Ruin Explorer
Legend
I don't think that's really a reasonable attitude, because I think SNW was quite difficult to work out - it wasn't just some format that had been widely requested prior to Discovery.If Paramount had been paying attention, they would have given us "Strange New Worlds" in the first place.
On the direct contrary, we hadn't had an actual Star Trek TV series for 13 years when Discovery came out. 13 years in which television changed hugely, from a situation where episodic shows were normal, when ENT started, to the "Prestige TV" era by the time Discovery started. During that time, what audiences accepted and were interested in seemed to change absolutely hugely.
Discovery wasn't quite what it needed to be, but I can see, logically, where they thought they were coming from in a "Prestige TV"-era Trek show. And when Discovery launched, people were absolutely advocating for a non-episodic Trek show, and for heavy continuity and so on. And the expectation, after intervening successful "Prestige TV" SF shows, that audiences would want something darker and more action-oriented than previous Trek shows was not an entirely invalid one.
What I'm saying is, SNW just wouldn't have gotten made in 2017. It wouldn't have happened. The money wouldn't have been there. Kurtzman et al could have absolutely advocating for it, saying it was what people wanted, but it wouldn't have happened.
There's a reason why S2 of Disco was essentially a backdoor pilot for SNW, and that's that it took the reaction to S1 of Disco, and the realization that there was demand for a more positive, bright-hearted, more old-Trek-like (but still more action-y) Trek series.
Also there's the Michael issue, which was that Disco piled way too much on to Michael's character:
1) She's the focus of the show, for no apparent reason, and all previous Trek shows focused around the captain/leader (though all except TOS were kind of ensemble pieces and TOS wasn't far off).
2) She's Spock's human sister, which is kind of a big, and initially very random-seeming deal, and which hamstrung the actor in S1 because she was initially clearly being directed to like "act like a human trying to be a Vulcan", something they later largely gave up on, and once they did, things improved.
3) She was a young-ish Black woman in an era when the chuds of the world were really doing everything they could to drag down any non-white male characters (leading to the famously insane "Star Trek has gone woke!" stuff, like wth do you think TOS and TNG were doing, mate?).
4) She's called Michael and it's never explained. Like, yeah you can have a masc name, but you're clearly femme as hell, so what's that about?
If they had removed any one of 1, 2 and 3, like say, made her in charge of scout ship (or even a full-size ship but she's seen as a sort of prodigy), so it made sense to focus on her, or made her just a human, not Spock's rando sister, I think that would really have helped how the show was received, though it might have caused people to focus more of some of the other weaknesses.
And actually Michael is representative of Disco's S1/S2 issues in general re: "having way too much going on".
But anyway they learned from Disco and SNW only took so long to get here because of the pandemic, I think.
Here's the UK version of the trailer - for me @Umbran's one shows "video unavailable" so I suspect there may be some geo-blocking going on in a weird way. I've noticed recently Youtube isn't always saying "Video not available in your region", which is extremely annoying.
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