Posted on 05/01/2005 9:58:15 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
May 1, 2005
By DAVE ITZKOFF
IN the sector of planet Earth known as Hollywood, it was business as usual on the Paramount back lot. On a sunny day in early March, green-skinned aliens with zippers embedded in their faces were eating catered lunches, stagehands were disassembling lighting rigs labeled "Thorium Isotope Hazard," and all were doing their best to ignore the fact that the warp engines on the starship Enterprise would soon be shut down, perhaps never to start up again. "Welcome," a security guard said with heavy irony, "to the last days of Pompeii."
On May 13, UPN will broadcast the final two episodes of "Star Trek: Enterprise," the most recent spinoff of the genre-defining science-fiction series created by Gene Roddenberry nearly 40 years ago. The scenes filmed in March will bring closure to the story of a futuristic space vessel and its intrepid crew, but the end of "Enterprise" also casts into doubt the future of a venerable entertainment property that is entering a realm where no franchise has gone before.
Almost from the moment it was canceled by NBC in 1969, the original "Star Trek" set about defying television conventions: a three-season dud in prime time, it became a success in syndication, spawning a series of motion pictures, a merchandising empire, and three television sequels (the syndicated hits "Star Trek: The Next Generation," "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" and "Star Trek: Voyager," which helped start the UPN network in 1995).
"Enterprise," a prequel devised by the veteran "Trek" producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, was supposed to be the series that would take the franchise into the future by venturing into its past. "We knew that in the 23rd century, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock were out exploring the universe, and they were comfortable in space," said Mr. Berman, who was put in charge of the film and television properties after Mr. Roddenberry's death in 1991. "But who were the first people to have to try a transporter? The first people to come into contact with hostile alien species; who were hesitant about taking these first steps into the galaxy?"
Set 100 years before the first "Star Trek" series, aboard an embryonic version of the ship that would later carry Kirk, Spock and company across the cosmos, "Enterprise" made its debut on UPN on Sept. 26, 2001, to over 12.5 million viewers. By the end of its first season, its audience was just half as big, and by the end of its second season, barely a third of those original viewers were still watching. "People never really warmed up to 'Enterprise,' " said Ronald D. Moore, a former staff writer of the syndicated "Trek" television sequels who is now executive producer of the Sci Fi Channel's new "Battlestar Galactica" series. "It never quite grabbed people viscerally and hung on, like the other shows did."
As Jolene Blalock, who played the Vulcan officer T'Pol on "Enterprise," explained: "The stories lacked intriguing content. They were boring." A lifelong "Star Trek" fan, Ms. Blalock said she was dismayed by early "Enterprise" scripts that seemed to ignore basic tenets of the franchise's chronology, and that offered revealing costumes instead of character development. "The audience isn't stupid," she said.
Aware of viewers' disappointment, the producers made significant changes for its third season: a single, yearlong storyline was established, pitting the ship's crew against a malevolent alien race called the Xindi, and Manny Coto, creator of the Showtime series "Odyssey 5," was brought in as a co-executive producer. But while Mr. Coto was widely hailed by colleagues and fans alike for delivering episodes that equaled the quality of previous "Star Trek" series, the show's ratings continued to erode.
When it was time to commit to a new season of "Enterprise," UPN ordered fewer episodes than in the past and shuffled them to yet another time slot. Still, some people clung to hope. "Being the optimists that actors are," said Scott Bakula, who played "Enterprise's" heroic Captain Archer, "you think, 'Maybe if we do a really good job. ...' But basically we were kidding ourselves."
The network says the problem was that most of "Enterprise's" viewers were male, unlike those of its bigger shows, like "America's Next Top Model" and "Veronica Mars." "It didn't really fit into the overall brand, and it was harder to attract the audience for that show, because they weren't sitting here all week," said the UPN president, Dawn Ostroff.
As "Enterprise" prepares for its final voyage, its producers admit that the found it hard to write for both dedicated "Trek" fans and uninitiated viewers. "When it was time to start the writing for Season 4," Mr. Coto said, "we were mostly gearing episodes towards people who knew the 'Star Trek' universe. We were not worried so much about people who didn't. They were gone anyway."
Yet "Enterprise" was also hobbled by competition from the four previous "Star Trek" TV series, which continue on cable and in syndication. "If anything, Paramount has gone to the well too often, because the franchise has been such a huge cash cow for the studio, for decades," said the longtime "Trek" actor and director Jonathan Frakes, who reprises his "Next Generation" character, Commander Riker, in the "Enterprise" finale. "You can go right through the dial and there's always 'Star Trek' on somewhere."
At the same time that "Enterprise" began to sputter, the "Star Trek" film franchise went into a tailspin: the 2002 theatrical release "Star Trek: Nemesis" was the series' first bona fide bomb, grossing just over $40 million. "There became a certain perception that the franchise wasn't something people had to rush out and see in any way, shape or form," said Mr. Moore, who wrote the screenplays for the "Star Trek" films "Generations" and "First Contact." "That perception becomes self-sustaining, and then people drift away from it."
They may have drifted toward Sci Fi's "Battlestar Galactica" (which brought in about 2 million viewers in its first season this winter) and USA's "Dead Zone" (which averaged almost 3.5 million viewers last summer). "It's like there's a certain number of science-fiction fans, and that's it," Mr. Coto said. "It's a genre that appeals to a certain type of individual, and there's not a lot of them."
THIS fall, for the first time in 18 years, there will be no original "Star Trek" series on television; a new film installment is unlikely to materialize before 2007 or 2008. Paramount Network Television confirmed that there was no timetable for the development of a new show, and no creative team in place to develop it. And despite the near-universal praise he earned for keeping "Enterprise" aloft, Mr. Coto said no one had approached him about further involvement with the "Star Trek" franchise. "It is kind of disappointing, frankly," he said. "I don't think a lot of people who are in charge right now are that interested in talking about the next thing."
From his office in the Gary Cooper Building at Paramount Pictures, behind a door with a plaque that reads "Please speak softly, massage in progress," Mr. Berman remained remarkably sanguine for a man so frequently threatened with bodily harm on Internet message boards. He had begun preliminary work on a potential new "Star Trek" film, but, he said, "I'm not certain that I will be involved in creating the next 'Star Trek' series. I have no idea when that's going to happen, and it very well may be someone new who's going to be doing it."
And as he spoke of the optimistic vision that Mr. Roddenberry presented in the original "Star Trek," one in which the most demanding of humanity's earthbound problems have been solved and the infinite wonder of the universe awaits mankind, Mr. Berman expressed a similar hopefulness for the future of "Star Trek" itself. "You can go anywhere in the world and people know what 'Beam me up, Scotty' means or what a Klingon is," Mr Berman said. "They're not going to go away."
But some who are departing the Star Trek universe, like Ms. Blalock, seemed relieved to be free of early-morning makeup calls and prosthetic pointy ears: "The girls on set, we would always joke: 'We're gonna be cute after this all over. After we shake off the haggard.' "
She was just as Poopie on Next Generation as the wise, pie-hat Guynan. Was she ever a boring goody-two shoes....just the PERFECT p.c. product for Hollywood.
:)
Excellent idea.
When they resurrect the franchise, they should hire a couple of GOOD writers who don't have P.C. and sex on their brains. Sleaze and smut sell. Sad, but true. I doubt whether Hollywood can do that in this day and age.
I wish they could and I wish they would.
We never needed a "Next Generation" while the original generation were still around. The idea of (except for No. 5) letting everyone get old aboard the original Enterprise was right -- that is what we Pioneer Trekkies were doing. (And by the way, most of my college and university Trekkie Friends think No. 3 movie was the best because it showed that six grownups on the ship and two on the space station could run the whole show, and that the Next Generation were made up of blabbermouth wussies.)
I hated the Next Generation because their MO appeared to be that you sit the enemy down and talk him to death. Just SHOOT HIM!
Oh please, Kirk was bagging babes left and right. Sex was all over the original series, way more then any of the newer shows. Archer has hardly even touched on the subject he has been so busy.
Star Trek needed a LOT more Robert Heinlein and lot less Diane Feinstein.
What is wrong with Enterprise you think its Fienstien oriented for crying out loud?
Did you watch the Xindi story arc? Keeping with Trek tradition of paralleling our times, it paralleled 9-11. Archer had to make some very difficult decisions to save the Earth. He had to use unconventional interrogation methods. Is that Fienstien? No way.
My Dad, brother and me used to watch the first run Star
Trek series back in the 60's. We never missed and loved
every minute. :)
If the original Star Trek had been all about just sex, the show would have never made it. I would have dumped it at the get go. Sex wasn't the centerpiece, like it was on Voyager. The star of that series was 7/9's tits -- the star of the show. It was absurd.
Archer hardly ever does touch on sex because Vulcan female is too busy boinking everything that isn't bolted down. SHE and her kink-o-rama is the star of the show, NOT Archer, who is, I think, a great captain.
I only watched the show a little because I was always BLASTED with Tpel's boink-o-rama. What I saw of Archer was good. Not enough of him, too much of Vulcan boinking....and always mooning up at whom-whatever she was boinking for an eternity. Cameramen were obviously getting off on her too. It was like watching the movie the Abyss -- 90% of the movie was the moron female lead's face on the camera. She WAS boinking the director and producer. Lol.
Boy, is she put together!
The series was I feel partly responsible for the utopian vision that infected a generation and kept liberal domination in politics around longer than it should have.
ST:TOS was firmly niched in the Cold/Vietnam War. So there was something with which to work off of.
ST:NG had no such backdrop. Though there were some good episodes. Many were PC drek. Picard was a negotiator and no Kirk. Ryker was a waste of flesh. Wesley Crusher just needed to die.
ST:DS9: The Middle East in Outer Space. Sisco was just as good a strategist as Kirk, but not as stong a character. Andy Robinson RAWKed as Garak! Liked "The Defiant" and Gul Dukat. Casting Nurse Ratched as the Head Man Hating, Back Stabbing Priestess was a stroke of Genius!
ST:Voyager: Femnists in Space! They should have stuck with their first choice of Genvieve Bujold as the ship's Captain. Mrs. Columbo just didn't seem to hack it. The Hologram Doctor, Robert Picardo seemed to be the strongest and wisest character.
ST: Enterprise: I saw my first episode two weeks ago. With the Green Chicks. Seemed a lot like "Mudd's Women". Not much to write home about.
I'll still stick with The Original "Outer Limits" and "Babylon-5".
Jack.
ROFLOL! And spot on!
Definitely!
utopian commie space propaganda?
Jeez man, I really dont see that at all.
Fans of the show come from ALL political views in my experience. Republican, democrat, conservative, liberal and just about everything in between. I cant think of any fan that wouldnt want to live in such times.
I think it speaks volumes about Trek that it can have that can of mass appeal anc cross those kinds of beliefs that normally are huge voids between people. That it speaks to that many people in so many different ways says a lot in my opinion. Trying to say its commie propaganda? jeez dude. Roddenberry was a decorated bomber pilot in WWII.
Ever see the original series? The klingons and Romulans are the soviets and chinese. There are many more examples.
As bad as Star Trek is, the WORST case of blatent commie propaganda disguised as a Sci-Fi film was "The Day the Earth Stood Still."
The thing is the new "Battlestar Galactica" from what I've seen plays straight dark hard reality nothing "PC" in that, same option no matter who you are .... the old Battlestar Galactica is just negative baggage the new one carries
I agree. Avery Brooks was horrible. The character was great...but his acting....yuck. Especially when he acted like he was mad. Reminded me of something I would see at a broadway ply...not acting on the big screen. Terrible.
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