It's unfortunately not about what's "healthy" it's about what's a name, and what's already familiar in people's mind so it can be a "hit" when it get's put out there. This is why so much stuff these days are getting re-made, re-launched or re-booted, because doing something original is both too much hard work and too much of a risk if it fails.Deledrius wrote: ↑Fri Jul 20, 2018 11:04 pmI don't even get it. The thirty-year rule for nostalgia means that we should be getting people who are obsessed with TNG making things right now by default, even if I hate the nostalgia-driven reboots in general. And with what I've read coming from people in retail who sell the models and such, the TNG-era merchandise is still a better seller than TOS and JJ-Trek, so there's even that from the business sense. It's just weird that someone seems to have decided where the fan nostalgia is (or maybe it's just a situation where everyone thinks someone else decided and no one questions it), and keeps. going. back. to. TOS. regardless of anything else. And I love TOS! But I also like Trek as a franchise (and more importantly, the universe it has built), and it's not going to survive if it can't grow. ENT, JJ-Trek, and Discovery are three attempts in a row to feed on itself, and that just isn't a healthy path forward.
Platforms such as Youtube, Netflix, Amazon Prime etc have blown open how much stuff people can now watch, and has also opened the door to shows getting made that a "proper" studio would never have touched. Now that we're a few years down the line on that path, the awesome advantage to being able to see so much historical & new content together, is now becoming an equally strong disadvantage in tandem.
Through internet, social media, and the general advertisement of media technology, marketing, & distribution, we've reached a point of creative overload that is taking us to a creative desert. There is so much out there getting made all the time that people can watch, they can't feasibly hope to see all of it with only a finite amount of time to do so. Therefore if a show in most cases isn't an immediate hit, it's dumped. If a movie only makes hundreds of millions instead of the 1 billion+ the studio wanted, that "failure" is either buried, or we get a "re-boot" and change everything to try and make that level of money next time.
We're reaching the point where studios feel they need a "name" that people know, to make it standout as a way to get people to watch it in the hopes to stop it from failing. That's why we're getting so many re-boots or re-envisionments. Take Star Trek & Lost in Space, take the names and references away, would those shows have got made? I really don't think so, and if they did they wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the backing they would have. This is why we're now also seeing the likes Buffy coming back, it's a "name" that can be sold if it's done at least half-right, even though it's a show that doesn't need re-made. It's getting depressing!
