A Brief Guide to Star Trek

storytelling they found accessible. Berman and his various creative teams were struggling with how to create not only new science fiction television shows, but also new
Star Trek
, with all that the concept implied.
    With the end of the original cast movies and the arrival of the Borg,
The Next Generation
had finally found itself and successfully created a new way of telling
Star Trek
stories that succeeded with a mass television audience. After that, it was a case of rapidly diminishing returns. Each new series would debut to huge viewing figures as a curious public were seduced into checking out what the latest version of
Star Trek
was like. They then discovered each show and its new characters simply didn’t match up with their vivid memories of the originals or
The Next Generation
. Without exception, every series after
The Next Generation
suffered a catastrophic fall in viewing figures across each full run, culminating in the ignominy of cancellation for
Enterprise
in 2005. The franchise had turned inwards and begun to service only the die-hard fans – often with very well-told stories – but it failed to reach beyond the fan base. Each subsequent series featured either characters from
The Original Series
or
The Next Generation
in an attempt to bring back the mass audience and appeal to fans of those individual shows.
The Next Generation
’s Worf became a regular on the later seasons of
Deep Space Nine
, while the Borg (and even Sulu) appeared on
Voyager
, and
Enterprise
fell back on regular appearances by Klingons and Vulcans (and even controversially concluded with a story built around
The Next Generation
’s Riker and Troi).
    Television science fiction had changed in the 1990s, following the success of
The Next Generation
. The show had opened the doors to a new breed of darker science fiction and fantasy shows such as
The X-Files
,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
,
Babylon 5
,
Farscape
,
Stargate SG-1
(and its spin-offs,
Atlantis
and
Universe
),
Firefly
and
Battlestar Galactica
. Many of these shows successfully reacted against the edicts of
Star Trek
storytelling (in the way that
Deep Space Nine
had attempted) and fitted much better with television in the 1990s and 2000s when stories became darker and serial television was much more willing to deal in long-running story arcs. Characters would change and develop, often in dramatic ways.
Star Trek
told great stories, but apart from in
Deep Space Nine
, few of the long-running characters were very different at the end of a series than they had been at the beginning. The result was that the later
Star Trek
shows – especially
Voyager
and
Enterprise
– began to look old-fashioned,like something from the 1960s, in fact. That echoing of the past may have worked well for fans in the final season of
Enterprise
(showrunner Manny Coto said he felt the fans were all that was left watching, so why not cater to them?), but it failed to engage the mass audience needed to keep such an expensive show on network television. Without the archetypal characters they remembered, and with many other better choices available, audiences began to desert new
Star Trek
.
    Once seen as the saviour of
Star Trek
, Rick Berman was – by the time of the cancellation of
Enterprise
– enemy number one to fans. The perception was he’d destroyed the franchise he’d done so much to create and shepherd – after all, eighteen years of continuous television production of very complicated shows is not to be discounted. He seemed to believe that serving up more of the same, sometimes modelled on the character dynamics and dramatic situations from
The Original Series
, would be enough to see the lucrative franchise continue. Berman was wrong, and by 2005
Star Trek
on both the big and small screens was dead, slowly strangled by a failing formula and killed by creative complacency. The
Star Trek
franchise had simply not adapted – Borg-like – to the twenty-first-century television environment, and so it ultimately failed.
    There was one lesson to be learned from all this:
Star Trek
worked as an event.
The Next Generation
had succeeded as a series with mass appeal, drawing an average of 10–11 million viewers per season, but none of the other series enjoyed the same success. Yet, each had begun with massive viewing figures.
Deep Space Nine
had drawn almost 12 million viewers to its spectacular debut episode, but had ended its seven-year run with less than 4.5 million watching regularly.