Star Trek has reached a crisis and juncture and turning point--which is not unusual.
If my very lengthy series of essays on this blog laying out (in rather inaccurate fashion) the history of Star Trek have anything to say, it is that Star Trek is not and never has been a simple, single formula or genre or thing or "vision" of Gene Roddenberry or anyone else. Most of what makes Star Trek interesting to me, in fact, is the intensely collaborative nature of the (now extinct) genre of network television, and how tied Star Trek has always been, not to any particularly original treatment of science fiction or politics, but rather with the ever-shifting personal and political and utopian visions of America looking at itself.
Anyway, more or less since the year 1966, Star Trek has been in crisis: beginning with the initial crisis of its failed first pilot, extending through the crisis of its too-expensive budget and too-low ratings, through the crisis of its first cancellation, through the crisis of its second cancellation, and ending with the crisis of its true and final cancellation after its third season.
Then began the terrible monstrous crisis of trying to revive Star Trek, which took up most of the 1970s, got a lot of people fired, and resulted in dozens of unproduced scripts, lots of unused design work, one terrible cartoon show, and one terrible (but sublime) film. Then there was the terrible horrible crisis of TNG's birth and first two years, then the crisis of how to do a TNG spinoff in the '90s, and a lot of other crises that I refuse to summarize in this sentence.
Certainly Star Trek has been in crisis since the year 2005, when Star Trek Enterprise was unceremoniously cancelled after four seasons. There are a lot of things one could say about Enterprise--and maybe one day I'll say them--but perhaps the most relevant is that its demise is impossible to untangle from the gradual and now irreversible decline of network television, television networks, and indeed television itself.
In 1995, Star Trek Voyager had debuted as the flagship show of the new network UPN; in 2001, Star Trek Enterprise took over that role; in 2005, Star Trek Enterprise ended; and in 2006 UPN itself went the way of the dodo. Its successor, the CW, has like most of network television continued to limp along til the present day, gradually losing viewership and profitability and shows: it now runs more or less exclusively sports, news, reality, and variety shows, with its last produced scripted drama show set to end this summer.
A few years later, though, Star Trek took to the big screen, attempting to join the "Marvel rush" of would-be blockbuster films greenlit by executives desperate to find any even vaguely comic-book-esque franchise (Battleship? Emojis?) to share in the bounty: and, like most of their peers, met with mixed success. JJ Abrams' Star Trek produced three successful, popular films that nonetheless were considered disappointments by the studio for not matching the grosses or profit margins of true blockbusters: and Star Trek was once again left to die.
While all this was going on, a little website called Netflix was introducing on-demand streaming to the world: an event that not only accelerated the decline of network television, but also led to a desperate attempt by any and every studio to replicate Netflix's success. In 2014, CBS, the owner of the Star Trek shows, released CBS All Access (later Paramount Plus), a transparent desperate cash grab with a complete dearth of original content whose main selling point was that it had the old Star Trek shows available to watch. And so, a new era began, where the hoary network-television entity Star Trek would be retailored for a new age of free-flowing subscriber cash, maximal budgets, and an ever-increasing demand for content.
And then, of course, the streaming economy completely collapsed, and studios began cutting back massively, cancelling and reducing budgets across the board in a desperate attempt to figure out how the new model of streaming television could possibly be profitable.
Hence, the latest Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy was cancelled shortly after the airing of its first season ended, and probably more than a year before its already filmed second season was set to be released (the date has not yet been announced): as I write this, its sets are being auctioned off publicly for peanuts. Strange New Worlds, despite having two seasons left to air, has also already finished filming its fifth and final season: and for the first time since Star Trek Discovery began in 2017 there are no Star Trek productions filming anywhere in the world.
Meanwhile, Paramount is in the process of being bought out by Skydance, run by the son of Trump ally and CEO of massive-beneficiary-of-circular-AI-deals Oracle Larry Ellison in a monopolistic bargain that numerous Hollywood and Star Trek stars are currently protesting, but which many people on the Internet either hope or fear will make Star Trek stop being woke--reactions themselves occasioned by the massive, politicized online backlash to Starfleet Academy for being woke and/or having a gay Klingon. And as the Culture War (and also a real war) rages on, Star Trek fans around the world wait, and watch, and bemoan the fact that (undeniably) Star Trek is In Crisis, that (once again) Star Trek As We Know It Is Over, and wonder if anyone, anywhere can perhaps (in a stunningly original neologism that I just came up with) Make Star Trek Great Again.
As the dust settles, though, those of us not engaged in furious online debates over Wokeness (an online term for things that are cool from the year 2015) versus Anti-Wokeness (an online term for American conservatism from the year 2019) can once again take stock, reflect, and post absurdly long essays on Star Trek to our blogs. Or as Quark said, "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
Abstracting (quod sit impossibile) from the political and economic situation of America, the fact remains that a lot of people have not been particularly happy with the 2017-2025, streaming-bubble, Alex Kurtsman era of Star Trek. Some of those people have been merely grumpy old men who vastly prefer rewatching another episode of Star Trek TNG to watching any new show whatsoever or spending time with their wives; but some have been people who had legitimate issues with the actual creative quality of these shows. And what is more, this era of Star Trek, taken as a whole, has in fact resoundingly failed to recapture the general audience lost to Star Trek c. 2000, so that Star Trek is less culturally relevant in the year 2026 than it has ever been, even during the 2005-2009 interregnum, and is more or less the least culturally relevant franchise still producing content--significantly less relevant, alas, than The Fast and the Furious, whose proposed eleventh film is currently bogged down in production hell.
Hence, it is my goal in this post to Do My Duty as a Star Trek Fan (i.e. tedious old man) and do the hard work of drawing some lessons from the recently completed era of Star Trek to, hopefully, offer to future generations and/or future runners of the Star Trek franchise. Unfortunately, it is too late for the actual writers and producers of Starfleet Academy to benefit from them: but the below "lessons" are still offered in the somewhat aggressive, ironic, tongue-in-cheek spirit of one educator speaking to another.
Star Trek has in its history been run by everyone from an ex-Southern-Baptist ex-cop (Gene Roddenberry) to a Jewish ex-Quiz-Kid (Harve Bennett) to a Jewish writer of Sherlock Holmes novels (Nicholas Meyer) to a Jewish actor-turned-director (Leonard Nimoy) to another Jewish actor-turned-failed-director (William Shatner) to a Jewish documentary producer (Rick Berman) to a Jewish writer with a blue beard and an obsession with Las Vegas (Ira Steven Behr) to a Jewish writer of Transformers films (Alex Kurtsman): and I for one am eagerly awaiting the next anointed one in this storied lineage.
For after all, when Woke and Anti-Woke both disappear into the mists, reality will remain: and so will things like aesthetics and framing and character and story and plot and themes and meaning and the true and the good and the beautiful. Also, just FYI, budgets really matter.
