To say that I’m feeling conflicted about the news that there will be a new Star Trek is to put it lightly. I’ve had my struggles with getting through Voyager, and Enterprise was just almost entirely unwatchable. Yet.
Yet.
Star Trek will always hold a place in my heart, though. I’ll always be willing to give something Star Trek a shot just because of the rich history. There were times when The Next Generation dragged on a bit and yeah, Deep Space 9 was incredible but some of the time traveling stuff became a bit grating after a while, as was the late focus on Chief O’Brien being a schmuck. Give the guy a break, already.
The shiny, new JJ Abrams movies are rather divisive when it comes to Star Trek fandom, with hardcore fans claiming that they are an atrocity while others are okay with the more action-oriented take on classic Star Trek storylines. I enjoyed them for what they were and it was fun explaining the story parallels between the awesome Wrath of Khan and Into Darkness to my wife. Of course, she then couldn’t sit through Wrath of Khan, which may be a huge negative for the modern films. Anyway, they are mostly fine.
Now there is news that there will be a new Star Trek television series debuting in 2017 on CBS All Access. The first episode will air on CBS proper, but then every following episode will stream on CBS’s web streaming service which, dear god, this is an awful idea. Television is really starting to fragment and consumers need to have a variety of subscriptions to keep up with shows now. Like I love the show Community but Yahoo! Screen was a terrible platform for the last season and I still haven’t even finished it yet. Mostly because of how obnoxious of a platform Yahoo! Screen was, and it didn’t even cost money.
The question is this; is Star Trek once again positioned for failure?
I understand on a base level that this is a ploy to get people interested in CBS All Access, but at the same time, putting Star Trek behind a $5.99 a month paywall seems ridiculous. Is Star Trek a strong enough brand name to push people to sign up for a streaming network that feels, at best, unnecessary? Netflix, Hulu Plus and every On Demand give consumers access to just about everything, why start another worthless subscription site and then bury a new show behind it?
What’s worse is that Star Trek fans have been burned so many times now. Voyager wasn’t great, but it had its following, for sure. Enterprise was just not good, with only the hardest of the hardcores sticking with it for the entire run. The show just wasn’t good, though. Michael Dorn (Worf) has been attempting to get his own Star Trek show picked up for ages and this apparently won’t be that, so really, what is this going to offer Star Trek fans? The films have already taken on a drastically different tone than the rest of the franchise, the last few series weren’t great, why can’t Star Trek fans have nice things?