With the openly homosexual character specifically, and the "social justice" influence in general, I think I will be giving this a pass (even if CBS's horrible marketing choices were not already making that decision for me).

The ratings will be the final arbiter. We'll see soon enough if CBS made the right call at least from a purely business perspective.

It should work out ok. It didn't ruin the likes of Ghostbusters.

Oh wait...

Why does anyone give a flying crap what the nerdrage star trek dorks think?

I love Star Trek but by god I hate the damn "trekkies" and their incessant crying and #%&*$# and moaning and nitpicking idiocy. Bunch of idiots.

The people the series are made for are not the selfobsessed people who think they "own" the franchise. It's the people like me who enjoy a good show without much regards for it's baggage.

Sorry for the rant, but the trekkies can all sod off and die in their quest to ruin Discovery. :P

The problem is that, should the ratings tank, CBS executives will most likely - as usual - draw the wrong conclusions regarding the "why". They will most likely blame the genre, market saturation or the distribution method. And/ or piracy. Not the fact that they let a rather radical but vocal minority dictate how a show is written, thereby missing their core target audience - like that Star Trek Fan from the OP's article - by a mile and a half. As if they never heard of the Spock quote: "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...or the one".

Star Trek (at least from a Federation POV) was always about "diversity". Roddenberry and the writers just were not that militant and preachy about it, and did not reduce characters solely to their gender, skin color, or sexual orientation.

Nowadays, it feels like the mindset is: "we'll have a transgender ,part extraterrestrial, part multiethnic terrestrian with a polyreligious belief system as designated, term-limited spokesbeing for the Starship (can't have hierarchies, either), and you better like it, or you are a horrible human being and should be publicly shamed".

They can write in all the "diversity" they want, for all I care, as long as that is not the core of the story or the only defining trait of the characters. If they manage to write good episodes, most Trekkers will not be offended.

Oh well, maybe the show will turn out to be good, after all. There's always hope

Good points MadDog and ultimately it's the casual mainstream audience that really determines the creative direction that Star Trek or any other major franchise takes.


Why did we have the JJ Abrams reboot films? Because the last TNG film "Nemesis" bombed at the box office and "Enterprise" was cancelled after just 4 seasons due to low ratings.

In other words, the hardcore Trekkies alone were not enough to pay the bills so changes were made.

The success or failure of any content entity these days in most cases is determined whether the "right" people "publicly" give it their blessing, or not. Hence why "influencer marketing" has mutated itself into this grotesque monster.

I did not have the impression that the interviewed person in the OP's article was a militant, "hard core Trekkie". I bet the general audience for the reboots were also "Trekkies" in a wider sense: those with enough familiarity with the franchise to want to see it. And don't kid yourselves: most hard-core Trekkies did watch the reboots at some point. Same will be true for the upcoming show. I find it hard to imagine that there would be an entity referred to as "general audience" with absolutely no previous affiliation with Star Trek, that would now just jump on "Discovery" like it were the next GoT or Westworld.

Regarding Star Trek after Voyager: I believe it were "the Trekkies" themselves that abandoned the franchise after Brannon/Braga took it in a direction they didn't like. Hence the initial (=first run) low ratings of "Enterprise". Neither did it help that every movie (with the exception of "First Contact") was perceived to be mediocre at best. And "Nemesis" was the low point of those.

I'm not reading all of that.
Has anyone actually seen all of the episodes yet? If not, their opinions aren't worth crap. At least see all of it before complaing in detail.

Frankly the "trekkeis" are such a small demographic that they wouldn't have mattered - it's the "unwashed masses" which generally make or break a show. I didn't watch Enterprise because I disliked the premise and the characters - just like i didn't watch Voyager because I hate the bloody Borg which got overused in TNG and First Contact (that and time travel are my two biggest hates in Star Trek).

DS9 is the only great ST series, TNG has like 5 rewatchable episodes. TOS is too... 60s :P

Best movies:
Wrath of Khan
Undiscovered Country
Star Trek (JJA one)

I concede that ST:TOS has a lot of that 1960's campiness but there are so many episodes that had great scripts and the performances by Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley have become iconic IMHO.

In a way, that's impressive. In general, ST just isn't your cup of tea...nothing wrong with that...but they still managed to put out a series different enough that it appealed to you. Did you like Babylon 5?
You might like The Expanse if you haven't already tried it. Possibly the best scifi show since B5.

TNG was marred with silly plots (technobabble solved like half the episodes), and cast I disliked (Wesley and Troy mostly, but I never really warmed to Riker either) - Worf and Picard were the two standouts of the cast IMHO.
TNG also started off on one of their worst episodes (Encounters at Farpoint) which didn't help.

I like most of the original movies (except STV), but never liked the TNG ones much. They felt too much like double-episode tv shows.
DS9 had darker episodes, it had an overarching plot. It was basically B5 in Star Trek
Voyager had a borg at a time I hated the borg for being overused (kind of like Q, he got used far too much).

I love Babylon 5, I love StarGate (incoluding Atlantis and Universe).
I watch about every Sci-fi show that comes along (or give it a chance at least) and most sci-fi movies.