First off, why do almost never hear anything about Star Trek: Deep Space 9 anymore? I have satellite TV and it apparently is not on on any of their channels at least. TNG and TOS are well represented. Heck so is Voyager. But no DS9. I’m serious. Frankly it is the only show of the franchise I never followed because I thought it was rather silly and had too much angst. But some people still liked it apparently.
Also, speaking of the other series, why did they never do a movie? The Voyager series ended not too long ago. And the actors from it still look relatively young, IMHO at least.
The answer to both your questions is simply lack of demand. DS9 was my favorite of the Trek series but this is not a common opinion among the fan base. Most fans would consider Voyager to be a distant third at best. The studios have basically moved on to what they think most of the fans are willing to pay to see, Discovery and the Kelvin timeline.
Voyager & Enterprise dragged the curve way down as far as interest & vitality for the franchise were concerned. By the time DS9 ended, lots of people had stopped watching; by the time Enterprise started, even more had dropped. When Voyager ended, people were already saying that the franchise needed a break, and then they came out with Enterprise and just beat the horse some more. The whole franchise needed to lie fallow for four years before they could make the new Star Trek movies, and even then, some people hate the reboot.
DS9 is just stuck being the last really good series they made while people were abandoning the sinking ship, like the dance band on the Titanic.
Deep Space Nine is on the Heroes and Icons (H&I) network six nights a week. It runs in a block with the other four classic Star Trek series, TOS, TNG, VOY, and ENT. H&I is an OTA network, but is also carried on the local cable systems in my area since we have an affiliate over one of our stations.
Edit, AFAIK, it is not available on satellite, but if it’s carried in your area, you may be able to pick it up with an antenna.
Everything was on Netflix the last time I checked.
Not surprising CBS is giving more than most people want, since the people who run the franchise these days don’t have a clue about what made it a franchise.
If you want to see a really good Star Trek series, watch The Orville. Seth MacFarlane understands Star Trek better than anyone now associated with Star Trek.
Neither DS9 nor Voyager is really suitable for a movie follow up. DS9 was heavy on plot arcs, which were all resolved by the end. Voyager had a central dilemma: get home, which was resolved in the final episode. Where do you go from there?
DS9 also got rather arc-y in the last couple of seasons, making it harder to follow for the casual viewer. Voyager was hampered by a cast that couldn’t act their way through a 3rd grade class play, scripts that plumbed new depths of awful and a total ignoring of the basic premise of the show.
There’s a fairly buzz worthy DS9 documentary which just came out. It includes speculation about what another season might have looked like. The new Picard series has a guest spot by Seven of Nine, so it’s possible some DS9 characters could eventually appear there or on Discovery or another project.
There’s a podcast called Mission Log which has been reviewing one episode of Star Trek per week, in roughly the order that the shows were made. They’ve done TOS and TNG, and are now in the second or third season of DS9. They’ve mentioned a couple times that this show doesn’t have quite the fan base or familiarity that its predecessors do, and maybe takes a bit more of an effort to get into, but they are watching with an open mind and growing to appreciate it.
Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix, last I checked. It was the best written Star Trek series of its era. It wasn’t silly at all, but quite well thought-out.
I’ll grant you that there was very little non-Ferengi based silliness. But…, yeah. Some of the Quark heavy episodes, silly is about the best thing you can say about them. Watch Little Green Men or The Magnificent Ferengi and tell me there’s no silliness.
I quite agree. The other Star Trek shows had an easy way to develop stand-alone plots - they were on exploratory missions, so always exploring new planets and coming into contact with new aliens. By comparison, DS9 was stationary - yes, different cultures did visit the space station, but still, they were stuck hovering over Bajor. My sense is that, because they did not have the easy crutch of exotic new planets to visit in each episode, they were forced to think more about subtleties like character development.
In one of the special features of the DVD set of an early season, the DS9 PTB bragged about how they had to deal with issues, not fly away at the end of every episode. Which seems to have led to them running out of plot ideas and falling back on the interminable Dominion War. And the Defiant visiting planets just like they said they wouldn’t.
The first three seasons were great, but it fell to hell by the fifth and I gave up.
Errand of Mercy on TOS was designed to introduce an adversary but make sure the series would not center around a war. The Great Bird knew what the hell he was doing.
As much as I disliked Voyager I’ll defend the actors because most of the problem lay with the writing and directing. The actors were told to underplay their human roles to make the aliens seem more real. And the writers just didn’t go anywhere with some of the characters. Did we ever find out what tribe Chakotay belonged to?
Based on the fact that even Memory Alpha refers to them only as Chakotay’s tribe, I’m guessing no. There may have been a deliberate decision not to identify a specific tribe, so as not to risk getting some aspect of the culture wrong.
I was very active in Trek fandom at the time DS9 was on, and I can remember one phrase that was floating around at the time was “Star Trek for connoisseurs.” That is, DS9 was aimed at the more discriminating viewers, those who wanted more than just the wacky alien of the week or the latest holodeck malfunction. Now, that was probably just DS9 fans being snooty, but there was always a sense that, because they weren’t actually “trekking” anywhere, DS9 has a fundamentally different feel. I can definitely remember there were some people who were less enthusiastic about it for precisely that reason. It was also darker in tone than TOS and TNG had been, and some people (including George Takei, most prominently) felt that was a betrayal of the optimistic vision of Gene Roddenberry.
I remember Avery Brooks coming in for some criticism because his performance as Ben Sisko, at least early on, seemed very low-key and subdued. I read at the time that he was doing that very deliberately. He felt that as a military officer, Sisko would be very disciplined and keep his emotions under tight control. But I think it read to some viewers as a flat and lifeless performance. He did expand his emotional range as the series progressed.
As mentioned, DS9 is on Netflix. I’ve re-watched a few episodes here and there, but its highly serialized nature does make it harder to watch just one episode.
