Vigilance said:
Something Manny Coto said that really shows how out of touch Berman is, Manny wanted to do shows that tied into TOS. Berman said no because "there are only 3 fans of the old show left".
Berman seems to know squat about fandom. I remember well a discussion on the net right before First Contact came out that he kept insisting that the inventor of Warp Drive be a hot woman who could be a love interest for Picard, and his comeback to the entire backstory of Zephram Cochrane being well established in Trek lore (and even an appearance in TOS) was:
"Less than 1% of the fans are even going to know or care about something like that!"
I think that sums it up, B&B don't know Trek half as well as a typical fanboy Trekkie and don't really care. I think most of the successes on their watch have come in spite of them, not because of them.
Trek now has 10 movies, 3 seasons of original Trek, 7 seasons of TNG, 7 seasons of DS9, 7 Seasons of Voyager, and 4 Seasons of Enterprise. That's around 700 hours of footage (and just the canonical stuff, leaving out the animated series and the hundreds of novels, comic books, video games ect.) That's enough that playing it 24/7 it would take more than a month to watch all of Star Trek. They may well have mined out the basic Trek format of "starship flying around our galaxy from world to world, seeing earthlike cultures that provide social commentary on modern America and occasionally getting into fights with aliens who have ships a lot like ours and funny bumps on their heads".
Also, the fans place a high value on continuity of the setting, the producers never really have. In the beginning of the first series, they didn't really make up any background about the Enterprise or where it came from or what authority operated it, because they figured it wouldn't come up. Before "Starfleet Command", they talked about "Space Central", "Space Control" and "United Earth Space Probe Agency" being their agency before settling on Starfleet. The original series was lucky to have what little continuity it did, during the TNG Roddenberry era he was afraid to even mention the old show for most of the time so it felt half-detached, and for the B&B era they only paid lip service to continuity. I feel almost a little sorry for Mike Okuda when he penned the official Star Trek Chronology and had to put in so many notes and acknowledgements of places where it just didn't add up at all (although he did an admirable job against a formidable task).
Personally, I place a lot of the blame for the failure of Enterprise on UPN. I hate just about every show on the network except for Enterprise (it's fixation on "urban" programming, which is a euphimism.) They schedule Enterprise for constantly changing, inconvenient times and treat it like a burden and obligation instead of the Crown Jewel it was presumably supposed to be. TOS became a big hit in syndication, TNG and DS9 became big in syndication, and at least Voyager was syndicated out in the later seasons so first-run went to UPN but back seasons went to other channels.
Also, for the longest time Trek was
it with regards to TV Sci-Fi in the US. It was the first real non-anthology Sci-Fi show in the country, and for the longest time it was the most well known and visible one (thanks to syndication, which meant it could be on all over the dial). Since then you've had shows like Babylon 5, which in terms of writing and acting consistently outdid Trek.
For a long time, if you asked a Trekkie why Trek was successful, they'd say something about Roddenberry's "Vision" of a perfect future and the standard response of Trek providing a vision of a positive future for humanity. I believe that's nonsense. The over-the-top blatant moralizing of Trek always seemed to be almost talking down to the audience. People who want Sci-Fi and want it well, Trek was the best thing you had for a long time (realize that Lost in Space was the big contemporary). However, the field has grown and developed, but Trek has felt comfortable to rest on it's laurels and trade on it's name while recycling the same basic plotlines and themes over and over with different casts on different ships. Stargate, Babylon 5, (New) Battlestar Galactica have all shown a creative spark that hasn't had in a long, long time.
