It's a great time for Star Trek. The phenomenal final season of Picard just ended, and Season 2 of Strange New Worlds warps onto Paramount+ this month. There are also a trio of other series, two animated, with new seasons in the offing. However, all these new shows hearken back to the claim that "Star Trek fatigue" ended the Rick Berman-era of the franchise -- a claim made by Berman himself.
Rick Berman worked for the studio but quickly switched teams to work for Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. For nearly two decades, he oversaw the TV Star Trek franchise, which began with The Next Generation and lasted into the 21st Century with the under-appreciated Enterprise prequel series. The last show until streaming, Enterprise didn't fail; its network did. Still, perhaps the start of what's now a tradition, the end was blamed on franchise "fatigue" after some 600-plus episodes of TV. While it's true, the audience who made The Next Generation a huge hit wasn't the same one watching Enterprise; as a generational saga, new fans discover the shows all the time. However, both the studio and the fans took this impossible success for granted.
Rick Berman Oversaw an Impossibly Successful Star Trek Revitalization
Before Star Trek: The Next Generation, no television series had ever been successfully revamped or rebooted. Also, the show made history as the first series to be sold directly into syndication. Before the series finale, the show spun off Deep Space Nine, which spun off into Voyager. In conversation with fellow longtime Trek producer Brannon Braga, Berman admits that he worried about fatigue. He asked the studio for some time off between Voyager and Enterprise, but they wouldn't hear it. Yet, as UPN suffered to find an audience, the blame fell on its flagship series rather than the executives who couldn't even keep their affiliates on the same schedule. Listening to Berman and Braga tell stories from the trenches of producing 18 years of Star Trek fatigue may have played a role, but not from the audience.
Only those who were there know what it was really like behind the scenes of the shows, but it seems like a frequent infusion of newer, younger writers might have been the missing ingredient. In a franchise like Star Trek, even the "worst" episode is a fan's favorite. The shows Berman and company produced all had their merits and kept the franchise alive in the minds of fans forty-plus years after Star Trek: The Original Series went off-the-air. More writers and producers would've helped take some of the load off Berman, Braga and other showrunners of the era like Jeri Taylor, Manny Coto or Ira Steven Behr. It also might have brought new and challenging perspectives into the storytelling, keeping the franchise fresh.
The Audience Couldn't Imagine a World Without 'New' Star Trek
With only 79 episodes, The Original Series' success on syndication broke with the conventional wisdom that said a minimum of 100 episodes were needed. The show was on multiple channels in the late 1970s and early 1980s, becoming the top-rated syndicated series at the time. This is why Roddenberry, Berman and the rest were able to sell the new shows directly into syndication. From 1987 through 2005, Star Trek fans did not live in a world where there weren't at least two series on at the same time. The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine didn't leave syndication either, merely going to other stations as The Original Series did. Star Trek was so ubiquitous that fans thought they could skip Voyager or Enterprise and pick up the franchise on the next series.
Star Trek: Discovery and Picard Season 1 debuted with a new approach to how stories work in this universe. Some fans who went a decade without new Star Trek TV balked at the new approach. After years of beating him up on message boards and early social media, they yearned for a slice of Berman-era storytelling. Strange New Worlds, along with Prodigy, Lower Decks and Discovery, don't run the risk of "fatigue" because each show is a different kind of story aimed at different audiences. Star Trek should never be just one thing.