Both seem to be trying to establish some new threat to the Federation (and possibly a shared threat between the Federation and other rival powers such as the Romulans). The final two episodes of Next Generation's first season, "Conspiracy" and "The Neutral Zone", seem to have been part of an abandoned attempt at more long-form story-telling. Heck Q's judgement of humanity was originally presented as the framing mechanism for the entire show! It was scaled back in the following seasons due to the general poor reception of the first season, and the fact that John de Lancie just works better in a more whimsical and comic role. By this time, The Next Generation had several story threads that had recurred over the course of a season, or over multiple seasons - as well as several attempted overarching plot threads that were dropped.Īs early as the first season of Next Generation, Q had become a recurring antagonist, and his "judgement" over the human race was established as a recurring plot thread. Deep Space Nine premiered in 1993, the same year as the sixth season of Next Generation. Serialized story-telling wasn't alien to Star Trek. Looking back now, that sort of serialized story-telling is now ubiquitous and expected, and so it's easier to recognize that Deep Space Nine was truly innovative and ahead of its time in this regard. ![]() If my dad was watching it, and I was there, I'd watch it, but I wasn't planning my day around it. ![]() Missing so many episodes meant that I had very little idea what was going on when I would watch, and so I mostly lost interest in the show. I was in elementary school and middle school during DS9's run, and I missed a lot of episodes in the first couple seasons, despite wanting to watch the show. Highly serialized, long-form drama are the norm for modern networks and subscription television services.Īs I mentioned in the previous essay, this was the case with me. It's easy to lose viewers if none of them know what's going on. Expecting the audience to have seen every previous episode in preparation for this week's episode was a dangerous and risky expectation for a production studio. Viewership, therefore, would be much more fickle and fractured. Furthermore, the networks or affiliates could change the time slot of the show pretty much at a whim. A big part of why serialized television was uncommon was that the producer(s) of network syndicacted shows didn't have as much control over when its affiliates decided to air the shows, or how heavily they would market and advertise it. British television has a much longer track record of serialized story-telling. ![]() ![]() At least, this was the case in the United States. Serialized, long-form television may be commonplace now, but back in the 1990's, it was virtually unheard of outside of daytime soap operas (such as Dallas and Dynasty) and the occasional network mini-series. Procedural dramas are going the way of the dinosaur. Whether it's AMC's The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad, HBO's Game of Thrones, Sci-Fi's Battlestar Galactica, Netflix's House of Cards and Stranger Things, History's Vikings, and so forth, it seems that every big new show outside of sit-coms has a heavily-serialized format. Every network and streaming service has wanted its own blockbuster TV shows. In the age of streaming and binge-watching here in the year 2023, long-form serialized television is now ubiquitous.
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