It also probably doesn’t help that progress moves quickly. When the Kelvin films were released, gay marriage was not Federally legalised in the US. That only happened about two years before Discovery first aired.
Though I don’t know if checking boxes is entirely true either. In my opinion, the bigger issue seems to be that a lot of them have no idea what they want to be, and while that might be fine for something episodic, that’s not really feasible for more modern serialised shows.
Discovery gets a little bit of a pass from its first two seasons being a production disaster, with the show runners getting fired or kicked out for a variety of reasons, but it never really settled into what it wanted to be either. All of its seasons are completely different to each other.
Picard has a similar issue, where the overarching plot kept changing per season. First you had the synth plot, then the ex-Borg abuse plot, and then the actual Borg plot, which ended up dragging the show all over the place, because it had serial hooks that made you expect a continuation between seasons, which then weren’t followed up with.
It rather reads like the entire premise is to make Star Trek and that’s all there is, with nothing more behind it.
On the social side, Star Trek is a huge cash cow now, so executives probably aren’t that keen on anything that pushes as hard and risks tarnishing the brand, but that’s been a trend since TOS. Most of the sequel spin-offs after its big success haven’t had that almost blatant progressiveness, where they were really pushing social boundaries.
I do wonder if Star Trek could also benefit from stirring the formula up a bit. The 32nd century could have been great for that, but unfortunately wasn’t taken as a route. Whether advertently or inadvertently, since TNG, a lot of the issues have gradually shifted from being in the alien planets being visited, to flaws within the Federation itself.
Both TNG and Voyager show extensive bias within the Federation for organic humanoids for the most part, and that was reinforced a bit with Picard. DS9 had a splinter group of people in the Federation who thought they were too soft, and someone needed to do the hard dirty work to make the Federation a success.
A show that digs into that explicitly could have a decent amount of bones in it. What does a society that sees itself as a moral utopia do when they find out that they aren’t? Can the Federation survive without the dirty work? Does the Federation lionise its core members too much, including venerating their own heroes at the expense of others? The entire genetic ban came about because Earth misused it in history, and Cochrane is credited as the inventor of warp drive, even though the Vulcans had it for much longer than Earth has been on the galactic stage. Who invented the Vulcan warp drive?
Or on that topic, how does the Federation deal with technological changes, or something that ends up pitting them at disadvantage, that can’t be quickly resolved? Warp drive putting holes in the universe was done behind the scenes, but what if it wasn’t, and the Federation was stuck between deliberately holding themselves back, or risking their quadrant of space? Or if warp drive started becoming an obsoleted technology. As far as we know, it’s a technology whose basic design and operation have barely changed since the 21st century. It’s been 300 years. A lot of the alternatives aren’t better, or have serious drawbacks, but there’s an open question of what if something was simply genuinely better, and a lot of conflict from that, which could make for something quite compelling.
It also probably doesn’t help that progress moves quickly. When the Kelvin films were released, gay marriage was not Federally legalised in the US. That only happened about two years before Discovery first aired.
Though I don’t know if checking boxes is entirely true either. In my opinion, the bigger issue seems to be that a lot of them have no idea what they want to be, and while that might be fine for something episodic, that’s not really feasible for more modern serialised shows.
Discovery gets a little bit of a pass from its first two seasons being a production disaster, with the show runners getting fired or kicked out for a variety of reasons, but it never really settled into what it wanted to be either. All of its seasons are completely different to each other.
Picard has a similar issue, where the overarching plot kept changing per season. First you had the synth plot, then the ex-Borg abuse plot, and then the actual Borg plot, which ended up dragging the show all over the place, because it had serial hooks that made you expect a continuation between seasons, which then weren’t followed up with.
It rather reads like the entire premise is to make Star Trek and that’s all there is, with nothing more behind it.
On the social side, Star Trek is a huge cash cow now, so executives probably aren’t that keen on anything that pushes as hard and risks tarnishing the brand, but that’s been a trend since TOS. Most of the sequel spin-offs after its big success haven’t had that almost blatant progressiveness, where they were really pushing social boundaries.
I do wonder if Star Trek could also benefit from stirring the formula up a bit. The 32nd century could have been great for that, but unfortunately wasn’t taken as a route. Whether advertently or inadvertently, since TNG, a lot of the issues have gradually shifted from being in the alien planets being visited, to flaws within the Federation itself.
Both TNG and Voyager show extensive bias within the Federation for organic humanoids for the most part, and that was reinforced a bit with Picard. DS9 had a splinter group of people in the Federation who thought they were too soft, and someone needed to do the hard dirty work to make the Federation a success.
A show that digs into that explicitly could have a decent amount of bones in it. What does a society that sees itself as a moral utopia do when they find out that they aren’t? Can the Federation survive without the dirty work? Does the Federation lionise its core members too much, including venerating their own heroes at the expense of others? The entire genetic ban came about because Earth misused it in history, and Cochrane is credited as the inventor of warp drive, even though the Vulcans had it for much longer than Earth has been on the galactic stage. Who invented the Vulcan warp drive?
Or on that topic, how does the Federation deal with technological changes, or something that ends up pitting them at disadvantage, that can’t be quickly resolved? Warp drive putting holes in the universe was done behind the scenes, but what if it wasn’t, and the Federation was stuck between deliberately holding themselves back, or risking their quadrant of space? Or if warp drive started becoming an obsoleted technology. As far as we know, it’s a technology whose basic design and operation have barely changed since the 21st century. It’s been 300 years. A lot of the alternatives aren’t better, or have serious drawbacks, but there’s an open question of what if something was simply genuinely better, and a lot of conflict from that, which could make for something quite compelling.