Remember when ST had competent people at the helm?
- Berman
- Pillar
- Behr
- Moore
I choose to read this as "remember when Star Trek had Star Trek people at the helm."
The biggest problem now is that modern execs think it's better to slap the Star Trek name on whatever focus groups, market research and disconnected studio heads think people want in their Sci-Fi in general, rather than creating a chance for creative folk invested in the property to do something entertaining with it that will attract viewers.
If I may be indulged in using a classic Trek plot exposition device, the "
Phlebotinum Analogy" (aka "explain a specific, technical, often fantastic plot issue in relatable analogous terms that the character (and thereby the audience) can understand" technique)
It's like walking into a restaurant and ordering a steak, only to get a piece of chicken that's been cut and cooked to sort of resemble a steak. And then the waiter tells you that this is better because it allegedly gives the steak-eaters what they want (something they swear is a passable facsimile of actual steak), but also being what all the people who wouldn't normally eat at the steakhouse want too (chicken that isn't the stuffy, boring, unevolved steak that their parents ate and they've never cared for). When instead what they should do is get chefs who know how to make the best damn steak you've ever tasted so that all the chicken eaters will come to the restaurant curious, try the steak, and say "you know what? This is really
really good."
Admittedly that's a terribly clunky analogy that I mostly did to set up and pay off a bit of (bad) meta Trek 'humor', but the point stands:
A wider audience will watch a show that is unmistakably Star Trek at its core as long as it is
good. But the built-in Star Trek fan audience won't necessarily sit happily through a show that is mostly engineered to attract the anti-Trek crowd by disavowing the franchise's spirit, no matter how much of a glossy Trek-ish veneer you paint onto its surface layers.
As an aside, I also continue to be astonished as I watch the make-up competition reality show "Face-Off" which is judged by two of the people responsible for Discovery's Klingon redesign and those judges habitually chastise contestants on failures of design and aesthetic that are very much at the core of their Klingon makeups' problems (too difficult to speak clearly in, too difficult to emote through, baked-in expression/emotion, violating the spirit of the design inspiration in order to do something cool but unrelated, drifting too far outside the confines of the task handed to them so that it no longer looks like it belongs to what they were asked to do, etc). Every time Glenn carps at some contestant because the makeup turns the actor underneath it into a range-less mannequin, I tear my hair out because he crafted a set of Klingons that look like they strolled off some 15-year-old emo kid's DeviantArt profile and sound like they all just got out of major dental surgery and still have the gauze stuffed in their mouths.
