Watching DS9 recently and reflecting on RPGs has made me realise one key difference between DS9 and Smallville (and most of its subsequent similar series such as all the CW shows like Arrow, Flash, and Supergirl that I’ve seen), which is that they take fundamentally different approaches to storytelling and characterisation.
DS9 (more than the other ST series of the 90s) wants to tell both single-episode personal sci-fi stories and longer season (or multi-season) long epic sci-fi stories, but in either case it really cares about telling a well-crafted story which ideally springs naturally from character development. So - and I’m sure anyone who’s been in a long enough RPG campaign will recognise this - it takes a while to get going, because it takes time to establish who the characters are outside the initial flat outlines, giving the writers and actors (and audience) time to colour them in and get to know them and the relationships between them. The longer DS9 goes on, the richer the stories get, and it earns that richness by being true to its characters and really knowing who they are without letting them cliched or stale.
Smallville, on the other hand, doesn’t really care much about the plot or rich cumulative character-driven storytelling. It’s happy enough to do good one-off episodes with some interesting character development but those developments rarely last long because they’re easily undone by the next bit of drama. And drama (as a phenomenon) is really all that Smallville wants - it wants to bounce the characters off each other as hard as possible to generate as much drama as possible every week. It never hesitates to have a couple of guys with guns come through the door. The Smallville RPG did an utterly fantastic job of capturing what the show was all about, which is characters leveraging their Relationships with each other to get into as many misunderstandings and Conflicts as possible to generate as much Stress as possible. In the RPG, this process is basically essential for character advancement, and the show is full of the most XP-hungry PCs imaginable.
Now, which kind of show you prefer watching is very much up to you! But I don’t think I’ve seen a snow that takes the DS9 approach in at least 20 years and honestly I don’t expect to. I don’t know why, exactly - it just doesn’t seem to be what people want to write (or maybe watch). The closest thing to a modern show taking this approach, now I think about it, is probably Ted Lasso, which does a very decent job of collective character development.
