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.
For the record, I've been co-signing with every post of yours in this thread but I gotta say for the record that I can name no fewer than five posters who started watching specifically bc they were Bakula fans.
Coincidentally, most of them became Tucker fangirls who were the biggest critics of Archer as a character
funny how that goes haha
Putting aside the diversity bit, the biggest problem I found with Archer was his absolute petulance. I understand TIIC were trying to make him be less polished than the previous captains who had more experience with diplomacy but that has nothing to do with the disrespect towards T'Pol for being Vulcan, for example.
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time....
While Enterprise was not without its flaws, the main reason it was received poorly is that by that time, much of fandom had trained itself to accept that “if Berman & Braga do it, it sucks” — mainly because of a lot of weak writing on Voyager (and discounting some good writing there too; depended on the episode). I guarantee you that in the early 2000s, any new Trek would have been received the same way, regardless of its quality or lack thereof.
You're not wrong, since that attitude is absolutely present amongst people determined to blame everything they hate about Modern Trek regardless of his level of direct involvement (which IIRC is nowhere near the input Rick Berman had, where he was sitting in on the post filming aditing, as Anthony Montgomery once recalled).
Still, while many of the posters here were fairly new to the franchise, many of them noticed the huge change in writing during S4 when Manny Coto was brought on (may his memory be a blessing). Even though I was not overly invested in the TOS fanservice bits, I did appreciate the attempts at better character writing for my faves. We didn't see T'Pol get objectified once, which was a huge W.
The only saving grace was that John Billingsley was a better actor than Ethan Phillips.
JB definitely brought a gravitas that wasn't always there in the writing but TBH I wouldn't sleep on Ethan Phillips either. Once his character got decoupled from Kes (which should've happened no later than the third episode, seriously who told TIIC to make fetch happen with this?!) and Neelix got episodes that weren't about him going full Jonah Hill--to horribly carbon date this post for some archiver reading this in 2043 or whatever--he could work his acting chops. "Jetrel" was a banger, as was "Riddles" and that one with him grappling that their probably isn't an afterlife like he was told.
Plus, I can't hate too much on any actor that has to put on that amount of makeup three to five days a week, which often took as long to put on as it did to film the specific scenes.
And again, that's why you don't make a prequel. A prequel only caters to the hardcore fans.
I dunno that I fully agree with this TBH. Granted, this show was my intro to Trek and while I admit I was unique among millennial Trek fans, I wasn't alone. Like I said in the previous post, there were dozens of us newbies posting up a storm here and forgiving of the things long time fans considered earth shattering deal breakers, like the design of the NX-01 itself, which was easily the stupidest wank I've ever seen outta the fanbase before that Boimler gag from Lower Decks broke the brains of people who never blinked when T'Pol got half naked every third episode.
You know what changed my mind on this? Surprisingly, Star Wars. I will go to my grave hating all three prequels but there's a whole generation of kids where this was their intro to SW. They're old enough to read about the hate EP II in particular received...and they don't care. They got into other SW media eventually.
Hell, we got an entire new Trek series airing right now where the fate of the main character is known to the audience and even said main character itself, but it's also been one of the easiest entry points to the franchise since...
...well, ENT honestly.
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