Star Trek should be on standard television for the foreseeable future.
Star Trek is a major brand that helped define the television landscape in the 1960s, 80s, and 90s, proving to be a juggernaut for Paramount and the fandom as a whole. Since Star Trek: Enterprise ended in 2005 after being canceled by UPN, there has not been one new Star Trek series to premiere exclusively on television.
With the writers and actors strike, you’d think that now would be the perfect opportunity for such a trend to come to an end. We saw it briefly during the Pandemic Era, with Discovery making its way to the terrestrial airwaves, and then Strange New Worlds premiered on CBS on Sept. 8, 2023, with 1.6 million viewers.
And while that doesn’t seem like a lot, considering that it was the first episode of the first season, that’s not bad at all. Especially since it didn’t get the same amount of promotion and advertising as it would’ve if it were a new series.
This is the type of thing that Paramount needs to do more of.
Star Trek should air same-day with its release on Paramount+
Why are the rich the stupidest? No one really wanted streaming services to exist as they are. What people wanted was Netflix, a one-stop source for all the things we already watched. We didn’t want streaming to take the place of appointment television. We like appointment television, it gives structure to our lives.
What we wanted was the ability to watch the older episodes of a show we were currently watching without having to go to the store for the boxed DVD collection that would run us $60. Netflix gave us that, and then every other television network decided to be butts and ruin the experience for everyone by taking their own properties and starting their own streaming service.
Now, everyone has to own 12 or so digital streaming platforms just to watch the handful of shows we want, and it’s killing the business. The streaming services are losing money hand over fist, the subscribers are down, and not even a behemoth like Disney+ is making money or keeping its subscribers.
Major studios need to reinvest in television, as it gets people a higher rate of return on advertising, helps pay the people more money, and generally just simplifies a very complicated existence. Does cable need to die? Probably, but we should still strive to keep 20-odd television channels going.
And Star Trek should absolutely be one of the shows that Paramount brings to television. Let it run on CBS at 9:00 PM local time on a Thursday. You don’t even need to add more episodes, just go from Strange New Worlds to Lower Decks to whatever is next for the series as fall turns to winter and then spring.
It won’t happen, as the people making decisions end up missing the forest for the trees, but it should.
