So are you saying we were dumb in the 80s?
Paramount had a lot invested in the sets, costumes and acting contracts. Their was a lot of prestige in bringing Star Trek back to television. They were going to give fans a bigger and better series. More like the movie franchise. They had bigger budgets for special effects and costuming rarely seen on tv. I always assumed Paramount wanted to make TNG work. Fire whoever they needed to and bring in the right people. Fix whatever was wrong. A lot of the production staff from Season 1 left.
Obvious stuff, like Picard getting into the action. Riker even had a first season 1 speech reminding the Captain he wasn’t supposed to put himself in danger. He was supposed to stand around and give orders. They fixed that in the third season. Picard became the focus of the show. Not reckless like Kirk. But definitely a man of action. Even surviving an assassination attempt by a Klingon on their home world .
They fixed other things. Improved the writing. It got better Season 2. It got pretty good Season 3. They hit their stride in Season 4.
I honestly don’t think it’s as bad as people make it out to be. It was still better than most of the TV I’d seen up to that point. And this was in the 1990s, watching reruns.
It was Star Trek. What other space opera was out there that was as good?
It was epic and ambitious TV for its time, notable just for that reason, and the nerds loved it immediately, including me and all my friends. You could see its potential, its modern updated take on a familiar show, and a rare instance of a sequel TV series, which was fascinating in itself. I’m sometimes surprised how many elements look dated and very 90s, because at the time they were extremely futuristic.
I wanted to like it. I’d been a TOS fan (the nutty “nothing else on TV has ever been worth a damn” type of TOS fan, in fact) and to have Star Trek back on TV…
Nope. I couldn’t stand Riker or Troi. I liked Picard but didn’t like him as captain: I didn’t care for the Enterprise-as-bureaucracy motif. I didn’t like the plotting and pacing of the shows.
I was the opposite on Picard. Unlike the Kirk unit, he’s exactly what a Star Fleet captain is supposed to be.
I like to think they made it past the first season by killing the security chief before the season wound down. I believe that gave everyone a new hope. That woman could act about as well as Marilu Henner.
Kirk was exactly what a frontier-exploration captain is supposed to be. And Picard is…nottttt exactly what a more modern Captain should be…but close.
Denise Crosby is a fine actor, as demonstrated in Yesterday’s Enterprise and the Sela episodes. She left because she was tired with being given awful writing and standing around doing nothing behind the horseshoe for 15-hour shooting days.
You could say the same thing about TOS, too, that it looks dated and very 60s. But both shows have held up extremely well. The TNG movies weren’t as great, though. I thought “First Contact” was the best of that bunch.
I watched this tonight based on your post here. Interesting stuff. Shatner was surprisingly tolerable.
The general consensus seemed to be that the show survived because its fanbase sustained it. But it was on very shaky ground for the first two seasons and didn’t really seem to take off until Roddenberry passed.
FWIW, TNG was my first experience of Star Trek, and I discovered it long after it was on the air (think middle to late 2000s.) I thought it was good from the beginning, even though I wanted to kick Troi in the teeth (A feeling that never really passed.)
That was my point, when TNG hit I remember thinking “at last a show that takes its projections of the future seriously and doesn’t tie it down to current cultural aesthetics like TOS did”. But in retrospect it’s inescapable, and in some ways both series helped to define the aesthetic of each era.
Back then syndicating a new big budget show was something not done, and only a Star Trek could have gotten away with it. But a big factor was that canceling TOS after three seasons looked like a blunder in retrospect, and Paramount was not about to make that mistake again.
It’s also worth noting that there was no other real space-based science fiction on television at that time; Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and the original Battlestar Galactica had been off the air for six or seven years (and were not very good themselves). There were action-adventure shows with a kind of technology premise like Knight Rider and Airwolf, but these were really run of the mill 'Eighties “lone hero” actioneers (and have also aged poorly) or the “hero on the run” themed Starman. Star Trek: The Next Generation was the first show in the decade to actually delve (if ham-handedly) into topics of classical science fiction such as social conflicts, the impact of technology on society, et cetera.
No, it wasn’t very good, albeit more because of a lot of the backstage drama and editing, and the insistence of Gene Roddenberry in inserting awkwardly outmoded allegories and lectures about the moral superiority of the Federation, et cetera. And quite frankly, as science fiction, it never really improved; while it took more of an action-oriented approach to stories (especially with the introduction of the Borg), it’s attempts to address problems of technology and conflict between alien societies was always kind of ham-fisted, in large measure due to it conflict-of-the-week structure and the necessity of having to recreate artificial plot complications to get around the solutions that should be available by its beyond-magical technology such as warp drive and matter transportation. But it actually had a better cast than most science fiction shows before or since; Stewart, Spiner, Burton, and McFadden were all excellent actors, Dorn did the best he could with a painfully stereotyped role, and while Wil Wheaton gets a lot of grief for Wesley Crusher, he actually shows good presence when given an opportunity to do more than whine or improbably come up with a technobabble solution to the plot conflict.
One thing Star Trek: The Next Generation did do was show that even mediocre science fiction had a large supportive audience, something television executives up to that point simply refused to acknowledge. It opened the door for pretty much ever science fiction television series that came after it, and also demonstrated that high quality (for its day) special effects could be done on a television series production budget and schedule. It certainly helped that CGI advance to the point that digital processing and animation rendering could be done on relatively inexpensive workstation rather than a supercomputer, and advances in motion capture technology (later superceded by purely digital image generation) made it possible to produce story-specific scenes rather than reusing footage over and over again.
In short, the early seasons of TNG were terrible, but they were dramatically less terrible than pretty much everything that had come before, and were good enough that the audience appeal went beyond Star Trek fans and into the general viewing population. And if you watch television from other genres of the same era–say, Miami Vice, Wiseguy, Crime Story or L.A. Law–you’ll see much of the same painfully amateurish television that nonetheless laid the groundwork for widely regarded shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, House of Cards, or Breaking Bad.
Stranger
Heh Kirk broke the Prime Directive at the drop of a hat. He’s the kind of officer that gives superiors migraines. In a realistic military, he’d never have been given command. He could be the future equivalent of a pilot/astronaut/etc. but no way would the lives of 400 people be put into his hands. Or, alternatively, he’d be found guilty at one of his fourteen court-martials and have command permanently stripped from him.
In fairness, the prime directive makes zero sense and is applied very inconsistently through the Treks.
But agree with your post though – in the unlikely event Kirk was given command of a starship, he would have been stripped of it in short order.
The show’s producers have never made any secret that Picard is based largely on Horatio Hornblower. (This was also pointed out in the Chaos on the Bridge film linked to upthread.) And generations of readers have very much held Hornblower to be a model captain. Picard comes across as a slightly more personable version.
And he never, ever gets sick in space! Well, hardly ever. 
I know, I know. I threw an HMS Pinafore reference in with Hornblower. So, sue me.
If Picard is really like Hornblower, he’ll get sick in Spacedock.
Yeah, I was going to throw in a reference to “A British Tar,” but I thought it might be slightly over the top.