Alex Kurtzman signs 4 year contract extension worth $160 Million

[Yukaphile]

1. I'm being fair since I'm not keeping up on modern news or the shows, I just hear critics say they change things to try to please them without acknowledging it, even as they take shots at them. So they feel pandered to. It is good they changed it back regardless, but even if the executives didn't, everyone else did. Though it kinda doesn't shock me from non-fans. I'd doubt Kurtzman is anything more than a casual fan at best, but he keeps getting hired since he does what he's told by his corporate owners.

2. I haven't seen Andromeda either, but it's not as if Star Trek doesn't have a history for that sorta thing - look at plundering the B5 story bible. Even so, my point was that I would rather check out something less corporatized like Andromeda than what we have now. It is a problem the longer a franchise goes on, in that the excessive corporatization becomes very much harder to ignore.

3. He said the Federation "nationalized the companies" in the future of Star Trek. I mean, come on, a true nerd would know what post-scarcity is. You could easily trip him up on lore knowledge the more in-depth you go, past surface detail. It's not just limited to him either, but other longer-running franchises. I hate to say it, but in the online world we live in, anyone can do easy research to look more knowledgeable than they really are. It's where rising distrust is COMING from, in every aspect of society. And it's how toadies are more easily being put into prominent positions they should not be, the way I see it.

But I don't know. I can't speak to the quality of the shows, since I've never seen them. I suppose there's lots of great potential and ideas there. I'm going to mostly speak to the management flaws now, because I have read up on them.

[Frustration]

The Simpsons is the best example of this going. 30 years its been on and I don't know anyone who would claim it didn't peak in the nineties.

The first eight seasons were revolutionary, and changed the nature of television, in addition to being darned entertaining.

None of it past the twelfth season or so is worth watching. Yet someone must be, judging from its ratings.

[Frustration]

Actually, that is kind of my point. That what people like from their genre medium can be extremely varied and there's "No true Trekkie."

I think you're missing =my= point, which is that wildly different works have been shoehorned into the brand of 'Star Trek', to the degree that one can be a wildly-enthusiastic fan of one section of the category while absolutely loathing another section.

It's a corruption of the brand at the very least.

[Thebestoftherest]

Actually, that is kind of my point. That what people like from their genre medium can be extremely varied and there's "No true Trekkie."

I think you're missing =my= point, which is that wildly different works have been shoehorned into the brand of 'Star Trek', to the degree that one can be a wildly-enthusiastic fan of one section of the category while absolutely loathing another section.

It's a corruption of the brand at the very least.

You know that appealing to as wide of a market as possible is common place, weather it is for good od the brand or not is irrelevant, this is nothing new for trek.

[Frustration]

They're not appealing to as wide a market as possible. Trek has NEVER done that.

What they've done is change their target audience.

[CharlesPhipps]

They're not appealing to as wide a market as possible. Trek has NEVER done that.

What they've done is change their target audience.

Which is ridiculous because Star Trek is one of the largest widest brands in the whole world.

[Thebestoftherest]

They're not appealing to as wide a market as possible. Trek has NEVER done that.

What they've done is change their target audience.

Which is ridiculous because Star Trek is one of the largest widest brands in the whole world.

Yeah which is why Enterprise wasn't cancelled before it time.

[Makeshift Python]

I genuinely believe if DISCO had actually stuck to the aesthetics of TOS, not only would it have been a less controversial show among fandom, it would have been given a pass for simply adhering to the old look, perhaps even COMMENDED for doing that. But because the makers had the gall to “update” the look of the universe, that was perceived by fans as a slight against the original series, it told them “your previous TOS wasn’t good enough”, and from that point on they viewed any Kurtzman production in bad faith because they did the unforgivable. That’s not how I perceive it, but I’ve seen a lot take it that way. Especially given how Star Wars in contrast actually replicated the 70s aesthetics so faithfully that you have loads of fans who commend ROGUE ONE for being accurate on that front, and Trek fans are absolutely jealous that the other big space franchise is getting away with it.

[Al-1701]

Admittedly, Star Wars has an easier job to recreate the aesthetics of the original. It's a completely different galaxy meaning their technological level is more fungible, and it started with a full-length feature film which could afford better sets and effects than a weekly television series a full decade earlier.

What her DISCO is it came when CBS dropped the hammer on Axinar and seemed to be their attempt to cut that project off at the knees by covering that period of time. Add in that it's the first time Trek would be put behind a paywall, and any flaws were going to be blown out of proportion. There was also the Orville which was pitched as a replacement for Trek which didn't help matters (though, as Discovery got its act together and MacFarlan got more hamfisted in his storytelling, Orville's ratings nosedived).

Really, I think Trek is going to be polarizing because we live in polarizing times. It's always had a progressive angle to it. It's just you have this segment of the population who act as if progressive means the end of America as we know it. This has nothing to do with Kurtzman. He just happens to be on top of the heap currently.

[Yukaphile]

Yeah, but I think the REAL question to be asking ourselves is: Are today's progressives REALLY the right people, the right ideology, to lead us into the future? In the past year, I've been asking myself that more and more and harder and harder than ever before. If we're having a fuckin' war over PROPER LABELS and how they apply to people... because labels historically have divided people, and at this stage in history we have more labels than we ever have. Plus the people I talk to, the conservatives? By the metrics of merely a few decades ago would HAVE to be considered the progressives for that generation. I've said this before. Or at least the liberals. But if that's the case, then Star Trek was always a LIBERAL show. Always held back before it could fulfill every checkmark in Roddenberry's progressive agenda, and it was a better show for it. Not that the modern shows do that, by any stretch of the imagination, just from all I hear. There's just false marketing to make you THINK it has. Like declaring Michael Burnham "the first black lead in all Star Tre -" whoops! And they made Sisko into a footnote. So they amended into "black woman!" As if there's some kinda invisible tug-of-war where one bit of diversity trumps the other and mixing them all into a blender ensures the ultimate goodness. I mean, it's just what I see as an outsider.