If Paramount is serious about bringing Star Trek back, it needs to look at why it failed.
A new movie is logical -because in the end, it will be cheaper to produce a theatrical film versus a new weekly series. And if they’re going to do a movie, it seems obvious to many -including the fans who supported the anemic Voyager and Enterprise - that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga should keep their hands off it.
Their failure to understand what Star Trek is, coupled with Paramount and UPN’s stance to produce a show as cheaply as possible, with a high content of sex and violence and little story, doomed the franchise. While Berman will argue that he kept up the principles of Roddenberry’s visionary themes, I would say he stuck to them so closely that it lost even the most hardcore fans. Sure Roddenberry’s utopian imagination was welcomed during the turbulent 1960's, but even by 1987 when The Next Generation premiered, those same values seemed archaic at best. TNG’s erratic first two seasons pointed out all the behind the scenes drama that was going on. Writers and producers came and went like waiters in a restaurant, as some tried to write stories that maybe conflicted with Roddenberry’s ideal that the Federation was all cookies and cream.
As Berman ascended to the throne as Roddenbery grew ill, he seemed to take the creator’s "bible" of Trek as gospel. That Gene was God of Star Trek and you could not change anything, even when things conflicted with each other (sounds like many religions). When Michael Piller was hired for the third season, TNG really began to settle in. As a producer and writer, he was known to tell people that "...the whole idea of exploring space is a metaphor for exploring ourselves." That the shows that gave the audience insight into humanity and the meaning of humanity were far better than "exploding space ships and space-monsters." He always encouraged the writers on all the shows he written for, like TNG, DS9 and Voyager and now The Dead Zone, to try and find the moral and ethical dilemmas; the human element of the story.
For most fans, him included, once he left Voyager to work on other things, there seemed to be a less of appetite for that kind of story telling. And while he might disagree with the why that happened, it is easily explained that Star Trek: Voyager and then Star Trek: Enterprise’s main goals was two-fold: reach a broader-based audience and achieve higher ratings. So his style of storytelling -but one that led to TNG’s additional 5 years of better and balanced stories after it’s wobbly first two seasons - was deemed too lofty.
Perhaps moving Trek from syndication back to a network show doomed it. In syndication, while ratings were important, the expectations of those ratings were scaled back. While TNG maintained an audience of 10 million or more in syndication, by network standards, it would’ve never survived. And while DS9 never achieved the high ratings of TNG, it nevertheless was still the number 2 drama in syndication after TNG (when both series overlapped each other) and became the number 1 drama when TNG ended in 1994 -and by then more and more shows were popping up in syndication.
So, with Voyager and soon-to-be Enterprise coming to network TV, Berman and Braga made a Star Trek series that was bland and no worse or better than any other run-of-the-mill science fiction show. Which was, in hindsight, the beginning of the end.
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