If I were to tell you what show I first watched regularly, it'd probably be Sesame Street or Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. But there are two shows I really think of as definitional to my childhood TV habits, and those were The Simpsons and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I'm not currently watching classic Simpsons - though I do sometimes have to remind myself that that show is somehow still airing new episodes nearly 20 years after I stopped watching it - but I am watching the other show.
Next Gen launched in 1987, the year after I was born, but of course I wasn't really ready for the show for a while - I must have started seeing it when I was 4 or 5. What I do distinctly remember is that it was the first show I watched in which I became aware that it had an end. When All Good Things, the series finale, came out, I remember having what must have been the first of many existential crises in my young life (I was 7, about to turn 8. I remember first becoming horrified at the possibility of my own death at 6, so it wouldn't be the first.)
Anyway, there are a few things I remember about the show from childhood. One is that I remember that some episodes seemed to have a worse video quality and were often scarier (Conspiracy comes to mind) and I later realized those were simply from earlier seasons. I remember that I loved Data and Geordi (the latter probably in part due to my viewing Reading Rainbow concurrently) and that the Enterprise-D seemed like a wonderfully comfortable spaceship to explore the galaxy on.
The funny thing is that I'm of a generation where Next Gen simply was Star Trek for me. My Dad, whose interest in the show is probably why it was such a big thing for me and my sister, got a novelty mug as a gift from a colleague or student that showed Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on a transporter pad, and they'd disappear when the mug was filled with hot liquid (or maybe the reverse.) I remember being perplexed as to who these people were until my dad explained to me that Next Gen was based on an earlier show from the 1960s.
(It occurs to me that part of what makes the "Kelvin Timeline" Star Trek movies feel so weird is that I imagine that the Star Trek J. J. Abrams was nostalgic for was strictly the more action-focused movies with the original cast - Star Trek Into Darkness is basically a remake of Wrath of Khan - and so for someone 20 years younger, I have a different pop-culture reference point than he does.)
Reconstructing the history of the franchise is kind of a fascinating process. The original show only had 3 seasons, and then there was an animated series I only found out existed relatively recently. Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out in the late 70s, but much like Star Wars, the movies became a big franchise in the 80s. What really blew my mind was to realize that the movies with the original cast continued into the 90s - overlapping with Next Gen (Michael Dorn even plays Worf's grandfather, a lawyer who defends, or at least attempts to defend, Kirk and McCoy in Klingon court when they are framed for the assassination of the Klingon Chancellor.)
Star Trek: Generations was the movie that transitioned to the Next Gen cast, and deeply upset me as a kid (not so much because of the ignoble end it gave to Kirk, but more for the existentially creepy idea of a guy essentially trying to die and take everyone with him.) So it was strange for me to realize that it came only two years after The Undiscovered Country.
While the original cast's movies had some apparently good ones (Wrath of Khan being the gold standard - which came out the same year as Return of the Jedi) the Next Gen crew's transition to the big screen was less successful. Of the four movies they did, I think First Contact is the only one that people generally seemed to like (it helped that it used Next Gen's most iconic bad guys, the Borg) but I think in general this is probably because the movies, in order to feel like big events, tend to amp up the action, when Next Gen's strongest episodes tend to be the contemplative and thoughtful ones.
Consider the Inner Light, Darmok, Measure of a Man, or even Chain of Command, whose most iconic scenes are really just Picard speaking with his Cardassian torturer.
It is, in fact, part of the ethos of Star Trek, and Next Gen in particular, that the conceit of the series allows us to imagine what things would be like if we truly held to our highest ideals. Even the horrific Borg are approached with a degree of respect, such as when Picard chooses not to use "Hugh" to exterminate the Borg given the potential that Borg drones do have some tiny glimmer of humanity within them.
I love Next Gen, but it certainly shows its age. Some of its cultural ideas seem utterly laughable in this day an age - given the amount of progress that we have made as a society on LGBT issues in the past 20 years, and that's in the midst of regressive conservative movements and not the idealized enlightened future of Star Trek, it seems utterly bizarre that a utopian 24th Century starship shouldn't have more visible gay, bi, trans, or non-binary characters. There's also the fact that the writers clearly couldn't help but first identify female characters like Troi and Dr. Crusher as women, and seem to (for the most part) write their stories from a very male idea of what a woman's concerns would be. There's behavior that I think we'd consider inappropriate (especially given the regimented world of Starfleet) that are kind of laughed off.
Now, obviously, the show was not made in this hypothetical 24th Century, and to a large extent, it was aspirational even as progressively-minded people were still struggling to imagine some cultural aspirations.
It's funny to see how its aesthetic shaped industrial design. I believe that the designers behind the iPhone cited Next Gen as an inspiration, ironically giving us the "Black Mirror" design that would become the name of a far more pessimistic science fiction show. On the other hand, the beige pleather used for the bridge furniture feels much more of its late 80's/early 90's era. (That being said, I love how brightly-lit the ship is, and I also really like the wood-paneled shoehorn-arc that Worf stands behind on the bridge.)
Picard, as a character, is kind of fascinating, and obviously one that Patrick Stewart and Paramount is interested in returning to with Star Trek: Picard, which is now in its first season (I haven't watched it yet because there are only so many streaming services I want to subscribe to, and CBS All Access is not next on the priority list.) I don't think I could deny that Picard was an influential fictional role model to me.
And the truth is that he mostly lives up to that. He is an intelligent and thoughtful person who speaks with the moral authority of someone who genuinely considers the ethical ramifications of what he does. It's funny, because in a lot of ways, Picard is the sort of figure that old white men want to seem like when they try to speak with authority. Given that I hope to live long enough to be considered an old white man (I've got the latter two,) I hope I can be one with the sort of integrity that Picard has.
It's funny, because I think that Picard almost feels like a reconstruction of the idea of paternalistic authority figure. He's the Captain, which means that, except for the occasional episode in which we see some Admiral, he's the ultimate authority on the Enterprise. I guess what prevents that authority from become grating is that he's written to really embody the ideals that he espouses, and ones that the audience is likely to agree with. And, to show that he deserves that authority, he seems to trust his crew and take their objections and contributions seriously.
I think in the current age, I'm particularly inclined to question the wisdom and dictates of older generations (for context, I'm currently sheltering in my home as a pandemic rages across the globe, with a strong sense that much of the havoc this is inflicting on the US could have been prevented with better leadership, but because we have pretty much exactly what you'd come up with if you thought of the worst possible person to occupy the White House right now, we have no idea how long this quarantine period is going to last.) So I feel a kind of obligation to approach Picard with a skeptical eye. He's certainly not perfect, but one never gets the sense that he doesn't deserve this command, and you do get a sense that his crew has good reason to respect him.
Next Gen is also, of course, a product of a different TV era. For one, it's designed to be watched... on TV, and via broadcast. The serialization that we've come to expect with much of our TV entertainment these days is suppressed, though some elements do pop up now and again. Worf's conflict with the House of Duras, for example, is a recurring issue. But to a large extent, the show tries to let things get wrapped up at the end of an episode, and that does have the effect of largely keeping characters static. While the degree to which Riker and Troi are a couple does shift sometimes (they do wind up getting married and having kids after the series) for the most part the characters have a kind of enduring attitude and quest. Worf is always struggling to embody both Klingon and Federation ideals, Data is always trying to become more human. The characters have a basic direction without much travel in that direction, which allows you to settle into a random episode and mostly understand how things are going for them.
My sister and I were talking about what this show would look like if it were being made today (which, granted, I guess the existence of Discovery and Picard lets us see rather explicitly) and one thing we were considering was that The Best of Both Worlds and its epilogue, Family, could have been drawn out to two whole seasons - one season in which Picard is Locutus of Borg, perhaps that development happening at the end of the previous season (as it does in Next Gen) and then taking all of season four for Riker to lead the crew and try to fight Locutus until the season 4 finale, in which they'd figure out how to rescue him. Then, you'd spend a big chunk of season 5 dealing with Picard re-acclimating to life as a human individual. Instead, we get all of that in the space of three episodes.
Admittedly, the longterm ramifications of Picard's tenure as a member of the Borg are one of the few areas where the show allows for some light serialization. His attitude toward "Hugh," the drone they find in I, Borg, and whom they teach the idea of individuality, is colored by his fear and desire for vengeance against the Collective. But after a fight in the mud with his brother on their family vineyard, Picard returns to the Enterprise more or less the same guy he's always been. There's no ongoing suspicion that he's got some sleeper-agent programming and we don't see him acting more rashly or overly cautiously - it's basically just left behind in the Enterprise's warp-field wake.
There is an advantage to this type of TV storytelling. Next Gen has a number of fantastic self-contained episodes. The Inner Light, for example, plays with the audience by first suggesting that the illusory impression that Picard is living an entire life with a family due to a mind-assaulting space probe is something insidious, but the episode becomes an almost lyrical tearjerker about a civilization whose last act is to cast a mote of their humanity into the void in the hopes that someone might discover it (and also a low-key early 90s warning about climate change). Darmok, while its premise is kind of ridiculous sci-fi nonsense (how could a civilization tell the story that their language is based on without a simpler language to tell that story?) still manages to make me cry some extremely nerdy tears because of the fact that this alien captain ultimately gives his life to try to reach out and communicate with another people (interesting to consider that two of my favorite episodes of the show are about attempt to communicate.)
In a serialized TV show, you either wouldn't have the room for a concept like that, or you'd need to integrate it into a larger narrative and risk spoiling the delicate precision with which the story is built. By allowing for an episodic structure, the Inner Light is not ruined, for example, by the far cheesier "are you sure this wasn't meant to be a Doctor Who script?" Time's Arrow, which was the two-parter season finale/premiere that followed it. (Seriously, between its "aliens going into the past to attack Earth during a particular historical period" and a broad caricature of Mark Twain, who is a major character in the episodes, and the cheesiest of all historical figure cameos by making the bellhop at the hotel where Data is staying turn out to be Jack London, this really feels far more like there should be a blue police box than a group of Federation officers dealing with this problem.)
It's clear that Next Gen happened because of the success of the original series-based movies in the 80s. But I also think that it's more on the strength of Next Gen's success that the 90s were saturated with Trek. DS9 launched its first season during Next Gen's last, and Voyager came soon after. After Voyager, the new century began with the prequel series, Enterprise, which never quite felt like it was of the same era (in part because the setting was different.)
For whatever reason, I didn't watch DS9 or Voyager, at least not much, when I was a kid. I guess I'd been sort of heartbroken by the loss of Next Gen (which I think ended not necessarily because it was cancelled, but because the show had run its course and people wanted to move on - except maybe Michael Dorn, who did another four seasons on DS9.) Around 4th Grade, not long after Next Gen ended, I became far more obsessed with Star Wars than I was with Star Trek.
I'm not really interested in hashing out the two - even if it was not always up to the high standard I remembered, Star Trek was always a lot smarter than Star Wars, but with that intelligence comes a certain nerdy awkwardness - it was better at ideas than emotions, which I'd certainly say is the opposite for Star Wars. But I think when Trek got the ideas and the emotions to work together, it was really transcendent.
Still, there's such a deep comfort in watching this show. The Enterprise-D feels like a place I've been, and even if I have some existential questions about how sure we are that transporters aren't just cloning/murdering machines (something which admittedly seems less likely given the episode Realm of Fear, in which one seems to remain conscious through the transporting process, but also far more likely given the episode Second Chances, in which we find out that a duplicate of Riker was left behind on another planet for eight years due to a transporter accident) the notion of being able to live on a Galaxy-Class starship while it warps from world to world sounds really nice (though hopefully other Starfleet vessels have fewer horrifying encounters with killer aliens or spatial anomalies.)
It'd also be nice if we had the kind of medical technology that they have in the 24th century. Might make this current crisis a lot easier to deal with. Oh, and a democratic-socialist post-scarcity utopia, too, please!
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