And yet several Trekkies in this thread are listing it second without proclaiming love for it. (Like me)
I agree, but was disappointed with what the writers did to him in the last story arc. I so wanted him to storm the Changling office with Garak and Kira rather than his side kick.
“That was the last Weoun clone.”
“I was hoping you would say that.”
Original recipe Trek for me. I liked my Klingons as devious mongols rather than bumpy-headed berserkers.
I am so happy to see DS9 getting its due. I’ve not yet seen TOS or Enterprise, but DS9 by far exceeded TNG and Voyager. It took risks, it had an incredibly nuanced and comprehensive plot, and it featured my absolute favorite badass chick of all time, Jadzia Dax. I’m still pissed off about her death. Not to mention that incredibly ballsy story arc where the crew was exiled from its own space station for several episodes. Jesus, it was epic. It is the golden standard to which I hold all sci-fi series.
I recently started watching Battlestar Galactica (6 eps in) and I can’t help but compare every second of it to DS9. It has a lot of potential, but so far, not even close.
I agree that DS9 seemed to have longer lasting and interesting multi-episode plot arcs.
But for some reason, the Kirk-Spock-McCoy dynamic seemed to be the one of the best part of Star Trek to me. Despite their personality and command style differences, and despite the all the stress from all those the crises(sp?) these guys had to deal with on a semi-regular basis, their friendship endured. Even Sybok commented on the bond they seemed to have. 
I don’t know what other relationships shown in the other series seems to have captured that same magic.
I’ve watched all of the Star Trek there is except for DS:9. I tried to watch it when it started, but it didn’t grab me. I watch the occasional episode in re-runs, and it still doesn’t grab me. Maybe when the re-runs start at the beginning again, I’ll give it a serious effort.
That said, my favourite Star Trek is TNG. Captain Picard is my favourite Star Trek character of all time. Just yesterday I watched the episode where a captain of another Federation Starship, the Phoenix, goes rogue and starts killing Cardassians, threatening the peace treaty. Captain Picard is fully prepared to blow his counterpart away to keep the peace, even though he knows the other captain is right, the Cardassians are up to no good. It would be easy to dismiss his actions as a soldier just following orders, but it is obvious that he is operating from a much more complex place than that - he has his orders, and he is good at following them, but he ultimately does what is right, and that’s what I admire about him.
Oh yes, the other Treks stand on the shoulders of giants.
Olivesmarch4th, in my opinion you must prepare yourself for a major disappointment.
I’ve seen everything aired and every movie. Instead of focusing on any one aspect of it, I’m now considering all of it as one GIANT series.
And it’s my favorite.
I blame my time here Trek Doping in developing this take.
:dubious:
BTW, CBS.com has all the OS eps available now. For awhile there this fall I was watching 3-5 a week.
I’ve watched all of them, the only one I quit watching was Voyager.
As others have said - TOS has the pedigree (real stories by noted SF authors - hell even TAS had Niven for an episode) - TNG got much better toward the end, but always had a happy ending - DS9 made the federation interesting again. Voyager suffered from wrestling and T&A tie ins and totally forgot what was good about trek, and Enterprise, for all of its attempts, just could never live up to being a good prequel - it had a few moments tho.
I haven’t had a chance to watch Enterprise, other than a few random episodes.
TOS - I’ve only recently rented the series so it can’t be nostalgia. The Kirk/Spock/McCoy relationship is fantastic. So often the situation is completely hopeless and that just makes things even more fun.
DS9 - A great and interesting cast, with a couple of exceptions. I didn’t like all the emissary crap, the final episodes were disappointing. I hated Kai Winn, couldn’t enjoy any episode in which she played a major role.
TNG - I grew up with this one but the plots and characters were so… Boring. Still, it introduced me to Trek, so thanks.
VOY - I don’t hate it but it’s certainly the least interesting. Neelix annoyed the hell out of me, as did Seska. Tom, Harry and the Doctor were great though.
Maybe when I’ve finished renting TOS I’ll give Enterprise a chance…
Personally, I think it’s unfair to try and compare Star Trek with any of the later incarnations. The gap in time between the first series and the Next Generation is so great, with so many fundamental changes in television, that it’s really like trying to compare apples to armchairs. It isn’t just the more modern special effects, either. Star Trek was a drama series, first and foremost, and stayed that way (with one or two notable, loveable exceptions); no A-plot, B-plot crap. All the other series were based upon a completely different paradigm, one that had developed during the 80s, where each episode is really two or even three episodes thrown together, with the ship as the unifying theme. Nor were the series drama series any more; even DS9 with its edgier tone cannot be called a true, old-style drama series. And the proliferation of television options, the wavefront of which spawned Next Generation, so altered the quality and type of programming, that it’s simply impossible in this day to comprehend what it was like on television back when Kirk, Spock and McCoy were plying the airwaves with their pointed banter.
So I set Star Trek aside as a different animal entirely. It always has a prominent place in my heart, despite the cheesy special effects, the lousy scripts for about 50% of the episodes, and the dated themes. Of the others, I rarely paid attention to Voyager as I got used up on the whole Trek thing about the same time as I ended up moving out of my house at the time of my divorce, and not having television for a couple years. I liked DS9’s premise, and loved Sisko and Odo, but thought they had gone back to some cheesy story lines, relatively speaking. I’ve watched Enterprise on video, and my thoughts on it are on record here in this forum: let’s say I wasn’t a big fan of season 3. :mad:
Next Generation started poorly, slowly gained some traction, had some great episodes during seasons 3 - 5, then started going back down the hill as they seemed to run out of really fresh ideas. I got tired of holo-deck episodes, and wished they would finally sort out what Troi and Riker were going to do or not do.
I loved TOS, found TNG annoyingly smug and preachy, never got into DS9, loathed Voyager with a passion and stopped watching it after one season…and I kinda liked Enterprise. It wasn’t perfect, but I found it more watchable than TNG.
I guess that makes TOS my favorite.
I’d have to agree. It’s just sad how much better BsG is than Ds9 - not even a fair comparison, really ;).
Tongue in cheek obviously, but I really do believe BsG is better than any of the Star Trek series, despite its numerous flaws. To me its a bit like the average difference between good cable series and good network series. I really like both Lost and The Wire, but fun as the former is, in the end the latter is just far deeper and more resonant.
As to the OP: TOS comes in first, for reasons that Polycarp and Voyager laid out very well. I also agree with John DiFool that it had lower lows, but also with DSYoungEsq and others that in many ways it cannot be fairly compared to the later series. Why think for myself, when others can do so far more effectively for me :p?
I’m also another who puts Ds9 second on the list and best of the modern shows. Once it started getting into actual long story arcs in its later seasons it became much stronger.
ETA: Olive I hope you started BsG with the miniseries. That seems to be a common mistake people make, which can cause some confusion.
I just watched “Balance of Terror” from the 1st season of TOS the other day. It’s still a good episode.
I think I wrote this post although I liked TNG.
TOS is fun, and for me has gone from “painfully cheesy” to “entertainingly dated cheesy”, if you put aside the rampant sexism. Some excellent entertainment to be found if you know what to look for. Frankly, though, some of the books have done TOS much better than the show ever did, and I am not going to call any of those books great literature, but some of the earlier ones were pretty good.
TNG was what I grew up on. I was 11 when it began. I lived for that show. Lived and breathed it. I credit it with getting me through middle school with my sanity intact. Seriously. I haven’t rewatched it in way too long, though. I can’t quite pull the bucks together for the DVDs or I would totally buy the whole thing. I would just never watch most of the first couple of seasons. I realized the suck in those long before the end of the run of the show!
DS9 was AWESOME when it was good. These days I think it’s my favorite of the bunch. I am going to go back and watch it again sometime soon. So much good stuff. It’s the only one that I have the DVDs of.
I have an enduring fondness for Voyager because I got to tour the sets back in 1994. It was all more convincing-looking than one might have expected, and Kate Mulgrew walked right past us and that was really cool. And then our tour guide kindly snuck us onto the Defiant bridge set, since we weren’t allowed into the main DS9 stages because our tour was officially only for Voyager. I think I can publicly confess this now since it’s been so long. I got to sit in the captain’s chair. Every time I see a scene on that bridge I still think, "MY ass was in that chair!!!"
I haven’t seen more than the first few episodes of Enterprise so I don’t feel like I know enough to really judge it, though I hear it took what seemed a really awesome premise (I admit I enjoy the concept of the opening montage and the song, you can throw stuff at me now) and squandered it throughly. Too bad. I know I rather like the few I’ve seen, though.
So, my order would be DS9, TNG, with TOS tied with ENT for third, which could change depending on if I ever see the rest of ENT.
As with so many folks on this board, I hate you.
Perhaps more than any of them.
I enjoyed Voyager lots.
I can’t say which I think is the best.
I can say it’s not TNG.
Space does a sort of chronological airing of all the live-action Treks (they SO need to get the rights to TAS…) daily. I watch Enterprise, TOS, and DS9 every time. I even stick around for Voyager occasionally. 9/10, I skip TNG.
Someone said upthread that when TOS was bad, it was entertainingly bad - the same applies to Enterprise, DS9, and a large chunk of Voyager.
And not only are their entertainingly bad episodes thus better than TNG’s boringly bad episodes, but they’re way more entertaining than TNG’s not-too-bad episodes.
TNG has a few that they really hit out of the park - pretty much entirely in the middle three seasons - and a couple (mostly season 1) that were the same kind of entertainingly bad as the other series manage. But the majority of the series is just one big grey blob of blah.