That’s an ask. That’s a bit over 4 hours, and to me exemplifies one of the biggest problems of modern T.V. - you can’t jump into it where it gets good without missing important stuff.
When I introduced my partner to TNG, we started with season 3, and they LOVED it.
Later on I was doing a rewatch and was part way through season one or two and they sat down on our couch “oh, nextgen. Nice.” And was silent for about 15m and then said “what is this shit and why don’t I remember it?” And later after another early episode and discussion “good thing you didn’t try to get me to watch season 1, I would have noped out of the show before they got good.”
I don’t want to slog through 10 episodes of shit to get to the good stuff…and, for me anyway, discovery would do exactly that over and over. 8 episodes of shit and 2 or 3 good ones…and for me, needing to invest that much time into a show for such a poor reward is very… disenfranchising.
Unfortunately, every Trek variation is like that. TNG is literally the reason the phrase “grew the beard” came into being. By season 2, when Riker gets rid of the baby face, the show comes into its own. Voyager by 4 and DS9 by the end of 3. Those are hour long, 26 episode seasons. A block of 10 episodes at 22 minutes is peanuts.
They’re all a commitment of time and patience, especially with DS9. As the first serialized attempt, it’s a slow burn, but worth it for the character building. If that’s not for you, that’s just fine. Certainly no shortage of other media to consume these days.
I didn’t feel that way about DS9, tbh. Voyager, yeah - but again, it was mostly episodic and you don’t need to watch the shit in order to enjoy the good stuff.
If you skip any Disco episodes then you are missing story and/or character development.
I kinda wonder in retrospect if they shouldn’t have done Voyager and Enterprise the other way around, make Enterprise first, then do the stranded far from home thing.
Voyager’s premise lends itself to being told as one continuous story, because…it IS. One trip, back from the Delta quadrant. Except in the late 90s they still wanted to make adventure of the week episodic TV. Especially early in the show, they ignored the premise almost entirely.
Enterprise’s premise is a return to the weekly adventure format; a ship named Enterprise wanders around and encounters shit, now with 38% more obvious thirst. That’s suited to episodic adventures, but it’s the early-to-mid 2000s, the era of TiVo and DVD box sets, the heyday of binge watching. Serialized TV was soon to become all the rage, Paramount knew it, which is why they tried to have not one but two overall plots. The first two seasons had the “temporal cold war” which I’m still convinced someone in a writer’s room blurted out without thinking through what it meant. The resulting plot was a bad guy and a good guy kept showing up to explain to Archer why they couldn’t explain to him what they were doing. That wasn’t working so they went full Starship Troopers. “I’m from Pensacola, and I say KILL EM ALL.”
The prequel Enterprise would have done better in the late 90s and the stranded far from home Voyager would have done better in the 2000s.
While I get what you’re saying here,
That’s an ask. That’s a bit over 4 hours, and to me exemplifies one of the biggest problems of modern T.V. - you can’t jump into it where it gets good without missing important stuff.
When I introduced my partner to TNG, we started with season 3, and they LOVED it.
Later on I was doing a rewatch and was part way through season one or two and they sat down on our couch “oh, nextgen. Nice.” And was silent for about 15m and then said “what is this shit and why don’t I remember it?” And later after another early episode and discussion “good thing you didn’t try to get me to watch season 1, I would have noped out of the show before they got good.”
I don’t want to slog through 10 episodes of shit to get to the good stuff…and, for me anyway, discovery would do exactly that over and over. 8 episodes of shit and 2 or 3 good ones…and for me, needing to invest that much time into a show for such a poor reward is very… disenfranchising.
Unfortunately, every Trek variation is like that. TNG is literally the reason the phrase “grew the beard” came into being. By season 2, when Riker gets rid of the baby face, the show comes into its own. Voyager by 4 and DS9 by the end of 3. Those are hour long, 26 episode seasons. A block of 10 episodes at 22 minutes is peanuts.
They’re all a commitment of time and patience, especially with DS9. As the first serialized attempt, it’s a slow burn, but worth it for the character building. If that’s not for you, that’s just fine. Certainly no shortage of other media to consume these days.
I didn’t feel that way about DS9, tbh. Voyager, yeah - but again, it was mostly episodic and you don’t need to watch the shit in order to enjoy the good stuff.
If you skip any Disco episodes then you are missing story and/or character development.
DS9 is about the only 80s/90s Trek series with an almost completely watchable 1st season, though.
I kinda wonder in retrospect if they shouldn’t have done Voyager and Enterprise the other way around, make Enterprise first, then do the stranded far from home thing.
Voyager’s premise lends itself to being told as one continuous story, because…it IS. One trip, back from the Delta quadrant. Except in the late 90s they still wanted to make adventure of the week episodic TV. Especially early in the show, they ignored the premise almost entirely.
Enterprise’s premise is a return to the weekly adventure format; a ship named Enterprise wanders around and encounters shit, now with 38% more obvious thirst. That’s suited to episodic adventures, but it’s the early-to-mid 2000s, the era of TiVo and DVD box sets, the heyday of binge watching. Serialized TV was soon to become all the rage, Paramount knew it, which is why they tried to have not one but two overall plots. The first two seasons had the “temporal cold war” which I’m still convinced someone in a writer’s room blurted out without thinking through what it meant. The resulting plot was a bad guy and a good guy kept showing up to explain to Archer why they couldn’t explain to him what they were doing. That wasn’t working so they went full Starship Troopers. “I’m from Pensacola, and I say KILL EM ALL.”
The prequel Enterprise would have done better in the late 90s and the stranded far from home Voyager would have done better in the 2000s.