Paramount+ Star Trek: Discovery - Official Thread (3 Viewers)

[Sam Favate]

It sounds silly but I believe they need to get data from people who don't have TVs to participate in order to account for people who don't have TVs. When they don't have a TV, it's not hard to guess that they didn't watch anything but Neislen still needs someone to actually provide that 'nothing' data.

Except that my friend without a TV provided false data. Nielsen never asked him if he had a TV.

 

[BobO'Link]

I have no faith that Nielsen ratings actually represent anything. This is anecdotal, but about 15 years ago, two of my friends were selected to be "Nielsen families." Each of them lived alone. One of them would record the shows she watched, but also would record shows she would have watched if she was home every day. My other friend that was selected didn't own a TV at the time! He would read the newspaper listing every night and record on his Nielsen form the shows he would have watched if he had a TV. These are absolutely true stories, and while they may not have skewered the Nielsen ratings much, it illustrated to me that Nielsen wasn't getting very good data.

I wholeheartedly agree. IMHO the Niesen's are pretty worthless because many people game the system in similar fashion. I know the few times I've received a diary I did. Once or twice I was working at a TV station, which is supposed to be an automatic exclusion, so I just forgot to mention that little fact. I disliked most of the programming I was a captive audience for, so since I was at work during many evenings I just put what I'd have watched had I been home.

 

[Blimpoy06]

but why is the female lead named "Michael," a name which is not considered gender-neutral?

I think I read on Trekmovie.com about this. I'm terrible at remembering my sources, I read so much, but it appears to be a trait Fuller has on many of his shows he created of naming females with traditionally male names. I've never watched anything he has written outside of Star Trek, so I can't speak from experience. The subject matter of most genre shows tend to be darker in tone and subject matters that I have little interest in.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Ugh, more of Fuller and the cult of personality that comes with him.

How much better would this show have been if they had never tried for Fuller in the first place? It seems like he brought a bunch of ill-advised ideas to the table, stalled production for a year, and then was kicked out while those problematic ideas stayed behind, possibly being worshipped by people too close to Fuller who remain on the show.

 

[Neil Middlemiss]

Ugh, more of Fuller and the cult of personality that comes with him.

How much better would this show have been if they had never tried for Fuller in the first place? It seems like he brought a bunch of ill-advised ideas to the table, stalled production for a year, and then was kicked out while those problematic ideas stayed behind, possibly being worshipped by people too close to Fuller who remain on the show.

I think you are being enormously unfair to Fuller. Fuller is the reason there's a show, and he has ambitious visions for his shows and, for my money, he's a risk worth taking (Hannibal remains one of the boldest and best television shows I have ever seen). He may have lost his way during the set up of this show, which I imagine his other commitments played a large part in (and so, in that, he will have learned a lesson), but the man is seriously talented and he clearly had a strong vision for what this new incarnation could be for Trek (not a retread of how the show has been produced in the past, but something new and different which must then stand on its own and be judged).

I've said this before, but either ST: D will work or it won't. I hope it does. I hope it shows that Trek's stories can be told in different ways and I hope the core of Trek - examining who we are as a species through allegory, along with a sense of adventure and discovery (inward and outward) - are what we find amongst the long form story this show will be telling in its first season. But if it doesn't, then CBS will find another angle, and take another crack at it as this is clearly an important show for their streaming plans, and Netflix has clearly offered up enough money to stream it internationally to show CBS that there's an appetite for this property. If this first season stalls, they can correct with the next season (and there are MANY shows that stumbled out of the gate only to find their footing later on).

Keep your mind open, Josh

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Fuller is the reason there's a show

I'm not sure I can agree with that. I think there would have been a show one way or the other - CBS has been keen to do something since the reboot, and they were eager to have something ready to launch around the 50th anniversary. My understanding, from articles and interviews, etc., is that after CBS decided to do a new Star Trek show, they then sought out Fuller. I do not believe it was a case where CBS said "We want to work with Bryan Fuller on anything, we just need to be in the Bryan Fuller business" and then Fuller said, "well, what if I do a Star Trek show?" Now, if I'm wrong about that, I'll happily concede the point. But I think if anyone other than Bryan Fuller was producing, the show would have completed its first season a year ago, and would be on its way to launching a second season in the coming weeks.

I have not seen everything that Bryan Fuller has done, but what I have seen, generally didn't work for me. I couldn't make it more than a couple episodes into Dead Like Me. I couldn't even make it through the pilot of Wonderfalls. He joined (rejoined?) the staff of Heroes at the end of the third season to plot out the fourth season, and the fourth season was far and away that show's worst moment. I couldn't get past the first couple episodes of Hannibal. I get that a lot of people enjoy his work, and I don't want to just shit on something that people love for the sake of hearing myself talk. I should probably just say that Bryan Fuller's work doesn't do it for me, and I think the less of Fuller that remains in the final product, the better.

he clearly had a strong vision for what this new incarnation could be for Trek (not a retread of how the show has been produced in the past, but something new and different which must then stand on its own and be judged).

And I guess part of my problem with that is, to me, everything I've heard about Discovery sounds like a retread. To me, not retreading would involve setting a Star Trek show in the future of the last Trek, so that everything that happens would be unknown, and that they'd be building a new history. Like TNG did. When TNG started, we knew it was about 100 years after TOS, but that's it. We saw that there was a Klingon on the bridge, but we didn't yet know what happened between TOS and TNG to make that possible. We didn't know about the villains or the conflicts the TNG crew would face. We didn't know what the morals or ethics or everyday routines of the 24th century people would be like. Watching TOS might have given a viewer the vocabulary they needed to watch TNG, but it really didn't tell us anything about the new show would be. By comparison, everything about Discovery seems to be done in relation to something already existing. It takes place in a time period that severely limits their storytelling possibilities. It involves a conflict that we're very familiar with, and an antagonist we've seen many times before (and frankly, a group I don't need to see as the antagonist again). It feels like a retread of Trek's greatest hits, told in the hip new style of today.

Keep your mind open, Josh

I'll certainly watch the pilot that plays on CBS broadcast, and I'll almost certainly take advantage of the free trial option to preview the next episode online. I want to like this. And if my objections sometime seem over the top or whatever, it's coming from a well-intentioned place. Trek is something near and dear to my heart, and I want to see them get this right, and I am so fearful of being severely disappointed. It'll hurt less if I was expecting that from the beginning.

It's also disappointing coming on the heels of the Twin Peaks revival, which has been unlike anything ever done before on television. Instead of giving us a version of Twin Peaks that combined the greatest hits of the original show with the current TV trends, the show had a bold story to tell that involved sidelining most of the things that fans of the original show liked it for, and told it in a style unlike both the original series and unlike the most popular shows today. So to see what seems like "Let's take those bad guys from Trek and give it some Game of Thrones action" instead of trying something either more true to Trek or more original, is disappointing.

But I want to be wrong. I want to come back here the day after the premiere and have reason to say, "Neil, can I get an order of crow, please? I'm very hungry and I think feathers would taste lovely right now."

 

[Blimpoy06]

Totally agree with Josh on the appearance of Discovery as been there, done that Star Trek. Klingon politics, omniscient Vulcan mentors, Federation at war and Harry Mudd no less! The new characters and story execution will have to be top notch to keep me interested for the long haul.

 

[David Weicker]

Josh ,
I've enjoyed Fuller's work
Pushing Daisies was fantastic.
And he was a writer/producer of Heroes Season 1, 3, and 4. So he oversaw what is considered the best season of Heroes (1)

 

[Josh Steinberg]

David, I didn't realize that about Heroes and him being that involved earlier on... good point!

 

[The Obsolete Man]

That article gives me no faith about this being any good.

And I'm sorry, but why is the female lead named "Michael," a name which is not considered gender-neutral? Are they just trolling us?

Obviously, her family were fans of The Waltons.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

A behind-the-scenes featurette reveals the main title theme for the show:

 

[Jason_V]

Ya know, I actually kinda liked the main title music. And I'm thrilled (honestly, truly) to know the show WILL have a main title, unlike 95% of modern shows. Trek wouldn't be Trek without it.

The fact they're using an orchestra is a plus. The sound is a mix of TOS and the Kelvin timeline music, which works so far for me.

 

[Jonathan Perregaux]

Sounds like a tune in search of a theme.

 

[Dave Upton]

It's not awful, but it's very disjointed. I'll always consider TNG, Voyager & DS9 as the "pinnacle" of Trek themes though. TOS never did it for me quite as much.

 

[NeilO]

A new disturbing sign:
CBS reportedly won't allow reviews before it airs.

 

[jcroy]

A new disturbing sign:
CBS reportedly won't allow reviews before it airs.

Heh.

At times I wonder how much of all this is CBS deliberately lowering expectations to a really low bar.

 

[Jason_V]

So let's think about this.

When does a film studio put an embargo on reviews of their product? When they have no confidence in the final material. Usually a horror movie, but not always. Even big budget movies that are horrible (Transformers: The Last Knight, for example) didn't have this kind of review embargo.

The devil's advocate argument is CBS wants this to grow organically and feels they don't need the reviews. But with all the production issues in the last 18 months, they need all the goodwill they can get. If this is true, it isn't helping.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

There's a giant digital billboard just outside of Times Square in NYC with a Discovery ad showing all day, been there all week -- so they're spending some money promoting this thing.

 

[Jason_V]

Of course they are. Netflix essentially paid for it, so the money CBS would spend on the production can go to something else. Plus the "expected" All Access fees. Besides, if they didn't promote the heck out of ST, they'd incur a new round of wrath from fans and some media about how they don't care about the show.

I can't remember ever being this "blah" about a series this close to its launch. Ever. Maybe it's me and I'm becoming "that" guy who says "my" Trek will always be the best. Forget these youngsters.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I'm apparently getting old before my time. I'm 34, which okay, isn't 20 anymore but isn't 70 either, and I have mixed feelings all over the place about this. And a whole bunch of other things. My reaction to the new iPhone announcement could probably best be described as, "Why couldn't they make it with a smaller screen and less high tech crap in it? I don't want to scan my face to turn the phone on, why can't I just press a button?"

This is a strange launch, for sure, that has been bungled badly in so many ways. Even if the new show itself, Discovery, is a remarkable achievement in the history of television and reinvigorates both the franchise and refines the nature of episodic television, the launch was still bungled. This should have been on the air on or around September 8th, 2016. The 50th anniversary did not sneak up on them. It was a known thing. You look across the pond to the BBC, which operates with far less money than CBS, and you look at their sci-fi flagship Doctor Who, and what they did for Doctor Who's 50th anniversary, and there's no comparison. Doctor Who got a 90 minute special for its 50th anniversary that expertly allowed past and present cast members to return, and it paid tribute to the origins of the series while also setting a new course forward. Now, with the caveat that each franchise is its own thing and I wouldn't want Star Trek to merely copy Doctor Who, but why couldn't CBS have their launch ready then? By all means, take the franchise into uncharted territory, but do it in a way that invites fans of the other shows to come along with them, rather than rubbing in their face that it's different for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

But I think a lot of us know what one of the more likely outcomes is. The monthly fee for CBS All Access will likely be a barrier to entry for a lot of fans - I think CBS wants $8 to watch it with commercials, or $10 without commercials. I think CBS All Access has only one other original show, the sequel to The Good Wife, which probably doesn't have a lot of crossover appeal to Trek fans. Pretty much all of the other CBS content on the website is catalog material that's also available on services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. So people subscribing for this show get this one show out of it and probably not much else. GIven that the plan is to air seven episodes, take three months off, and then air the remaining eight, fans may wait until the first seven have gone up to take out a free trial, binge, and then cancel, and then may just do the same when the remaining eight are up next year. Or, it'll displace Game Of Thrones as the most pirated show on the internet, and I would bet most people would feel absolutely no moral problem with downloading it illegally given the barriers that CBS is putting in place. But whether it's lack of fan interest, or the CBS All Access pricing, or the perceived quality of the show, the numbers will be lower than expected. And CBS will jump to the easiest conclusion: "People don't like Star Trek anymore, it's just a small group of nerds but not a cultural phenomenon anymore."

I'm trying to resist feeling like I'm forced to support bad Trek just to make the point that people still like Trek at all.