A grittier new Star Trek series?
- Thread starter Naitron
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Yeah, I think that's it. People want Star Trek that they can take seriously, and for that to happen, it has to appeal to cable audiences, because it probably can't survive on broadcast and would end up like Terra Nova if anyone tried to make Star Trek for broadcast now.
To get someone to make Star Trek who won't botch it, you have to accept that they're going to add grit into the mix, because that's what they do.
The problem is, there's no place on TV that does that.
On broadcast, adding in Galaxy Quest elements would simply turn Star Trek into a mainstream comedy, and wouldn't even be remotely Star Trek anymore. It might be real-world nerds playing Star Trek.
On cable, adding comedy elements would turn the whole thing nasty, and if anything be even less Star Trek than the broadcast version. There was a comedy series pitch a couple years ago called Going Boldly Nowhere, basically a satire of Star Trek - that's what we'd get. It was from the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia producers, and although I love that show, that kind of vicious comedy is not at all appropriate to Star Trek.
I think gritty is a bad word, because like someone said earlier, people interpreted it to have all the characters be dicks and have the story entirely devoid of any happiness. No, it doesn't need to be grittier, but it needs to modernize. When Voyager got off the air in 2001, we were graced with a TV schedule of 24, The West Wing, Buffy, Angel, Smallville and others. Voyager finished doing exactly what TNG started doing in 1987, albiet with better special effects. Television has changed a lot and Star Trek needs to go with it or else it won't last.
Trek can be gritty and it can work. Undiscovered Country was gritty in nuBSG terms. Kirk was WRONG and he was kind of a dick about. Spock was slightly wrong, in that he let the IDEA get ahead of his friendship. Starfleet officers conspired to do the wrong thing in the Klingon Empire's darkest hour.
The difference between nuBSG and Star Trek VI is that nuBSG had character be relentlessly wrong. Mistake piled atop other mistakes with no one seeming to ever learn a lesson from it. Trek VI was a movie. It had to be resolved within it's allotted run time.
In the end, Trek VI reaffirmed the core optimistic message of Star Trek. Even when we make mistakes, we can learn and redeem ourselves. BSG was relentlessly dismal to the very end, with Tyrol doing the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment. Good story, but beyond gritty. BSG was dystopian.
I think Trek could be gritty, but I don't think many creative teams are up writing that week in and week out. You'd have to have people make bad choices and learn from them, without the whole thing devolving into a constant morality play. Trek has enough trouble with that in optimistic mode. I think it would become overwhleming if they tried to play it too dark. In fact, I think it happened on DS9 despite the efforts of the producers. The bad choices main characters made in the name of expediency never came back to haunt them. They didn't learn from them. Nothing was resolved, and each time some did something morally questionable, I could hear the writers screaming "YOU SHOULD THINK ABOUT THIS!!!ELEVENTYONE"
The difference between nuBSG and Star Trek VI is that nuBSG had character be relentlessly wrong. Mistake piled atop other mistakes with no one seeming to ever learn a lesson from it. Trek VI was a movie. It had to be resolved within it's allotted run time.
In the end, Trek VI reaffirmed the core optimistic message of Star Trek. Even when we make mistakes, we can learn and redeem ourselves. BSG was relentlessly dismal to the very end, with Tyrol doing the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment. Good story, but beyond gritty. BSG was dystopian.
I think Trek could be gritty, but I don't think many creative teams are up writing that week in and week out. You'd have to have people make bad choices and learn from them, without the whole thing devolving into a constant morality play. Trek has enough trouble with that in optimistic mode. I think it would become overwhleming if they tried to play it too dark. In fact, I think it happened on DS9 despite the efforts of the producers. The bad choices main characters made in the name of expediency never came back to haunt them. They didn't learn from them. Nothing was resolved, and each time some did something morally questionable, I could hear the writers screaming "YOU SHOULD THINK ABOUT THIS!!!ELEVENTYONE"
Agreed. The viewer should never feel like throttling the protagonists (or the writers).
This.
"It will be dark and gritty".
Seen this with the BSG remake and Stargate Universe and a few other shows besides. As far as I am concerned, "D&G" means the (alleged) Good Guys spend their time scheming against EACH OTHER rather than deal with the obvious problems or otherwise doing anything heroic, decent or even simply constructive. They just sink lowerr and lower, until you ultimately start rooting for the Bad Guys because, whatever their sins, they are at least more honest.
DS9 might have tended towards "D&G", sure. There was never any doubt that the characters on DS9 (and the rest of Trek) had flaws, but they always remained people you wanted on your side when things were bad.
I need to see "D&G" garbage in Trek like I need to ram an icepick into my eye. No thanks.
Seen this with the BSG remake and Stargate Universe and a few other shows besides. As far as I am concerned, "D&G" means the (alleged) Good Guys spend their time scheming against EACH OTHER rather than deal with the obvious problems or otherwise doing anything heroic, decent or even simply constructive. They just sink lowerr and lower, until you ultimately start rooting for the Bad Guys because, whatever their sins, they are at least more honest.
DS9 might have tended towards "D&G", sure. There was never any doubt that the characters on DS9 (and the rest of Trek) had flaws, but they always remained people you wanted on your side when things were bad.
I need to see "D&G" garbage in Trek like I need to ram an icepick into my eye. No thanks.
I really think dark and gritty comes down to set design and wordrobe alot. Voyager was squeeky clean. Sponge Bob could have been an alien. ENT was darker and cloistrophobic. The unfortunate thing is that noone is going to give anyone power over over Trek to funnel his vision through and it needs a reinterpreting. Abrams is just not it.
Here's the fundamental difference between Star Trek and nuBSG grittiness:
-Star Trek's writers always save their characters' butts from having to really deal with the consequences of their actions. Even in the furthest-out-there example of grittiness - "In the Pale Moonlight" - Sisko and Garak's schemings didn't cause the Federation to lose the war.
If that were a nuBSG episode, the Romulans would have found out, switched sides, and the Federation would have become enslaved vassals of the Dominion, because they're corrupt and deserve it, bwahaha!
-OTOH, nuBSG wallowed in self-loathing to a degree that ended up being simply absurd and rendered its "message" moot. Fundamentally, the fight with the Cylons is a fight for species survival. When you ratchet up the stakes that high, morality no longer counts. All that counts is survival. You can wallow in guilt later, assuming there's anyone left alive to do the wallowing, in which case you've won, so what are you wallowing about, really?
So both approaches have their absurd aspects, but I think Star Trek wins by virtue of being slightly less annoying.
They learned, sometimes. Kira was a very different person by the end of the series, feeling bad for mouthing off to Damar just when he'd just been hit by personal tragedy. The peace ceremony that ended the war suggested that the whole thing had been a tragic misunderstanding and that things would be better from now on (which doesn't really jibe with how the war was portrayed but oh well.)
Well, Honor has a movie deal, so no-can-do... but yeah, a cable mil sci-fi series seems pretty plausible and also not something for the Star Trek brand.
Tonally, I think Abrams points the way forward. A reinvigorated Star Trek should be fun and basically an optimistic future. The rest follows.
Not to be argumentative, because you mostly said what I said, but I do have to make one point. nuBSG had characters relentlessly make bad choices in their personal relationships and fail to learn from them. I don't hold them to task for the gray moral decisions made in tactical or strategic circumstances. It was an intolerable position on the one side, and a jihad on the other.
But watching characters take large steaming dumps on their personal lives and come back for more is a bit too realistic. It breaks the suspension of disbelief. Not badly. Like I said, BSG was a good story, and well executed. But the whole thing was too grim on too many levels. It tended to feel like the writers were trying too hard in later seasons. Bits like Dualla's suicide seemed tacked on for shock value.
Trek is, ultimately, optimistic and it would be a shame in my opinion to lose that for grit's sake. I think you agree, based on what you said, but I want add something David Brin pointed out in order to explain why I think Trek's optimism should be defended.
We have lots of "serious" SciFi on film. Only 2 out of all of those properties is optimistic. Of those 2 only one is optimistic about the future. StarGate SG1 and Star Trek. SG1 and SG:A take place in the present, and SG:U took a dump on the optimism, so all we have left is Star Trek. Trek is the lone voice saying, "Hey guys! The future is going to be cool."
For me, a gritty Trek series would be placed post-TUC. It would be a small ship manned with a special-ops/undercover Starfleet intelligence strike team patrolling the border between the Klingon/Federation border dealing with post-Praxis Klingon relations, Orion smuggling, Romulans infiltration. Down and dirty dealings, space battles, brawls, the seedy underbelly of the Alpha Quadrant at its worst (and thus its entertainment best).
We may not need another DS9, but we don't need another tNG either, considering Voyager was just the poor man's TNG. A Star Trek show to survive in today's current TV landscape, needs to be show written for today, not 1987.
While a new Star Trek show doesn't have to be black as pitch, but it does need an ongoing story instead of being episodic, being episodic would not fly in today's TV land scape. It would need better continuity then previous shows, episodes should have consequences, if new tech or tactic are invented, they shouldn't be forgotten. Also there needs to some believable inter personal conflict, characters shouldn't be dicks, but everyone agreeing on everything all the thing isn't believable, different people will always have different ideas to deal with situations. Everyone agreeing all the time, makes a crew seem less human, not more human.
Leave it be. Let new times do their own styles and stories. Why must we wish to resurrect Star Trek? Old wine into new wineskin: bad idea. A gritty Star Trek wouldn't be Star Trek. It might be somehow shoehorned into Trek continuity. Or use words like "starship" or "Federation." But it would be TINO (Trek in name only).
A prosaic example: If I take an empty bottle that held wine and is still clearly labelled "wine," but fill it with chocolate milk, I can call it wine. But it won't be. Same for a BSG-ish "Star Trek."
Star Trek had two good incarnations (TOS and TNG/DS9), each close enough to be two instances of the same "thing" (Trek in general). Give thanks and move on.
A prosaic example: If I take an empty bottle that held wine and is still clearly labelled "wine," but fill it with chocolate milk, I can call it wine. But it won't be. Same for a BSG-ish "Star Trek."
Star Trek had two good incarnations (TOS and TNG/DS9), each close enough to be two instances of the same "thing" (Trek in general). Give thanks and move on.
Because it would be fun to watch.
And nobody would force you to watch, so don't worry about that.
Even chocolate milk is tasty when you are dying of thirst.
It WOULD be fun, a gritty sci fi series, especially if it were actually science fiction. But why call it Star Trek? Let it be its own thing. Let chocolate milk be chocolate milk, to continue my ungainly example. By the way, we consume chocolate milk by the gallon in my household.
I WOULD welcome a new, hopeful, adventure/exploration Trek show. Fat chance. MAYbe movie XII?
I WOULD welcome a new, hopeful, adventure/exploration Trek show. Fat chance. MAYbe movie XII?
Of course, even if one creates chocolate milk, it still is milk. Even if that one kid is kind of upset that he didn't get plain milk.
If it needs to have a famous brand name to get made, I guess. But I agree, I just want space opera. That Robert Hewitt Wolfe series that SyFy might be doing sounds like it could fill the bill just fine.
Here comes some deliberate provoking:
TOS: chocolate milk, tasty and colorful
TNG: white milk, blander, but better for you
DS9: buttermilk, sour but surprising
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