Watching through the first season and even the second season of TNG is a painful experience full of sanctimonious speeches, arrogant characters, racism and sexism. How did the show ever get another season?
Most first seasons, especially sf or otherwise “fringey” shows, have terrible first seasons. The first half of Babylon 5’s first season is almost unwatchable, even by fans.
SF has finally reached the point where decent material, production values and budgets accompany most launches, and it isn’t left to the Ed Woods of the industry any more. So BSG came out of the gate knocking 'em dead, and then turned awful when they tried to extend it too long.
But a weak, weak start until the show team finds out what works and what the audience likes (e.g., Spock and Data being huge fan hits) is pretty common historically.
TNG’s first season was great, unmissable TV at the time. It only looks bad when compared to what came later.
TNG was a syndicated show. The producers had it planned and budgeted as a multi-year project, and the stations that agreed to run it signed multi-year contracts.
IIRC, the first season of the show got pretty good ratings for a syndicated series that ran at different times on different stations. In St. Louis it was up against Saturday Night Live and did far better than anything else scheduled against SNL before or since.
ETA: Yup. 8.55 million viewers a week in its first season.
There is that and the fact that the show was syndicated from the beginning. It had the chance to develop that a network show may not have gotten.
And it resulted in the trope: Growing the Beard
I agree with the premise that the first series is basically unwatchable now.
But I’m old enough to remember well watching TNG for the first time, and I was absolutely blown away. I put it down to 3 things:
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Very upbeat and positive. The score still gets me. And we really needed it at the tail end of the dreary 80s.
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Great characters. We’re so familiar now with Picard, Data, Q, Worf etc that it’s hard to appreciate how fresh and compelling those characters were (ok, turns out worf was basically a redshirt until the second series, but anyway).
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What else were you going to watch?
We didn’t expect a lot from TV back then – when young people ask “How did you ever find this funny?!” about some 80s comedy, say, my response is always that we didn’t expect a TV show to make us laugh out loud. In this environment, there’s nothing very suprising about a so-so sci-fi getting good ratings, then killing it once they tightened the show up a bit.
I was watching a TNG rerun just the other day and commented to Mrs Cad how poorly it aged.
In the beginning, people didn’t watch it because it was good; they watched it because it was Star Trek. It was what Trekkies had been eagerly waiting for, or at least wondering about, for years. Even if you thought it sucked, you wanted to watch it so you could argue with your friends about why it sucked.
William Shatner recently hosted a documentary – “Chaos on the Bridge” – that’s pretty much just about the first two seasons of “The Next Generation” and how it managed to survive – Chaos on the Bridge (TV Movie 2014) - IMDb … it’s currently on Netflix.
This. You can’t judge something without first considering it’s place in time. Even if all you were doing was bitching about Wesley, you still watched.
Yeah, that sounds about right. I watched the show every week - the idea of missing something called “Star Trek” was just unthinkable. I certainly had plenty of complaints about Troi, Tasha and “the Boy,” but I watched it - so when the really terrific episodes like “Measure of a Man” and “Q Who” (“Q: If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home, and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here! It’s wondrous…with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it’s not for the timid.”) turned up in the second season, I was there.
It was the only Star Trek available at the time. And the TOS cast wasn’t interested in doing another series together. Come to think of it, if there was a fight scene between Scotty and Kirk and they weren’t going to use stuntmen, Doohan might have been interested. “Oopsie! I don’t know how I could have forgotten to pull my punches. Can we try another take? Oh no! Don’t tell me that haymaker connected with Billy Boy? One more take!”
It still had Stewart, Frakes, Spiner, Burton, and Dorn. They were all fantastic, even when the writing was bad.
The pilot, at least, was event TV. I remember sitting with a bunch of friends in various degrees of intoxication watching it. Yeah, the touchy-feely Roddenberry plot was trite, but it was Star Trek!
Actually, they were, with the exception of Leonard Nimoy. Paramount had planned a Star Trek Phase II in 1977, and all the original cast were signed to “play or pay” contracts, except for Nimoy, who no longer wished to do another television series. However, with the huge success of Star Wars in theaters, they decided to focus on bringing Star Trek to the big screen. By the time Star Trek:TNG premiered in 1987, the original cast had done four movies together and were shooting a fifth.
Indeed, the original-syndication deal was IMO critical to the survival past Season One. No “network suits” to pull the plug on less-than-blockbuster performance before they could find their footing, and it was Star *&^%$ Trek fer cryin’ out loud. Sure, we spent most of the season mocking the apparent standard strategy of “we’ll face this threat by just standing here being morally superior”, coming up with scenarios for a truly unspeakable death for Wesley, and making lame jokes about Data “functioning fully”. But that was good enough for 1987.
Frankly, I still regret Spiner didn’t stay with Night Court.
Or Harry Anderson playing Q.
There’s plenty of shows that are widely recognized as full on crappy for their entire multi-season run. Quality isn’t the determination of what stays on, money is. TNG had a syndication deal that went past the first season and decent ratings.