It's very different from TNG in most ways, but it does share the emphasis on retaining humanity, dignity, and ethics within ambiguity and hardship. Very interesting to think about them side-by-side.
The quality of writing for DS9 was also quite good but, after trying the TNG formula for a season or two, they broke with the writing-first mentality and adopted an action sci-fi formula. The showrunners feared they'd lose ratings if an episode didn't have at least some action. It worked for DS9, but later Trek series have had a tough time shaking free of the action sci-fi formula. The problem with formulas is that, while they produce individual episodes or shows that are exemplars of their form, the sameness eventually causes viewers to drift away.
Strange New Worlds has shown it's willing to do some pretty wild things (e.g. turning its cast into muppets, adding gore and horror elements, etc.), but they have not messed with the formula in a meaningful way.
If you're looking for something outside the Trek formula, one recommendation I'd share is "The Foundation".
For instance the various plot points in DS9 between Sisko and Eddington (like "For the Uniform") often have you starting to cheer for the 'bad guys', while really confusing the question of who the good guy and who the bad guy even is. DS9 even excels as 'humanizing' the Cardassians who are, on the surface at least, just an evil trope. And recent times in real life should emphasize, to the point of absurdity, that this is what people and situations are genuinely like.
But the modern Star Treks feel like they were written by people living in a bubble with minimal life experience. They rely on political tropes and diametrically opposed good/evil stuff that's utterly banal, and intellectually insulting. They actually do have some of the same writers as previous shows though, so I assume there must be production/directorial pressures that caused the shift in 'style.'
Discovery did this some of the time. There were episodes where they would show, then tell, then tell again all within a few minutes. Not every episode was done this way. I suspect they were experimenting and it did not go well. Anybody who was actually giving the show their full attention was bound to be irritated. Discovery was a low point in modern Trek for multiple reasons. They initially decided to forgo an ensemble cast and bet it all on a protagonist driven narrative. This severely limited the diversity of viewpoints in the first couple seasons. The writing was bad for entirely avoidable reasons. People who watch trek pay attention to the universe's rules. You can't beam through shields, you need to have a reason for why the away team can't be trivially beamed out of dangerous situations, etc.. The people writing Discovery did not bother to do this on a repeating and continual basis. Again, it was insulting to anyone who wasn't pecking away on their phone. I wouldn't say the writers for Discovery merely lacked life experience. They clearly hadn't bothered to watch previous Trek shows.
Strange New Worlds is better written, but a little too reliant on high concept for their most recent season. Every episode seems to have a gimmick. Still the cast is good and I look forward to them wrapping up Pike's story and, presumably, setting up a reboot of TOS.
Lower Decks is the best Trek show in recent memory. Thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. I can't recommend that one enough, just in case anyone skipped it because it was animated. Intelligent. Inventive. Hilarious. The people who made Lower Decks really put a lot of love into it.
Edit: I forgot to mention Picard, which is unforgivable. Some of the seasons were a little uneven, but some were fantastic and it was truly a treat to see Patrick Stewart as Picard one last time.
Wil Wheaton in Ready Room has some episodes about Lower Decks. The Crossover episode https://youtu.be/3SiYyIAz5xU and the final recap https://youtu.be/NK94dXm2Wis
I'd also generally suggest Dropping Names with Brent and Jonny ( https://www.youtube.com/@Dropping-Names ) where Brent Spinner and Johnathan Frakes chat with people about movies and TV. While it's not about Trek, it's a frequent tangential topic. I believe it's helpful in the context of "how much the fandom extends to other people in the entertainment industry."
This kind of TV writing really frustrates me. I’m currently rewatching The Wire (just finished Season 3) and the producers, writers and directors take the complete opposite approach. Each season has a large number of characters with many subtly inter-relating plots. To get the most out of the show, you need to be paying attention and to have a good memory for recalling details from previous episodes and previous seasons. The first two times I watched the show (more than 15 years ago), I watched in on DVD (lower resolution, 4:3 aspect ratio). This time I’m watching it in 16:9 HD on Bluray and I’ve picked up so many plot points and characterisations that I hadn’t picked up (or don’t remember) before, e.g., one very brief shot in Season 1 explains how Bubs gets his nickname. It’s such a breath of fresh air for the writers to pay so much attention to detail and for the viewer to be treated like a reasonably intelligent adult.
I agree with your take on Picard. However, I didn’t enjoy Discovery so haven’t bothered with any of the other recent Star Trek series. Thanks for the summaries of the other two shows. I’ll add Lower Decks to my to-watch list.
For a while I thought the acting was melodramatic, but I actually think it pairs really well with the truly crazymaking amount of wild shit that happens moment to moment in DIS. Burnham should be a PTSD shell, Tilly should've resigned her commission long ago, etc. etc.
Things as you say, but also: didn't know show's own technology history (Klingons with cloaks before they should've had them), adding in spore drive then needing to retcon it.
The show din't seem to know what it wanted to be and kept pulling in different directions, one of the early plans was an "anthology series, with each season being a standalone, serialized story set in a different era", which would have suited this much, much better: one or two episodes about the Klingon war, one showing Pike's command before Enterprise, young Spock's first mission, even some about a spore drive and the problems it has, some AI-takeover stuff, some post-TNG stuff, one episode about galaxy-threatening event, one about some post-apocalyptic thing like The Burn isn't even bad. But all that smooshed together with the same crew? Nah.
The reason Michael Burnham had a male-coded name was teased but never actually revealed (could have been interesting e.g. "adopted by Vulcans who didn't notice it was male-coded because that's a silly human thing"). Her character shifted way too hard and way too fast, from "Vulcan persona due to upbringing" to "traumatised normal human", a nature-vs-nurture tale could have been an interesting thing to explore.
And Michael Burnham was correct to want a show of force against the Klingons! Sure, wildly violated how command hierarchy works, but she was correct, and Starfleet Command should have known that because she got advice from Sarek. Not that she should have been Sarek's never-before-mentioned adopted daughter, we need to see new characters rather than just repeating the old ones; I mean, Vulcan is an entire plant, not a small Pacific island. (Amusing trivia from some fan-site I visited decades ago: VOY had the opposite problem, in that the list of extras appearing as background crew was larger than the crew complement).
And in the battle before they went off to the far future, that unexploded torpedo inside Enterprise, which the admiral heroically sacrificed herself to disarm… (1) it's antimatter, how does that "not explode"?, (2) it's ~ 50 megatons and inside the ship and in TOS an overloaded phaser pistol was supposed to be able to blow out multiple decks, (3) what, are their transporters not working? Can't you either beam it out, or the admiral out after she disarms it? (4) Why send in an admiral, did they run out of ensigns and non-officers? And Control (the AI) was proto-Borg, right as we had three seasons of Picard with season 1: Romulans, Borg, and Androids; Season 2: Q, Borg, and time travel; Season 3: Borg, Changelings, and Crusher saying "no one has seen or heard from the Borg in a decade".
Recently, and in no small part thanks to everything being available for streaming, I started with the DS9 pilot and made my way through all seven seasons. It took me several years of steady chipping away (spikes in watching on long flights, and weeks or months of no watching), but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are multiple sharks jumped. Alien sharks jumped. The same hammy and even adolescent takes on relationships. But through it all shines the enduring, consistent introspective existentialism.
I think watching DS9 in this way provides a richer experience while TNG can mostly be enjoyed by dropping in here or there, and you eventually pick up on the long arcs of the Borg, Q, etc...
TNG is very, very good, but it wears its heart on its sleeve. Picard never struggles with existential moral ambiguity. Even when he (rarely) fails, he's always The Good Man.
The utopian slant is appealing and we can't help cheering for him, but DS9 revealed there was some sleight of hand behind the narrative.
Of the series since, I think only Battlestar Galactica approached similar complexity. Maybe Westworld, which got quite abstract and interesting towards the end.
The Expanse is more by the numbers. It's basically class war in space, with the military, the aristocracy, and the peasants slugging it out, while a dragon rolls in and threatens to eat everything. The writing is very challenge -> response -> partial solution over and over, and for me it just doesn't have the depth or the emotional reach. (Or the acting chops.)
I find this amusing, because of what his best friend said about him wearing his heart on his sleeve :
It's kind of like Game of Thrones and 'The Red Wedding'. That episode is zomg, but if you watched it in isolation with no knowledge of the character arcs to date, it'd probably be interesting, but wouldn't have anywhere near the same sort of punch.
I am worried that Game of Thrones ruined a generation of sci-fi and fantasy - everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone. Even besides the fact that we are manifesting a world where progress is impossible, it has turned genres that is traditionally very positive and escapist into bleak emotional slogs.
I recommend reading the original book series. In my opinion the writing only gets better as it goes on, and it’s obvious the writers had a plan in mind from the beginning rather than just writing more books for the sake of continuing a series where the ideas were all used up in the first book or two
But like, Amos is a psycho.
GoT was a late-comer to this. For me, William Gibson’s _Neuromancer_ (1984) was my first exposure to dark and morally-compromised Sci-Fi. I am sure it predates this in novels. _Neuromancer_ inspired a couple of movies in the 90s: The Net and Johnny Mneumonic come to mind.
In US TV shows, I think Babylon 5 started the lean into the dark tone, and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica of the 2000s is a better example than GoT.
Yes, the Narn and the Centauri were not so pure, but it reads as a pretty mythic Good V Evil world to me.
And which sci-fi shows would you recommend instead?
(not to be confused with the USA version which is terrible)
As a lover of Douglas Adams (and a non-American), I adored the concept of Dirk Gently but felt the entries were some of the weakest material he'd ever released. There were so many great ideas but the characters were a confusing mess. The US adaption by contrast is possibly the most perfect blend or midpoint between of American and British humour I've ever seen, and one of the tightest time-travel stories that you can wish for without taking itself too seriously.
Looking forward to watching this previous series, I like Howard Overman and Matt Jone's other work.