If you’ve read my Three Timeline Theory, you know I spend a lot of time watching and pondering Star Trek. Probably too much. Not only do I run a weekly club, write a lot of trivia, and pride myself on knowing canon well enough to come up with crazy ways to make contiuity mistakes work, but I also know a thing or two about production itself, and I even have a little theory about that.

 Besides the fact that they’re all set in the 24th century, have overlapping timelines, share some of the same characters and a whole lot of writing staff and production crew, the other major thing Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager all have in common is that they ran for seven seasons. Both the original series and Enterprise were cut short. There are a number of reasons for this but there’s one very interesting one that isn’t talked about too often. All three of those shows came dangerously close to cancellation due to being in ratings hell. And they were all saved by a bold step by the producers.

TNG became the ratings powerhouse it was the rest of its run because of the popularity it gained during the summer after The Best of Both Worlds Part 1. The hype surrounding the cliffhanger about Picard becoming a Borg, no one knowing whether he would live, die, or whether Patrick Stewart would return created a lot of new viewers– the ratings for the reruns that summer were higher than they had ever been for a new episode, and it transformed into a phenomenon. DS9 wasn’t doing so hot either until Worf was added to the cast. Same thing with Voyager, until Seven of Nine came along.

Every Trekky knows the famous ways in which these shows were saved, but I wonder how many have realized the bizarre coincidence they share. Every one of these events occured during season cliffhangers between the third and fourth seasons! All three of these shows almost didn’t make it past their fourth year, and if these stories and new characters hadn’t been added, they may have been cancelled during that season or wrapped by the end of it.

What makes this especially intriguing to me is what happened to Enterprise. In 2005, the fifth Trek installment was cut short with only four seasons. And four seems to be the magic number. It almost wasn’t even renewed for a fourth, put in that same dangerous situation of the shows before it. It was pushed from its Wednesday night slot at 8:00 back to TV’s pit of prime time despair, Fridays at 9:00. But I’m not sure it’s just that time slot that killed it. There’s every possibility that it would have met the same fate even if it had stayed on Wednesdays, considering that even the bold 26-episode Xindi arc of season 3 hadn’t managed to boost ratings very much. And somewhat like The Best of Both Worlds, it had a surprising cliffhanger, in which Archer seems to be dead, only to be discovered in an alternate history where aliens are helping the Nazis to win WWII.

But these days, somewhat thanks to The Best of Both Worlds, epic cliffhangers are common place and not enough to jolt any series back to life. So the question is, would a Worf or a Seven of Nine saved Enterprise? It’s hard to imagine what character could have been added that would change the show’s fate, considering the problem many Trekkies loyal to the Berman/Braga shows had with it in the first place was its premise. There’s no way to do a prequel to Star Trek without ruining the continuity that came before it, and that’s exactly what Enterprise did. Though it was a highly entertaining show and had a lot of episode worthy of the Star Trek legacy, its continuity issues were too numerous for a lot of Trekkies to ignore. So the only way Enterprise could have survived would be to bring in a very large fanbase of people who didn’t have to be Trekkies to be Enterprise fans, and apparently it didn’t do a good enough job of that.

Season 4 did have a brave new direction, led by its new showrunner Manny Coto, who was on the writing staff during season 3 and wrote many of its best episodes. But unlike the previous season, Enterprise stopped trying to create its own mythos and started concentrating again on the classic mythos of the Trek universe. Coto’s mission seemed to be cleaning up the mess made by the first two seasons and making the show fit better with the rest of canon, especially where it concerned Klingons and Vulcans. And it was a great idea… if there were very many Trekkies still watching the show. Because what it couldn’t do is keep bringing in that new fanbase– now it was actually trying to be Star Trek, while its earlier seaons had tried to somewhat distance themselves from the rest of canon.

Perhaps it was too late to get that old Trek fanbase to join by the fourth season. The ones who didn’t like it in the first place had three years to become very annoyed that there wasn’t another Trek show on the air that went forward instead of backwards. I doubt if they would trust any show set in the 22nd century and with a ship named Enterprise, no matter the story direction.

But the most interesting part of all of this is that, if the show had made it to a fifth season, another regular cast member was planned to be added: Shran, the Andorian. Shran was played by Jeffrey Combs, who has had a long history with Star Trek and has played numerous characters, especially in DS9. His Shran character was very popular with fans, and appeared in about half a dozen episodes. The idea that he might have become part of the regular cast, serving about Archer’s ship, reminds me a lot of what happened on DS9 and Voyager.

And it makes one wonder, if the staff had this revelation at the end of season 3, if Shran had become a regular in the fourth season, just like Worf and Seven of Nine… would it have been enough to save the show? I really don’t know. Shran was popular with fans already familiar with the show, but Worf and the Borg brought in fans from outside of DS9 and Voyager. I don’t know if Jeffrey Combs himself would have been enough to do that. But maybe, just because it was that fated fourth season that saved the other post-TOS shows, it might have helped.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Until the early 90s, prime-time dramas, much like sitcoms and other kinds of series, were mostly episodic, meaning the show had a basic premise that was all you really needed to understand in order to tune in. You could watch any episode in any order without needing to see everything that came before it. Sometimes there was a slight progression or one episode that would call back to another, but if you missed an episode here or there, you didn’t have to worry that you couldn’t follow the next one. Every week was a new, stand-alone story with the same characters, similar to Sherlock Holmes stories. These shows tended to be somewhat formulaic in order to come up with enough material to do several seasons, often over 100 separate stories. Good examples of this are Star Trek: The Next Generation and the early seasons of The X-Files.

Series like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Babylon Five were seen as experimental but drew in large audiences because they took longer to tell big stories. Their characters went through deliberate changes, evolving with their grandiose plot arcs. Instead of occasional two-parters, every story would be bigger than one episode, sometimes lasting entire seasons or longer. The drawback to these sorts of shows is that they’re a long-term commitment– if you don’t watch the whole season, if you miss even one episode, you could be missing an important piece of the puzzle and be totally lost until you catch the rerun or wait for the dvds.

These continuous shows are becoming more and more common. Sci-fi fans are especially beginning to expect it. The most successful shows are of this type, shows like Heroes, Lost, and 24. The days of the formulaic and episodic sci-fi show, ala Quantum Leap, seem to be mostly behind us. Why is that? I hear a lot of talk in director commentaries and interviews about this being a positive step forward, that we’ve moved to this kind of storytelling because it creates deeper, changing characters and more complex stories can be told. That’s certainly one of the pluses to the continuous format, but I wonder if that isn’t more of an effect than a cause.

This trend is best illustrated by Smallville. The first season was mostly episodic– you really didn’t have to see the episodes in order (except maybe the pilot) to understand another, even though minor details would come back here and there, and there was a slight build up to the season finale. Slowly but surely the show moved in more of a continuous direction and now it follows the Lost and Heroes thread– you need to see pretty much every episode of a season to follow it. In fact, one of its biggest problems these days is that it still does lame, contrived one-shot episodes in the middle of season arcs that bog down the story. So why didn’t it just stay with the episodic format? I think it’s because writers keep covering the same territory. There are only so many one-shot sci-fi plots you can do in a show. A lot of completely unrelated shows have reused a lot of the same premises. For example, how many times have you seen the fight club scenario? A main character gets kidnapped and forced to fight to the death, and the supporting characters have to rescue him/her. I’ve seen it in Star Trek: Voyager, Angel and Smallville (just last year!). And get this: Birds of Prey was an episodic show that only got 13 episodes, and ONE of them was a fight club episode!

Voyager, “Tsunkatse”

Smallville, “Combat”

My point is, these huge stories that go through an entire season or even a whole series, in the case of Lost, is thriving, I think, because there seems to still be some unexplored territory there. Granted, it’s been THE popular format for close to a decade now (after shows like Deep Space Nine were no longer simply experimental) and so a lot of that ground has been covered. What’s nice about them is that very long stories can look more original, even if they aren’t really in essence, because so much more can happen within them. If the fight club scenario was a six-episode arc, it’s possible something more than the same old formula could be done with it. Heroes has been criticized as being just a live-action X-Men, and yet it’s extremely popular. Is that because the stories are so complex and the characters are given time to mature and grow, so we really don’t mind that the initial premise is something we’ve seen before?

But I sometimes wonder if expecting your viewer to watch every single episode of a show is still too much to ask. A lot of networks have begun putting full episodes on their websites in case you miss something, which makes it a lot easier to catch up if you miss something. But I find it a lot harder to follow a lot of shows at once this way, not only because I have to see every episode, but because there’s a lot to keep track of. With 24, you have to remember everything that’s happened in a day and you have to readjust from it’s hour-to-hour format after watching anything else (which is pretty jarring until you get used to it). With Heroes, I have to keep up with a lot of characters and how they’re all connected, and ditto with Lost, except there I have to remember pretty much everything that ever happened because it all ends being important to understand anything that’s happening!!!

I realize the episodic format isn’t dead. A lot of cop shows still keep this and I think CSI is too, though I’ve never watched it. Chuck is an interesting hybrid of both, with contained stories but a lot of through-lines that only matter if you care to keep up.

So what do you think? Do you prefer the current trend of continuous shows or do wish you could just tune in whenever you wanted and didn’t have to make a TV show a six, seven, or even a ten year commitment? I’d love comments on this.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan