My TNG Mission Statement

I’m pretty unabashedly a Star Trek fan. My trek, the one that I mostly closely associate myself with, is TNG. It’s hard for me to believe, looking back, just how popular it was in its time. In a lot of ways it was as future thinking in its marketing and business model as it was in its narrative as a show.

If they didn’t invent the concept of first run syndication, a model that other shows later mimicked endlessly (like Hercules, Xena, and at the very least, Star Trek: DS9), then they certainly were the ones that made it successful. They had a brilliant decision to give away the show to anyone that wanted to air it for a price very close to $0 (I can’t really recall the specifics here, but it was quite literally, pocket change) and only asked for a cut of the advertising.

And so the fledgling reboot of the Star Trek franchise was showing on independent stations throughout the U.S. in numbers that were staggering. It quickly gained a following that, if it were a show capable of producing such numbers today (close to 20 million on a good week), would put it at the very top of any series currently on television.

But even in the pre-internet time of the late 80’s and early 90’s. It was huge.

I was one of the millions that tuned in every week. I loved the show in a way that I can’t really explain. I’d been a casual fan on The Original Series, but with The Next Generation something clicked with me.

Fast forward a few decades and it’s only a fond memory. Except of the occasional rerun on BBC America while waiting for an episode of Dr. Who or Orphan Black to come on, I’ve really not watched the show since the original run ended (let's be clear here, I would tape each ep on VHS and rewatch it multiple times, so I've seen each episode many times, just not in a very long time).

I stayed on with DS9, and for a while, with Voyager. Only saw a smattering of Enterprise. It dawned on me not so long ago that it was time for me to revisit my old love and see if there was anything there for me still.

Hence, the birth of this blog. My goal is to rewatch every episode of TNG (maybe the other shows too, I don’t know. Leave me alone about it. Sheesh) and see what older me thinks of it.

So, this is a place for me to post my thoughts, If you are stopping by hoping for follow/follow-back sort of thing, I don’t know. I’m really doing this as an online diary that you just have the great honor of reading. So, whatever. I’m not making promises about anything. I don’t even know how often I’m going to be posting (for the love of god, please let be at least once per week).

If you’re still reading. Thanks. Don’t be mad if I’m a bit hard on the episodes I’m talking about. I think many of them will quite objectively be bad. As of this writing I’ve made it through about a dozen of the first season episodes and can say with a high degree of confidence that there isn’t a lot to love early on.