For anyone who hasn't watched and is trying to keep track:
Lower Decks is animated mostly-comedy made by Star Trek fans, for Star Trek fans, about Star Trek fans in the Star Trek universe.
Discovery and Picard is grimdark and made by people who, in addition to being bad writers and story tellers, are aware that Star Trek exists and has fans, but have no idea why.
Strange New Worlds only has one season, but it was pretty decent. Jury is still out.
The Orville is basically a new Star Trek: The Next Generation. Don't ask me how Seth MacFarlane pulled that off, but he did.
Orville, imho: The first season tries hard with some poor jokes (what you seem to be afraid of), but already has some very TNG worthy material and great ideas. It improves from there, and now it's occasionally funny but in a more mature way that fits much better. Just give it a try, and endure some cringe - I think it's worth it.
And as sibling says, some moments are actually pretty hilarious and/or spot-on. Though of course YMMV.
Millenia ago, Roman soldiers toured the then known world and left writings/graffiti, some of which survives to this day - a lot of it is dick jokes. Mozart wrote some of the most transcendent music of his era, and also a song that he enjoyed called "Lick My Ass" (music appreciation classes tend to skip that one for some reason).
So that is to say that based on the history of humanity as a species, the engineers running the starships of the future are probably going to still enjoy scatalogical humor which makes think MacFarlane's vison will probably be a bit more likely than Rodenberry's.
Also, Lower Decks is easily my favorite Trek running today.
Leck mich im Arsch is a fine song, but really Mozart's lyrical mastery comes out in Bona Box, which is not only a series of puns in five languages, it also contains the following lines (translated):
Pretty sure SM wanted to do the more straight TNG sequel, but since he is known for over the top comedy he pitched it as an over the top comedy/parody of Star Trek — and then pivoted to a homage mid season 1!
My impression was more that he just wanted to do Star Trek but the studios were like "it'll be funny right???". And so he went along with it at first, but dropped it as time went on.
On a related note, I've been rewatching Enterprise and I didn't know Seth MacFarlane made 2 cameo appearances in the series! (In two different seasons too.)
> I want to give Orville a chance, but Seth Macfarlane humor and star trek matches about as well as stinky tofu and ice cream.
A lot of critics dismissed it early for that reason, assuming it was just going to be some kind of Family Guy in Space show.
They were wrong. There is humor in The Orville but it is not really like Family Guy humor (about which I think South Park nailed it in "Cartoon Wars"). On The Orville the humor is just a minor part of the show. They are not going for a comedy in space. They are going for science fiction drama with some comedy tossed in, when appropriate.
I think AnIdiotOnTheNet was wrong though to call it basically a new ST:TNG. It is much more a new ST:TOS. Seth Macfarlane thought that TOS had an optimistic outlook on the future that subsequent ST series had lost. The later series were in a darker future, and he wanted a series that brought back that TOS feel.
It's basically ST:TOS but with a few more jokes (mostly good ones), and instead of being set on the flagship of the fleet, crewed by the very best of the best, it is set on a ship that isn't expected to ever do anything important crewed by people whose careers have gone nowhere where they are expected to finish their terms of service in continued mediocrity.
The first season was OK. It has some pretty good ideas.
The second season continued having many good ideas, and the writers and actors had really figured things out so things really came together well.
Orville happened because SM has a lot of pull and is a fan and made it happen. And I’m grateful.
TNG had the last sparkle of Gene Roddenberry's vision of utopia. It got preachy at times.
The sad thing with Picard is just how dark and violent it gets. TNG and the rest were plenty dark, but not the same. I’m frankly pretty sick of the gore nowadays.
But if Picard is the only way I get to visit that universe, I guess sign me up. Picard flopping at all isn’t going to stop that only dark/gore crap gets made anymore. Seems no writers or viewers can really do utopia anymore.
If the writing and story telling of Discovery and Picard weren't so terrible so much of the time I'd be willing to consider them on their own merits as though the rest of Star Trek never happened.
I will say that the mirror universe episodes of Discovery were actually a lot of fun. Their writers may be hacks, in my considered opinion of course, but the mirror universe worked well for them. I think they should have done a spinoff that takes place entirely in that universe.
TNG started as an 80s show and went into the 90s. It first aired in 1987, still during the Cold War, and had 4 seasons out before the Cold War is usually considered as ended. Three seasons aired after the Cold War. It was utopian even before the Cold War had ended, not just after and not because of its ending.
Star Trek was always hopeful though, even back in the 60s when the civil rights movement was in full swing, during a cultural revolution, and in the middle of the Vietnam war.
Star Trek wasn't loved for its utopian ideals because people had a lot of hope for the world, it was loved because it helped give them hope that they could create such a world if they tried.
As much as I disliked the violence it was the politics that did me in. I generally agree with what they're saying, but the way in which they're saying it says a lot about the respect they have for their audience.
That's probably why Orville felt like such a breath of fresh air to me.
Strange New Worlds was much better and I really wanted to like it, but I found the characters exhausting. Every other line of dialogue is a Whedonesque quip. The writers are laying on the "dark backstory" trope too thick to the point that by episode 3 it seemed like everyone was an alcoholic abused orphan.
There's a LOT of nostalgia for TNG in these comments; nostalgia primarily for the storylines and world, which the writers of Picard clearly didn't pick up on, and went with the "nostalgia for the characters" route + grimdark, and I'm not here to defend Picard. Season 1 and 2 were written like crap, Season 3 will probably also be written like crap, I'll watch it because of the characters, it won't really be remembered as "Good Trek" in ten years.
But talking about "Good Trek" is one of my passions, because: There's a LOT of Bad Trek in its canon. I'm a massive fan of the series, and I'll fully admit that there's probably as much or more Bad Trek than Good. But even for the series that were regarded as Good; there's plenty of grimdark, and a ton of peoples' favorite episodes or episode arcs could very easily be described as 90s grimdark. DS9 spent loads of time on the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, the slavery and persecution of its people, and war with the Dominion. The Voyager was fighting Borg every third episode. The Trekian Utopia concept more often pushed with TNG was extremely scarce in these two series; after all, as soon as literally the series after TNG the writers said "ok, but what if we take a Trek crew and tell stories far away from the safety of core Federation Space" (I don't remember if DS9 or Voyager came first, but it doesn't matter, because both of these series do that; and then Enterprise ALSO does that, but I'd rather not get into that hot topic).
And: We love them. Maybe DS9 more than Voyager, but In The Pale Moonlight is quoted up there among Measure of a Man as Trekies' favorite episodes, and ITPM is literally about Sisko betraying every Federation value he holds to conspire to commit a false flag to win a war the Federation is extremely close to losing. It is Grim; it is Dark; and its a great episode with great writing.
Point being, I think the article and other comments' criticism of "new Trek is bad because grimdark" is really misguided; I interpret criticism like that really more-so as complaining about lensflares and bad writing. Well, the lensflare modern cinamatography is what it is, not an interesting argument for me, fine. But I really think complaining about the bad writing is surface-level criticism of New Trek, which articles like this one attempt to "make deep" by throwing "grimdark" into it, even though that's also bad criticism; all of that ignores the ugly fact that Trek has a lot of bad writing in its history, and has a lot of grimdark in its history.
New Trek's bigger problem is that seasons only contain 8 or 10 episodes of content. That's not a Trek problem; that's just an industry thing, which unfortunately doesn't work all that well for Trek. You could go to any season in any series of trek and find a half-dozen episodes with roughly the writing quality of Picard. Go back to TNG and just marvel at the holodeck episodes, pretty universally disliked by the trek community (and they're bringing Moriarty back for Picard Season 3, so...), or how often the vast majority of the drama is derived from "we can't contact the Federation". Looking at the body of work as a collection, Old Trek oftentimes feels like throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks, and in retrospect we really only remember the stuff that stuck; New Trek is just throwing less stuff at the wall.
And, again, I don't think that's a Trek problem; its an attention span problem. Studios can't do 24 episode seasons of anything anymore because by episode 11 people are moving on to the next Netflix release. Its not a problem Trek created; its a problem the Tech Industry and social media created. Which I only point the finger at because I love the indirect, delicious irony in how correlated tech workers and "likes Trek" is; we destroyed our favorit...
Can't they just hire Seth McFarlane for the inevitable Picard season 4, assuming they can get him to drop the silly jokes? I love Orville for its surprisingly solid sci-fi universe but I cringe at many of the attempts at humour. Every actor behind a major Star Trek character have already played in Orville anyway (except for the bridge crews of TOS and TNG, I suppose).
Discovery and Picard have their moments, it's not all bad. The underlying story line is "government bad, humans suck" but there are some good characters hidden away deep inside.
A new TNG would flop. Monster-of-the-week (or in the case of trek, political-philosophical-pondering-of-the-week) doesn't keep people entertained anymore. TOS is boring and unwatchable for most, TNG is often doable but many some stupid episodes, especially in the earlier seasons (why on earth did they have to include "rape gangs"? and a "say no to drugs" episode? that episode where Crusher has space sex with the holo ghost of her ancestor?). Even more modern, more ST franchises like Voyager and DS9 would flop.
I'll be controversial and say that I'd like modern trek to be more like ST Enterprise. I think Enterprise struck a nice balance between classic trek and more modern TV, even if it's two decades old at this point. There was an overarching story line to keep people watching, but there was also plenty of time for going down to a random planet and ponder about space AIDS/mind meld disease and the associated prejudices. I love the Star Trek universe, but the older shows simply don't warrant all of the nostalgia; I recognize that they were an important part of TV and science fiction history, but the media landscape doesn't allow for philosophical pondering and space western TV anymore.
>Discovery and Picard is grimdark and made by people who, in addition to being bad writers and story tellers, are aware that Star Trek exists and has fans, but have no idea why.
I have a "friend of a friend", we'll say, who is an exec at Paramount and they're well aware that Discovery and Picard are creative trash. They do not care: it drives tons of subs every time a new season drops. Eventually you'd think that pattern would depress a bit but it hasn't thus far, allegedly.
We've recently seen plenty of bad content based on old franchises - from Star Trek to Tolkien - and I'm curious what will be the effect of this. I see two possible directions of improvements: one is that the producers will learn their lessons and start producing better quality, following the lead of Star Wars (where some of the best works, like Andor, came after the biggest flops, like the sequels films); the other is that the producers will start steering away from franchises and focus more on original content. Both directions would be an improvement, but I'm not very hopeful for either of them.
All of this is basically nostalgia bait. When people go in their thirties they want stuff that reminds them from their childhood.
You are currently witnessing this with Harry Potter.
I wouldn't even mind but the new stuff rarely catches the lightning in a bottle that the originals did.
Same with LEGO: People who have pristine, untouched kits from the past, could sell them for a fortune the last few years, even before COVID. People who buy LEGO today as a long term investment? I don't see that end well. Starting with the computer games going mainstream, LEGO is a lot less popular, there just is too much else to mess around with.
An investment would be what the current 6 to 12 year olds today have. Which would be Paw Patrol, maybe? Minecraft stuff?
I haven’t thought or cared about Harry Potter in about 10 years now and I initially looked over the game when I saw it in the steam best selling. But I decided to to give it a shot any way after seeing the good reviews. I’m shocked. I usually struggle to play more than 30 minutes of a game without getting bored, but I ended up glued to this game for 10 hours over the weekend.
This isn’t just a cheap cash in on some old IP, its genuinely one of the most fun games I’ve ever played and still would be without the IP.
Maybe just avoid directors/writers such as JJ. He seems to have a knack for making absolute garbage movies of beloved established worlds, that fans and critics absolutely hate, but sell well enough that it keeps happening.
Here is another take on it, coming to a different conclusion by someone (Dave Cullen) who despises most of modern trek but seems to enjoy the third season of Picard:
https://youtu.be/uNANI4-41VU
I was frankly amazed that Dave Cullen of all people was sent a review copy of Picard S3. Either Paramount/Amazon don't know who he is, or there's a legitimate attempt to extend an olive branch to "the fans" going on. Hopefully the latter, but if so there is almost certainly going to be a backlash from the teens and twentysomethings these franchises have been targeting (largely unsuccessfully) over the last few years.
> (inexplicably) conservative wing of Trek fandom was outraged that a show about happy space communists solving problems while remaining friends suddenly “got woke.” Good, old-fashioned Star Trek at least had the good grace to cloak its progressivism in allegory that could slide past the otherwise closed minds of some of its viewers.
For all the great points raised in the article, I was struck my the deliberate meanness of these lines. Can someone tell me who this was meant to appeal to? Why are people writing like this? Have we lost all hope of any sort of peace in this so called 'culture' war? Its ironic because the writer starts by how grim and militaristic Picard is and then launches that missile above at unsuspecting readers!
It's textbook bullying which I reckon exists because it creates a comradeship and us Vs them. A sense of our group being the good guys. Everyone who disagrees are the evil bad guys. Look at /r/all on Reddit where every top rated comment on a slightly political post is like that. It's a shame to see.
It began even before the full blown culture wars. There was a real focus on 'predicting' what political leanings someone has based on minor expressions. It was the seed of looking at EVERYTHING in a hyper partisan political lens. There's even divergent vocabularies now.
The weirdest part of it all is the open war on customers like the posted article. What are they doing other than alienating clicks/readers? What is there to gain? They're willing to sink the business they work for over it (and its tolerated if not encouraged!!). Thats the most bizarre behavior of it all IMO.
Every time a news outlet tells me to not watch something, and I eventually watch it, it turns out to be pretty good, actually. So I'm going to make sure to watch this ASAP now!
38 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 81.0 ms ] threadLower Decks is animated mostly-comedy made by Star Trek fans, for Star Trek fans, about Star Trek fans in the Star Trek universe.
Discovery and Picard is grimdark and made by people who, in addition to being bad writers and story tellers, are aware that Star Trek exists and has fans, but have no idea why.
Strange New Worlds only has one season, but it was pretty decent. Jury is still out.
The Orville is basically a new Star Trek: The Next Generation. Don't ask me how Seth MacFarlane pulled that off, but he did.
I want to give Orville a chance, but Seth Macfarlane humor and star trek matches about as well as stinky tofu and ice cream.
And as sibling says, some moments are actually pretty hilarious and/or spot-on. Though of course YMMV.
So that is to say that based on the history of humanity as a species, the engineers running the starships of the future are probably going to still enjoy scatalogical humor which makes think MacFarlane's vison will probably be a bit more likely than Rodenberry's.
Also, Lower Decks is easily my favorite Trek running today.
Good night, good night,
Shit in your bed and make it burst;
Good night, sleep tight,
And stick your ass to your mouth
On a related note, I've been rewatching Enterprise and I didn't know Seth MacFarlane made 2 cameo appearances in the series! (In two different seasons too.)
A lot of critics dismissed it early for that reason, assuming it was just going to be some kind of Family Guy in Space show.
They were wrong. There is humor in The Orville but it is not really like Family Guy humor (about which I think South Park nailed it in "Cartoon Wars"). On The Orville the humor is just a minor part of the show. They are not going for a comedy in space. They are going for science fiction drama with some comedy tossed in, when appropriate.
I think AnIdiotOnTheNet was wrong though to call it basically a new ST:TNG. It is much more a new ST:TOS. Seth Macfarlane thought that TOS had an optimistic outlook on the future that subsequent ST series had lost. The later series were in a darker future, and he wanted a series that brought back that TOS feel.
It's basically ST:TOS but with a few more jokes (mostly good ones), and instead of being set on the flagship of the fleet, crewed by the very best of the best, it is set on a ship that isn't expected to ever do anything important crewed by people whose careers have gone nowhere where they are expected to finish their terms of service in continued mediocrity.
The first season was OK. It has some pretty good ideas.
The second season continued having many good ideas, and the writers and actors had really figured things out so things really came together well.
I haven't watched any of the third season yet.
TNG had the last sparkle of Gene Roddenberry's vision of utopia. It got preachy at times.
The sad thing with Picard is just how dark and violent it gets. TNG and the rest were plenty dark, but not the same. I’m frankly pretty sick of the gore nowadays.
But if Picard is the only way I get to visit that universe, I guess sign me up. Picard flopping at all isn’t going to stop that only dark/gore crap gets made anymore. Seems no writers or viewers can really do utopia anymore.
I will say that the mirror universe episodes of Discovery were actually a lot of fun. Their writers may be hacks, in my considered opinion of course, but the mirror universe worked well for them. I think they should have done a spinoff that takes place entirely in that universe.
The real world influences writers and creators. Nobody believes in Utopia anymore.
Star Trek wasn't loved for its utopian ideals because people had a lot of hope for the world, it was loved because it helped give them hope that they could create such a world if they tried.
That's probably why Orville felt like such a breath of fresh air to me.
There's a LOT of nostalgia for TNG in these comments; nostalgia primarily for the storylines and world, which the writers of Picard clearly didn't pick up on, and went with the "nostalgia for the characters" route + grimdark, and I'm not here to defend Picard. Season 1 and 2 were written like crap, Season 3 will probably also be written like crap, I'll watch it because of the characters, it won't really be remembered as "Good Trek" in ten years.
But talking about "Good Trek" is one of my passions, because: There's a LOT of Bad Trek in its canon. I'm a massive fan of the series, and I'll fully admit that there's probably as much or more Bad Trek than Good. But even for the series that were regarded as Good; there's plenty of grimdark, and a ton of peoples' favorite episodes or episode arcs could very easily be described as 90s grimdark. DS9 spent loads of time on the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, the slavery and persecution of its people, and war with the Dominion. The Voyager was fighting Borg every third episode. The Trekian Utopia concept more often pushed with TNG was extremely scarce in these two series; after all, as soon as literally the series after TNG the writers said "ok, but what if we take a Trek crew and tell stories far away from the safety of core Federation Space" (I don't remember if DS9 or Voyager came first, but it doesn't matter, because both of these series do that; and then Enterprise ALSO does that, but I'd rather not get into that hot topic).
And: We love them. Maybe DS9 more than Voyager, but In The Pale Moonlight is quoted up there among Measure of a Man as Trekies' favorite episodes, and ITPM is literally about Sisko betraying every Federation value he holds to conspire to commit a false flag to win a war the Federation is extremely close to losing. It is Grim; it is Dark; and its a great episode with great writing.
Point being, I think the article and other comments' criticism of "new Trek is bad because grimdark" is really misguided; I interpret criticism like that really more-so as complaining about lensflares and bad writing. Well, the lensflare modern cinamatography is what it is, not an interesting argument for me, fine. But I really think complaining about the bad writing is surface-level criticism of New Trek, which articles like this one attempt to "make deep" by throwing "grimdark" into it, even though that's also bad criticism; all of that ignores the ugly fact that Trek has a lot of bad writing in its history, and has a lot of grimdark in its history.
New Trek's bigger problem is that seasons only contain 8 or 10 episodes of content. That's not a Trek problem; that's just an industry thing, which unfortunately doesn't work all that well for Trek. You could go to any season in any series of trek and find a half-dozen episodes with roughly the writing quality of Picard. Go back to TNG and just marvel at the holodeck episodes, pretty universally disliked by the trek community (and they're bringing Moriarty back for Picard Season 3, so...), or how often the vast majority of the drama is derived from "we can't contact the Federation". Looking at the body of work as a collection, Old Trek oftentimes feels like throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks, and in retrospect we really only remember the stuff that stuck; New Trek is just throwing less stuff at the wall.
And, again, I don't think that's a Trek problem; its an attention span problem. Studios can't do 24 episode seasons of anything anymore because by episode 11 people are moving on to the next Netflix release. Its not a problem Trek created; its a problem the Tech Industry and social media created. Which I only point the finger at because I love the indirect, delicious irony in how correlated tech workers and "likes Trek" is; we destroyed our favorit...
Discovery and Picard have their moments, it's not all bad. The underlying story line is "government bad, humans suck" but there are some good characters hidden away deep inside.
A new TNG would flop. Monster-of-the-week (or in the case of trek, political-philosophical-pondering-of-the-week) doesn't keep people entertained anymore. TOS is boring and unwatchable for most, TNG is often doable but many some stupid episodes, especially in the earlier seasons (why on earth did they have to include "rape gangs"? and a "say no to drugs" episode? that episode where Crusher has space sex with the holo ghost of her ancestor?). Even more modern, more ST franchises like Voyager and DS9 would flop.
I'll be controversial and say that I'd like modern trek to be more like ST Enterprise. I think Enterprise struck a nice balance between classic trek and more modern TV, even if it's two decades old at this point. There was an overarching story line to keep people watching, but there was also plenty of time for going down to a random planet and ponder about space AIDS/mind meld disease and the associated prejudices. I love the Star Trek universe, but the older shows simply don't warrant all of the nostalgia; I recognize that they were an important part of TV and science fiction history, but the media landscape doesn't allow for philosophical pondering and space western TV anymore.
I have a "friend of a friend", we'll say, who is an exec at Paramount and they're well aware that Discovery and Picard are creative trash. They do not care: it drives tons of subs every time a new season drops. Eventually you'd think that pattern would depress a bit but it hasn't thus far, allegedly.
I wouldn't even mind but the new stuff rarely catches the lightning in a bottle that the originals did.
An investment would be what the current 6 to 12 year olds today have. Which would be Paw Patrol, maybe? Minecraft stuff?
That’s definitely true of Picard, but is it for the rest of NuTrek? It’s hard to see how Discovery, awful as it is, is nostalgia bait.
> lightning in a bottle
Do I spot an RLM fan?
This isn’t just a cheap cash in on some old IP, its genuinely one of the most fun games I’ve ever played and still would be without the IP.
For all the great points raised in the article, I was struck my the deliberate meanness of these lines. Can someone tell me who this was meant to appeal to? Why are people writing like this? Have we lost all hope of any sort of peace in this so called 'culture' war? Its ironic because the writer starts by how grim and militaristic Picard is and then launches that missile above at unsuspecting readers!
The weirdest part of it all is the open war on customers like the posted article. What are they doing other than alienating clicks/readers? What is there to gain? They're willing to sink the business they work for over it (and its tolerated if not encouraged!!). Thats the most bizarre behavior of it all IMO.
Plus, it's not even that bad as a show by it's self - but people have sky high expectations, they can't just sit down and enjoy it casually
As for Discovery, I actually enjoy it and can't wait to see it. I've watched every Star Trek show out there, and while it's different, its still good.