. What demographic are you talking about if UPN's demographic was "non-Star Trek?"
UPN was the problem, they only had access to 90 percent of the market, which seems like a lot to me.
So until the final episode of Enterprise, they were getting less than a million viewers per episode and frankly deserved cancellation for those numbers even if the show was getting better, but according to this quote above, it was impossible to get more than 8 million viewers on UPN, when that's lower than what TNG was getting in it's heyday on Syndication.
Syndication is a lot of $ucking around, and they assumed that UPNs base was going to grow over time, but it did not.
Voyager cost 1.2 million dollars to make an episode, until DS9 was cancelled, then it cost three million dollars to make a Voyager, and then they decided that it would cost 5 million dollars to make an Enterprise.... Despite ad buys not rising commensurately with production costs.
If it had cost 1.2 million to make an Enterprise, everything would have been copacetic, and money would have been made by all, and ratings might not have mattered much since they could have thrived on lower ratings and cheaper ad buys.
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Advertiser-coveted consumers aged 25-54.
"We're in the top-five demographic shows on television. Demographically, we're just huge. The numbers issue has changed so much since we started four years ago, in terms of what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, and the demographic thing has become such a huge part of it all. We fit very well demographically....I know that the advertisers love us, and I know that the affiliates love us, because we're leading in to their eleven o'clock news and the right people are watching. And, like it or not, that's a huge part of what television is."
From an article originally on sci-fi.com, an interview with Bakula. I ran across it on the Wayback Machine.
Uh-huh. "25-54" is pretty broad to be a meaningful demographic.
And if he had such a loyal, demographically desirable fanbase, ENT would have lasted more than four seasons.
Scott, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I recall when it started thinking:
A) they're ignoring decades of books and other tie-in lore about how the Federation came to be, and even their own previous episodes. I didn't much mind, but came online and everyone was having a ....meltdown... over it. Google James Dixon.
B) It was same shit, different day. The same plots, the same format. The only difference was this was set before so this refried, remade episode of the week was "first"
C) Being a prequel was incidental. Same tech (slightly different names), same stories and same outcomes. Subtlety of a sledgehammer when they DID try something prequely ("some kind of... prime directive", "maybe artificial life... it might take a few Star Trek: Generations...")
A) they're ignoring decades of books and other tie-in lore about how the Federation came to be, and even their own previous episodes. I didn't much mind, but came online and everyone was having a ....meltdown... over it. Google James Dixon.
B) It was same shit, different day. The same plots, the same format. The only difference was this was set before so this refried, remade episode of the week was "first"
C) Being a prequel was incidental. Same tech (slightly different names), same stories and same outcomes. Subtlety of a sledgehammer when they DID try something prequely ("some kind of... prime directive", "maybe artificial life... it might take a few Star Trek: Generations...")
There were no Latinos. Though you could count Latina, Erika Hernandez, being captain of the NX-02 as a sign of progress.
Hoshi was originally going to be the Latina character, before they made her Asian. But even then, she could have still brought a Latin cultural presence to the show through an interest in Brazilian culture: speaking Portuguese to a member of the crew or to someone back home, listening to Bossa Nova & Samba music in her quarters, teaching Brazilian dances, using Brazilian greetings, requested Brazilian meals or complained when there was no Brazilian food on the menu, show interest in the World Cup and critique how Brazil performs; talk about festivals such as the Brazilian Carnival. The writers either weren’t familiar with Brazilian culture to do so, or they just did not think about Hoshi that much to realize that she should have embraced Brazilian culture if she actually lived in Brazil.
Torres is not a Klingon name.
B'Elanna's father was Latin or maybe Spanish.
Yes.
There's also Sonya Gomez, who
eventually became a captain.
And now that I can remember, there was in fact a Latino captain in ENT. Carlos Ramirez of the Intrepid. Though he only appeared in the S2 finale for 5 seconds of screen time and was never mentioned again, aside from Reed taking command from him in "Twilight". He just wasn't developed as a character, recurring or otherwise, despite being a friend of Archer's.
You are being deliberately obtuse. Why were there no Latino characters? Why were there no Muslim characters? Why were there no Arab characters? Etc etc etc? The world is full of communities the principal characters could have been drawn from. But instead, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga actively chose to make three out of the five human characters white and actively chose to hire white actors for the two non-human characters.
Remember: white people are not the default setting for the human race. Berman and Braga actively chose to make it a nearly all-white cast. And then, during production, they actively chose to give fewer episodes to their only two non-white actors.
No, you don't fucking count a guest star who appeared in a grand total of three episodes in the final season when you're discussing the main cast that was set three years earlier.
Also, Hernandez didn't even get a fucking first name in the aired episode, so it's not like she was given any real development as a character.
That's nice. None of that is reflected in what's actually onscreen.
Congratulations, an obscure character who appeared in two early TNG episodes got a guest starring bit on the animated series thirty years later. Want a cookie?
Again, none of this is in any way relevant to the question of why Berman & Braga made the main cast of ENT so white. And the fact that all you can think of are obscure guest stars just speaks to how little Latinos were represented in Star Trek until DIS premiered.
What you are saying is true, however this is what the network would have said if Berman had pushed for diversity... Which he probably didn't.
"Our audience is white, and white people don't like to watch stories about non white people, it confuses and scares them."
Looking at that, I probably could have said "White Men" rather than "White People" because I'm getting a Far Beyond the Stars vibe here.
PS
Lycia Naff is one of the most celebrated actresses in 80s science fiction.
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