For some reason these days TNG gets a lot of guff but it is still my favorite Trek. TOS was first and gets extra credit for that and DS9 was probably more consistently good but the Highs of TNG were higher than the other series.
Picard is one of my favorite fictional characters. A good and thoughtful person who did what he thought was right and wasn’t afraid to take action when it was necessary. I would love to see Patrick Stewart play the part again.
Yeah its a little preachy and somewhat dated but I love it. Happy 30th TNG.
I think I was actually homeless at the time (not unemployed or between universities, just homeless, living out of my car). I remember being so thrilled that it was finally happening, I stood for three hours* watching it on a TV at the nearest Target store.
After it was over, I thought "Wow, there’s some really neat shit there! Too bad there was so much absolute crap, too. "
The syndication commitment pretty much guaranteed success. Paramount knew they had a moneymaker on their hands, and they were going to milk it for all it was worth.
Gene Roddenberry was so larger-than-life in his own mind that he needed several characters to Marty Stu properly. Jean-Luc was his heavy-handed sermonizing aspect.
Thank God they managed to move beyond the utter awfulness of the first season scripts. I think if the second season had been equally poor, that might well have finished the show. I almost cannot re-watch first season episodes, they are so uniformly bad.
Now, by comparison, fifth season was filled with excellent episodes, including two of my favorites, “The Inner Light” and “I, Borg”. I’d have been a poorer person for having never seen that season.
Heh, I missed all the hoo-hah when it was on originally, because I was living in another country, but I’m watching the first season eps on H & I, and yeah, they’re pretty bad. Last night was the one where an away team, led by Riker, tries to rescue some stranded freighter crew from a planet with a matriarchal society (where all the matriarchs just happen to be smokin’ babes). All through it, I was thinking “well, according to the show it may be Stardate 4437.6 or whatever, but according to the haircuts, it’s clearly 1987”.
I was born after the original Star Trek, but I was 9 when this came on the air. I didn’t watch it “as it aired”, but we watched tons of re-runs and random episodes when we caught them. It aired at all different times and re-runs were plentiful.
I watched the final episode the night it aired, though.
I’m in the first few episodes of season 1, never having watched it before. The sets can be nice for 80s TV. Someone mentioned the scripts but does the acting get better in the following seasons? Would you say that the first season is skippable?
my grandpa was such a tech geek that when I was 11 or 12 we got to stay up until 11:30 to see it …I being a star wars fan was like it was pretty good …needed more shooting …
Somehow It was a miss, both tv and especially the movies. TOS could produce good movies every othr attempt. TNG maybe the second one is a bit tolerable but having Efraim Cochrane play Steppenwolf “Magic Carpet Ride” seemed like an attempt to get record sales on a soundtrack for Boomers.
With the tv show I recorded every episode as it was broadcast, editing commercials. Who knew that in two decades DVDs would be mainstream and cheap? But the only time I tried to go through it, I stopped after a couple years worth. Just kind of blah. Can’t think of a single episode I would call grat.
But proving a new version of Star Trek was successful commercially was a good thing.
I remember the premiere of TNG. Since I’d cut my teeth on TOS, watching every episode as it premiered for the first time (starting at the tender age of almost 9), I had high expectations for it.
And was pretty disappointed by that premiere. And the rest of the first season.
I wandered back about season 3 or so, sort of enjoyed a few of the episodes, but was an intermittent observer at best. Same for the rest of the ST series.
You can’t go home again.
But I still feel an echo of the same rush from some of the TOS episodes.
“Angel One,” definitely a candidate for the dumbest episode ever.
The only way it could have had a remote chance of being better would have been if all the women on that planet were six-foot-tall Amazons with green hair and steel brassieres.
Yet another person whose first reaction is “Oh god, I’m so old!”
While it did take a while to get its feet under it, I’ve got a lot of nostalgic fondness for TNG too. I was going through a tumultuous time in my life when it aired, and the staid, logical way the TNG cast solved their problems (“Let’s have a boardroom meeting and talk about the situation in serious, calm voices!”) was actually relaxing and enjoyable.
Nowadays, I think DS9 had better writing overall, but I’ve been reviewing TNG on Netflix and I’m surprised just how many episodes are fond memories for me. The Inner Light still makes me cry.
I can’t argue that episodes like Angel One or worse, Code of Honor don’t make me cringe now, though.
I still actually like Encounter at Farpoint, even if I admit that it’s not as good as later episodes.
As a kid, I never thought of it as anything particularly bad. I didn’t come in with any expectations, because I was watching it in reruns, as the show they ran right after the TOS repeats were over. I’m not even sure I actually saw the premier first, though I do know it was the first time I saw Q.
And I loved the guy. I loved De Lancie himself, and I loved the concept. He wasn’t some stodgy judge, but he wasn’t just some trickster they could outwit by the end of the episode. I enjoyed the little mystery he put them on, and how they solved it. I enjoyed seeing the ship separate, and how Riker had to put it back together (or something). I remember enjoying Troi in the outing as well. And the apple.
I don’t know if this was part of the episode, but Data definitely intrigued me when I first saw him. Spock had always interested me, but Data was even more interesting. That lack of emotion but trying to become like others? That was a new one after Spock’s trying not to feel (which I had tried). Oh, and having a Klingon on the bridge was really cool, too.
I remember being quite satisfied at the end. And, to this day, I consider it one of the good episodes of the early seasons. Not the best, but still good.
Too bad there was so much absolute crap, too. 
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