I think VOY is partly seen as a good "leave it on in the background while you do other things" show. The data isn't going to show how closely people are paying attention. You notice people aren't very picky about what season they're watching. TNG has a pretty readable pattern. There's the newbies who start with S1 and bounce off hard, and the people who know the conventional wisdom that TNG gets good in S3 (and possibly the sickos who watch S1 because they want to see how bad it actually is).
I think you'd find something similar to DS9 for all of'em in that the numbers would be relatively consistent. Be interested to how much of that is new viewers rather than rewatches/multiple viewings of specific eps on the classic era
One thing that's worth noting is that, even though it doesn't look like it, all of the series had a dropoff in viewership after the first season. That's because DS9 and Voyager both had shortened first seasons. (Similarly, the TOS dropoff isn't as extreme as it looks, because its first season was longer than the other ones.) The most notable deviations from trend are probably: 1) The high level of consistency in DS9 — if a viewer got past the first season, they were probably going to finish the entire series. That makes sense both because of the serialized nature of the last five seasons and because of the consistency of its quality. Much as I love TNG, it kind of started to run out of gas toward the end. So did TOS and VOY. 2) The TNG second-season dropoff being followed by an increase for Season 3. It's hard to know exactly what to credit for that. Did some binge-watchers decide to just skip the Pulaski season? Or, was there one viewer cohort that started with Season 1 and dropped off pretty quickly, and a second cohort that didn't bother with the first two seasons at all and started watching at the beginning of Season 3? 3) The VOY dropoff over the first three seasons being followed by a slight jump in Season 4. Again, I don't know if there were people who started with Season 1 and then went "meh, I'll just skip ahead to the seasons with Seven," or if there was a second cohort that just didn't bother with any of the pre-Seven seasons at all, or some combination.
VOY may have gotten a big boost from having its star also being apart of one of Netflix's biggest hits.
Trek's been having that problem since the 90s, which is why they were trying real hard to make ENT edgy™ and EXTREME © to appeal to those of us millennials whose parents hadn't introduced them to Trek. I literally wouldn't be here writing this if I hadn't watched that show for all its numerous flaws, but I'm glad that between the Academy show, Prodigy and even Lower Decks (which I've never done any polling on but I've run across far more new fans on Reddit who were introduced to Trek by that one more than any other new series), currently, it's not the worst thing in the world that they're aiming for a younger audience....one that will seek out the old stuff as much as the new. And hey, they didn't even need to bring in decon chambers this time!
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.20268 You enjoyed that ringed planet flyby the ship did at the start of every episode, but did you ever stop to think the effects it might have on the local civilization? Hmm?
As much as I love TNG, based on my rewatch of it back in the middle of the pandemic, I would rather watch a typical S1 episode than most of S7. Parallels, The Pegasus, Lower Decks, and All Good Things were the only high-quality episodes from that season, while the truly bad ones (Sub Rosa and Masks, for instance) don't have the excuse of a show just trying to find its footing.
I don't think S1 or S2 are as bad as everyone says. Yes, there are some incredible stinkers in those two seasons, but there are also some really amazing episodes as well. The problem with TNG is that, like many successful shows, they started to drink their own pee after S4.
The first two seasons definitely have some really bad episodes, but they also have some really good episodes as well, are they better than season six or seven, I don’t know. I’d like to do a comprehensive list. I’d TNG peaked at season three, four and five while DS9 peaked at season three, four, five and six. Then Voyager peaked at season four, five and six and Enterprise peaked at season three and four. Then DSC peaked at season two and that’s about it.
It has been rare that I've read so many wasted words. They could have just said: We know nothing about any of the possible future Trek series, except they may do some.
Just a random thought: okay I’ve. Seen some early episodes of TNG recently and now I understand why Kurtzman and Co. wanted to expand on things in Picard season one and two. It seems obvious now that they wanted to expand on the idea of Dara and what if there were slave androids and what if Dara tried to create more androids? Okay, well most of that was resolved in later episodes and those that weren’t were resolved in later series’. Then season two with Guinan, again, much of her “powers” was addressed in , “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” It wast mostly resolved. Now the Founders, okay, great story, but the Dominon war was Sisko’s story, why involve Picard in it? Then of course they had to involve the Borg? I get that the Borg is Picard’s story, but we all thought that was done and they made Jurati the Borg Queen. Why wasn’t Janeway involved? Then you have Q, well that’s fine, but he barely did anything. So looking back at both TNG and Picard it’s just convoluted and not really thought out well.
Yes, god forbid anyone should have an opinion that doesn’t align with your approved opinions or we should have a discussion about Star Trek instead of this thread just being another playground for Turdfan to post memes.