I Think I Miss Rick Berman - Modern Star Trek In Hindsight

It’s been 17 years since the start of JJ Abrams’ takeover of Star Trek. The interview posted above had me concerned, but I was willing to bet on it since we hadn’t had a Star Trek movie or TV show in what? 7 years at that point? Abram’s was Hollywood’s “IT” man and he had a decent string of sci-fi/action hits on his resume and Star Trek was in dire need of a fresh perspective. I was geeked!




After the first film premiered, I was pretty happy! A successful reboot! Superb casting! New fans! We were back! A few years later we got ST ITD and it had mixed reviews. I still like it a lot but I understand the criticisms of people who didn’t. When I finally got to see ST: B, well, again, I really enjoyed it but… something was missing. A Star Trek film should feel like a moment in history in that universe. This felt more like a disposable adventure. Where were the conundrums that caused you to re-evaluate your own views on things? Is this all Star Trek can be is a sci-fi action adventure franchise going forward?




Eventually we got the new era of Star Trek on TV and I have to say that’s been mostly a miss with some hits here & there. Alex Kutzman had worked with Abram’s on many different projects so I guess the Shows would be more of the same. To their credit, I feel like the show runners tried to I next a little more into the series than the movie producers. For whatever reason Discovery fell flat for me. Picard abandoned most of the things that made TNG great and SNW, honestly has mostly been a breath of fresh air as to what I’m looking for. I just don’t know if I can recommend it to anyone with a less than average knowledge of the original series. Would they get it? Is it too “in the weeds” for an average TV watcher?



For me Star Trek should aspire to tell stories on the level of Game Of Thrones, The Wire or Breaking Bad. It’s way more than the sci-fi action adventure that inspired Star Wars. I was watching an episode of Enterprise (S1E8 Breaking The Ice) on Paramount Plus this week and this was one of my least favorite series in the franchise and I felt like it was head and shoulders above most of the new Trek series. That’s what inspired this post.



What do you think? Have you enjoyed modern Star Trek more than me? Am I expecting too much from the writers of Star Trek to be actual fans of Star Trek?

Apparently so.
I think Lower Decks rivals TNG.
I think season 2 of Prodigy plays like a really good TNG movie.
I think SNW's worthy of being considered bonus seasons of TOS.
I think season 3 of PIC was the TNG ending we always should have gotten after Nemesis fucked it all up.
And while Disco never gave us a "Duet" or "In The Pale Moonlight" its standard episodes were right up there with standard DS9.
There was never a "Move Along Home" or "Profit and Lace" in the bunch.

It wasn't perfect.
Seasons 1 and 3 of Disco were the weakest.
Season 1 and about a third of 2 of PIC were weak.
Starfleet Academy wasn't given time to find itself, and get onto the groove.

But, 90's golden age Trek was equally flawed.
I think it's all nostalgia goggles.

Being a major LOST junkie BITD, I understood Abram's and Lindlelof's approach to solving the Grandfather Paradox when it came to time travel plots... so the ST movie made a lot of sense to me. STID, however, insulted me by basically raping one of my all time favorite movies and movie villains for the sake of an action flick. I never saw STB in it's entirety.

As to the shows, the only one I've cared anything about is SNW. SNW, for the most part, gets it right by having interesting ideas lead to interesting plots with interesting characters. A lot of the episodes that others might bitch over (the musical for example), I loved because I understood it. I'll say about 2/3rds of SNW is good to me.

Edit to add: I adored PIC season 3. That was an excellent send off for the TNG cast.

I have to say that Lower Decks was immensely enjoyable for me. It’s the only series that really captured the look and feel of what I wanted even though it was an animated comedy. It felt like a post DS9 continuation.

Picard started out strong but fell off the rails each season, IMHO. Especially season 3. Beverly & Picard’s son that he knew nothing about? Turns out to have some sort of super power? I forget. I won’t watch it anymore.

SNW is by far the best attempt so far.

"What do you think? Have you enjoyed modern Star Trek more than me?"

The movies?

Fuck no. Except for the brilliant casting.

TV shows? I thought Disco's storytelling was...fine. something like TNG level except with arcs instead of stand-alone stories, but as Diacano said it has no real extremes - not one classic, not one utter embarrassment.

SNW 1 & 2 are as good as, or superior too, anything that preceded it other than Ds9. Similarly to the above, few absolute bangers, few "I'm never watching that abomination again"
Season 3 was wildly uneven and when it was bad it was pretty damn bad.

Lower Decks ....is not my style. I won't call it bad, it's a fine example of what it aspires to be, but I barely think of it as Star Trek at all.

Prodigy was an underrated gem but I don't have a metric to measure it against older Trek

There was some things I liked about Picard (the appearance of Q particularly) and a good bit I didn't. I'd probably rate it similarly to Voyager on quality.

SA gets a grade of "incomplete"

If I was going to wax nostalgic for a showrunner, I'd have given the Disco concept to the surviving members of the DS9 writing crew, I'm not at all nostalgic for Berman. I'd have wanted someone like Manny Coto to run SNW (but he died in 2023) and Ron Moore (as f) to do Picard from the jump.

But miss Berman? Not at all.

I'm reminded of what one of the OG folks involved with SNL said when asked why the first season was so funny. Their response was, "We were operating under the assumption that we were going to get canceled before the next episode. So we just didn't care what the reaction was to a skit, because we didn't think we'd have a job soon."

When TOS ran, they were just trying to figure out how to stay on the air long enough to get the next episode out. They didn't worry about things like continuity or backstory. That gave them a freedom none of the series in the decades since have had. For fuck's sake, the studio was so worried about how people would judge TNG that they dragged out the old trope of putting humanity on trial in an effort to say, "See, this British guy who once carried a pug into battle, can be as cool as Kirk was." Meanwhile, that automatically stripped a lot of suspense out the show, since you knew no matter what happened, we were going to end up with the same cast and the same ship for the rest of the season.

Imagine, if you will, that in the run up to the TNG premiere, we'd been told that the series was definitely going to be set in the same universe as TOS, but that the Enterprise and her crew wouldn't be the focus, even if we would see them. Maybe the episode opens with us seeing the maiden crew getting onto the new Enterprise, or perhaps it starts with some other ship, and every implication that it is going to be the focus of the series. Then, halfway through, there's the prelude to the Big Event, and bad things happen to the non-Enterprise ship, leading to the Enterprise showing up, doing a rescue or something, as well as the folks you initially expected to be on a different ship, being on the Enterprise, as well as some of those on the Enterprise winding up on another ship.

Done right, you've thrown a number of things in flux, while at the same time establishing cred for those who'll be on the Enterprise (which will be the focus of the series). The suits would almost certainly balk at such an idea, since they think just getting the audience to accept a new ship, with the same name, and a new crew, is going to be hard enough. So, you have to establish early on who the crew is, and what the ship's going to be. That can really limit you options when it comes to storytelling.

Now, add in a few more decades, as well as different series, and it gets harder to take the kind of risks you once did. After all, you know that even the tiniest of mistakes is going to be spotted and screamed at on the internet. At the same time, it also offers up potentials for powerful storytelling that TOS didn't have. For example, would Spock's death in TWoK have hit as hard if that had been the OG pilot for the series? Sure, the acting, the script, and the direction all play a key role in the emotional punch, but so does the fact that we've known the characters for years by this point.

And, irregardless of if TWoK comes at the beginning of Star Trek, or 15 years after it first appeared, it hamstring's how you kill off an important character. Why? Because it cements the idea that if you're an important character, and you want people to at least think that there's a real chance to think that you're going to stay dead, you've got to be killed off in a pretty significant way. Not by drowning in a puddle. And every episode or movie you put out is going to complicate such things.

The reason for the Burn?? All of season 4 bar the last 3 episodes (which were so good I felt like my loyalty was being rewarded)?

Have I enjoyed modern Trek? It depends.

The movies? No. There are a million blockbuster action-adventure movies with spaceships zipping around and things blowing up and lasers going "pew pew pew." I like Star Trek when it's slower, more driven by ideas and characters, more reflective.

Discovery — Well, I enjoyed it a lot more when they jumped into the future because Star Trek was finally treading some new ground in terms of its setting. I didn't like the aesthetic as much; that's true of most modern live-action Trek (with the partial exception of Starfleet Academy, which did try to create at least a few spaces that you could imagine somebody living in). It lacked one of the things I personally like to have in a Trek series, which is an ensemble cast. It lacked the optimism that Trek made its name on. And spending so much time in the Mirror Universe early on — not to mention the "oh, the captain isn't really who you thought he was" switcheroo — made it hard to develop any sense of grounding. Things like the Mirror Universe work as a one- or two-episode detour after the show is well-established.

Strange New Worlds — Definitely like it. The ensemble is there, and it doesn't lean as hard into the dark-and-gritty. It's very well-cast (and not just because Jess Bush is smoking hot as Chapel). Anson Mount could sit there reading the phone book and still have charisma; Rebecca Romjin takes the cool professionalism of Majel Barrett's Number One and imbues the character with a level of humanity; Celia Gooding feels like a realistic younger version of the Uhura we already know. The aesthetic is a little warmer, though not as much as I'd like. As someone who grew up watching TNG, part of the appeal was always that you could daydream about what it would be like to be on that ship and live in that future, and the idea of being on Pike's Enterpise is appealing.

Picard — Shared some of the elements of Discovery that I didn't like as much. It lacked the mooring of a hero ship or station. The Federation is depicted as having lost its way, and although that picks up on a narrative thread that was starting to emerge as early as DS9, it really did diminish the traditional Star Trek optimism. I loved watching Season 3 — but that's because it was blatant fanservice, and I'm the textbook example of the fan it was intended for.

Lower Decks — I thoroughly enjoyed watching it, but that's because I'm a '90s-era fan. The whole "Second Contact" idea is fun. Most of the show was "Hey, we made a reference! And another reference! And we brought back this actor to voice their old character! Remember this thing? And this thing? And this thing?" Don't get me wrong, it was fun as hell. It's a popcorn series: Funny, nostalgic, and delightfully escapist — and best enjoyed when you're not expecting it to be anything more.

Prodigy — Didn't watch it.

Starfleet Academy — Maybe it's because I grew up in the era of Dawson's Creek and The O.C., so "teen dramedy" is kind of a nostalgic thing, but this is one of the modern Trek installments that I connect to the best. The characters are interesting, the writing is snappy, and while there are pieces of over-the-top silliness that I could do without (Khionians vomit glitter?), they're relatively easy to ignore. The cast is a true ensemble, and having "the adults" and "the kids" on separate but parallel tracks makes for good narrative variety. And perhaps most important, because it's set in a period of post-Burn recovery, it gets back to that Trek optimism.

I mean, TNG already did returns of popular characters, and flat out episode sequels.
If they had gone on for 14 years, they would have naturally coasted into "Remember this thing? And this thing? And this thing?".

I think the biggest issue hurting modern trek is that they aren't getting long enough seasons to flesh out the characters and establish a rapport with the audience.
You could always identify whether a Berman-era Trek was doing a Picard episode, or a Kira episode, or a Seven episode.
We don't really get that as much now. And it hurts the shows.
I know we'll never get 26-episope seasons back, but I think 15 would be a good compromise. That way reach character can get their own episode, easily. And it gives more time to make the universe feel lived-in.

Stealing @tafkats format: Have I enjoyed modern Trek? It depends.

The movies? Mostly. I liked the first one and third one. The middle one was pretty pointless.

Discovery — I liked the first two seasons but didn't care for it after the time jump. In fact, I lost so much interest that I haven't finished the series and I doubt that I will. Too much of it was too dumb for me: The Burn, "magical" technology, stupid detached nacelles, etc. I wasn't able to relate to any of it.

Strange New Worlds — I like it for all the reasons @tafkats stated. For me S3 was pretty uneven compared to the first two and I did not like the S2 singing episode at all (I bailed out after about 10 minutes). But the number of musicals I like can be counted on one hand and you'd have fingers left over.

Picard — I've only seen the first two seasons and, overall, it was very "meh". I don't know if I'll get around to watching the last season or not. S3 doesn't have Alison Pill, so that's a plus.

Lower Decks — I haven't finished this series but I've really liked what I've seen.

Prodigy — Didn't watch it.

Starfleet Academy — Meh. I wasn't excited about the 90210 in Space vibe, though the series wasn't as awful as I expected it to be (and I expected it to be unwatchable).


I will repeat: lose the 10-episode seasons. One of the things that Discovery did right was that only the last season had ten episodes. The rest had 13-15 episodes, which is just about the right amount IMHO.

I'd be more willing to tolerate the weaker SNW episodes if they were a lower percentage of the total number.

Season 4 was Kelvans in their true form, and season 5 was Progenitors.
So, they tied up the cosmic saga stuff.
It's like what the novels would do. It felt very novel-y.

One of the things I liked about SFA Season 1 was that it spread the focus around. In spite of only having 10 episodes, every cadet in the main cast got at least one episode where they were a primary focus.

Overall, yes, I would like it if American TV got back to longer seasons. The "filler" episodes are often among a show's most memorable.

2009 was fine as a space sci-fi action movie. Not a good Trek movie aside from visuals and casting. But I was willing to wait and see. People didn't appreciate TMP much when it came out, but it led to a better mix of action and ideas in TWOK, so.

Into Darkness likewise tried to balance action and ideas a little more, but it was disjointed and didn't pick the best ideas. I really want to like it more for the effort, but WAB mentioned some time back the 'three Trek movies he'd choose to never see again' and I realized Darkness would bve down there with NEM and INS.

Beyond is competent Trek but not as impactful as it should be and that still angers me a little.

Some day I may learn how to actually watch TV series again, but the shows will have to wait until then.

That is true, but even with ten episodes they spend too much time on legacy characters like Kirk and Spock. That is my biggest issue with SNW. I like the show, but I want more episodes focusing on Pike, Una, and some of the other characters. Stop wasting valuable time on characters that have had their day in the sun.Kirk and Spock had 79 episodes and 6 feature films. That's not counting the one off appearances on TNG, the Kelvin movies and Discovery. The characters have had their stories told and I have no interest in seeing more. They've went back to that well so much that it's poisoned at this point.

When Gene Rodenberry was given the opportunity at another series, he set it 75 years after TOS and created brand new characters. He didn't choose the lazy way out and just redo TOS with new tech. What excited me about SNW was that we were finally getting a Pike series, which had been something talked about in fandom for decades. We finally get it only for the past season and half focusing on SPock's love life and finding every way possible to put Kirk in. It's frustrating.

@topic - I don't miss Rick Berman. By Voyager, I thought the franchise had gotten stale and needed new blood.

Particularly Kirk, I would argue, because this show is supposed to be about Pike's Enterprise (and at least Spock is canonically supposed to be there).

I'll exempt Uhura because she didn't get much to do in TOS, Chapel because she got a little bit more to do but her stories were ridiculously one-dimensional, and M'Benga because he only appeared twice.

It's like there's an executive in the room constantly going "No, no! Put in a name they recognize, or they won't watch!"

But I realize it's just as likely to be because the writers are fans and they want to go back to the old, beloved characters.

If you used this approach on, say, a prequel to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it would be set in Xander and Willow's elementary school, but Buffy would turn out to have a never-mentioned cousin in Sunnydale who she's always visiting, Faith would show up on the flimsy excuse that her mom moved around a lot, and Wesley Wyndam-Price would be a study-abroad student at UC-Sunnydale, and he'd be teaching at Willow and Xander's school for some logic-defying reason, and also all of them would end up meeting each other and having demon-related adventures together, which would all be conveniently forgotten as soon as they get to their sophomore year of high school.

Absolutely.

Classic Trek may have seemed all fine if you're a cishet and/or white man, but could often be alienating to those outside of that. I mean, the treatment of Sato and Mayweather was so bad that we were calling it racist on TBBS back when ENT was still on the air! It was one of the very few things bashers and gushers alike agreed on!

Voyager was a mixed bag that has more good than I think many give it credit for, but we can't pretend Jeri Ryan wasn't hired for two specific reasons, even if her acting talents more than made up for that.

DS9 was arguably the best in how its women were treated on screen but the moments that are truly sexist get downplayed or flat out ignored and for me are sometimes worse than ENT decon chamber, to say nothing of how Terry Ferrell was treated backstage.

TNG? There's a reason Denise Crosby jumped ship.

Obviously I was a teen girl who found Trek on my own, but I stayed in spite of shit treatment of women onscreen.

These days on Tumblr and Bluesky I see plenty of other teens who love modern Trek for its inclusivity, who are glad to see women who are there not as eye candy or to target specific demos but as characters in their own right. Mike McMahon is on record as viewing the huge crowd of women the show garnered as a badge of honor. As well he should because we all know Trek would not have survived without the fan zine runners and the women who ran the earliest cons in school gyms.

It's wild for me to think about the kids in SFA being close in age to Jolene Blalock and Jeri Ryan at their respective starts with Trek & the way they were objectified versus the respectful way Caleb and the Betazoid girl were filmed in their one love scene. I'm glad for them and all the women in Modern Trek that none of them dealt with that shit.

And same too for the actors of color.DS9 was an outlier solely because Avery Brooks stayed on their necks but I'm glad they don't exist solely to check off a box.

Nor I. Putting aside everything else in my last post, it had gotten to be the same old, same old. That was even apparent to me as a relative n00b once I started branching out to the other shows.

One thing Kurtzman got completely right was creating a variety of shows with different tones so that no one show had to be everything for everyone.

To say nothing of the fact that Zoë Steiner and Sandro Rostra are contemporaries. Who did they write Jeri Ryan into intimate moments with? Robert Beltran and Robert Picardo, both 15 years her senior. (Jolene Blalock and Connor Trinneer are much closer in age, though Trinneer is still older.)

Generally, I think that after about 30, age dynamics don't matter all that much. But if nothing else, the writers seem to have been completely oblivious of the tropes they were feeding into. Modern Trek is much more thoughtful and intentional in its approach.

the plot point was shit, but I don't recall thinking the episode as a whole was an embarrassment. As a matter of execution. They committed to a very bad idea and then were stuck with having to make the best of it.

But if you want to argue the two are inseparable, I don't have any passion for disputing it.

Climbs the well-worn path and again plants the same raggady flag:

NOT THE SAME M'BENGA!

No, I'm not letting this go no matter what the showrunners say. Their claim is STUPID.

To a certain extent, blame the fans who keep consuming nostalgia Trek over and over (See: Picard season 3)
You should see the endless whining on the collector forums I go to about how Exo6 still hasn't made a classic Kirk and Spock figure. The ones saying they ONLY want TOS figures, not anything else. That is the type of audience the producers feel they have to cater to.

*Googles Exo6 to see the quality of their wares*
*Immediately gets their Captain Angel in Google image results*
OMFG, it's destiny. We have to pitch in and get UA one for Christmas!

LOL
Yes, that one just came out, and every person on the forum was like "Uh... what?"
Even I was a pass. I liked the character just fine, but not enough for that price.

She has a bulge almost as big a the n one in UA's forehead when he looks at that picture.

Ugh, but then we have to have another Ridiculously Small Universe moment. (The Federation president is Pavel Chekov's son! Sulu has a daughter and she's a helmsman too! La'an isn't just descended from Augments, she's a descendant of Khan himself!)

Granted, an uncle and nephew both being doctors and both being in Starfleet isn't that improbable. Occupations do tend to run in families, if for no other reason than that young adults are already familiar with their parents' jobs. (My dad is a teacher, his mother was a teacher, my sister is a teacher, and I strongly considered it for a while.) So does military service, and that's applicable to Starfleet no matter where you stand on the "is Starfleet a military or not?" question. The odds of both being posted to the Enterprise also improve if you adopt the TOS-era "there are only 12 starships in service in a big, lonely galaxy" aesthetic instead of the movie-era "there are other ships all over the place" portrayal.

But Star Trek has gone back to the "let's make this person related to this other person" trope so many times that my immediate reaction is "oh fer chrissakes, not another relative."

Like others, I've found Modern Trek a very mixed bag. There are very few episodes, let alone seasons, that I would say rank with best of TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY. I think that they have not handled most arcs particularly well. But at the end of the day, it's still Star Trek, and the floor is pretty high even if it doesn't quite match the ceiling of the others.

The movies: I liked ST 09, flaws and all (Kirk promoted to from not-yet-Academy graduate to captain of the flagship? Why not?), and the other two were just OK too. I would have happily watched a fourth with that crew, but it looks like it's not in the cards.

DIS: All 5 seasons were with a lot of ups and downs IMO. Contrary to shootER, I think I liked it better once there was the future jump. There was less need to try to fit the series's square peg into the round hole of TOS' history, and they largely abandoned the bad-for-SMG characterization of Burnham as a human with a Vulcan philosophy and let her be her own person S3 and later. But the whole concept of the spore drive is kind of silly, and it was particularly galling in the future that there was a ready-made, mass-producible one that the Federation should have installed throughout its fleet, and for no reason I can see did not against the backdrop of a cataclysmic event that made warp travel through dilithium-powered warp cores scarce.

Picard: JLP may be one of my favorite characters in all of fiction. So I was priced in to love a series about him. Instead, I found it largely a mess. I appreciate that Patrick Stewart wanted it to be different from TNG and that the writers wanted to focus on the theme of "what happens when a power loses its moral footing?" But I don't think the execution was well done. And by the time they came back to serve up TNG: TNG, they filled that season so full of non-sequiturs that I couldn't enjoy seeing my faves on screen again nearly as much as I would if it was literally them hanging out playing poker and reminiscing about times 30 years ago.

SNW: I think it is the most successful of the modern Trek live-action shows because it is the most episodic. I think that, for better or worse, the Trek writers capable of doing season-long arcs well are rare. It's pretty much the DS9 writers and maybe the SFA ones. Since they only have 10 episodes a season, it makes the mediocre ones stand out.

Lower Decks: I enjoyed it a great deal. Mind you, I haven't gone back to watch old episodes since its completion. But I could definitely see pulling up the occasional episode or doing full season/series rewatches at some point.

Prodigy: I watched S1 and some of S2, thought it was alright, but wasn't particularly compelled to finish it.

Section 31: One of the few things where I think almost all Trekkies (at least, who expressed their opinions online that I'm aware) agree was terrible. I suppose in some universe, eventually the cast might have gelled and a decent enough series could have been created out of the concept of Mission: Impossible meets Star Trek. But this wasn't it.

SFA: I actually really liked this show for the most part. I think it caught the short end of various sticks -- Paramount's change in ownership, the inherent concept leading people to label it Star Trek: 90210 without giving it a fair shake, the active campaign against it for being woke, the string of hit-or-miss series. I think of modern Trek, I'd be most likely up for rewatching its 1st season or individual episodes from it than almost any of the others.

I think part of the issue is that TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY are good and even great compared to the TV of their respective eras. It's easy to overlook such things as there being relatively few good Geordi, Troi and Crusher centric episodes of TNG because, well, that's how TV was in the 80s and 90s. It's easy to overlook that characterization of most folks was all over the place, and life-altering developments got forgotten in most cases by the next episode.

But post-ENT Trek has to compete with the television of their eras in addition to the Trek that has come before. And there just isn't a modern Trek series that exists that lives up to the storytelling mastery of the best of HBO (such as The Wire and Game of Thrones) or Amazon or other mid-tier streaming (Fallout or even something like Reacher) even a lot of what's on network TV.

Yet again, if you want HBO quality space SF, Ursula Le Guin's Hainish series is where it's at.

And yet again, I hope they never adapt them, because Hollywood would ruin 'em.

Have I enjoyed modern Trek? Haven't really seen any of it after the first couple episodes of Discovery. And that show turned me off pretty hard with its questionable-at-best design choices. Enterprise was my last Trek series and that was bad enough to kinda put me off.