Ranking the Star Trek television series

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Padres1969 said:
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that as of today I’d actually rank them as follows:
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As Spock would say, ‘fascinating.’

I didn’t think to include the animated series in the ranking, because I haven’t seen it since Nixon was in the White House and I also don’t mentally associate it with the live action shows. But my vaguest of memories of it do jibe with the way you describe it, and I suspect it does belong at the bottom of the heap. I particularly remember the characters not moving much at all while they spoke, as if to actually animate them was too much trouble.

It’s very interesting to me that you rank the original series below the Next Generation (not to mention that it comes in third overall) - I wonder if that’s a generational thing as well as a personal thing. I grew up watching the original series in syndication and so my feelings about it are tied up in nostalgia about my childhood. But you’re certainly correct when you describe it as ‘hit or miss’ because for every great episode that bears rewatching as an adult there seems to be two that are pretty bad. And they’re not all from the infamous third season either. I particularly dislike the ones where an alien civilization mimics a period from Earth’s past, often with the most flimsy of explanations (just for equality’s sake, it would have been nice if once they visited a planet whose inhabitants were mimicing a period from Vulcan or the Klingons’ past)* or the ones where Kirk talks a computer into blowing up. And as I mentioned above, even some wonderful episodes like ‘All Our Yesterdays’ to name one example are marred by pretty serious plot holes or logical inconsistencies if you’re willing to look for them. The exigencies of heightening dramatic intensity often contradict the internal logic of any given episode.

So it’s a classic but not without its flaws.

*incidentally I’ve heard this tendency ascribed to budget concerns. It’s a lot cheaper to reuse sets and wardrobe from a historical period show than to build brand new set representing a futuristic society. On this topic, does anyone remember the Earth colony from 'Operation: Annihilate!"? I recall as a kid thinking it looked convincingly ‘futuristic’ but if you watch it now it looks like any other 70’s office park!
 
I think some of it is simply how our tastes change as we age. After not watching them for years I’m re-watching them on Netflix.
TOS is great fun, but some of the third season episodes seem now to be rather silly. Spock’s Brain looked like a discarded Lost in Space script. But even the worst original Star Trek is light years away from the trash they serve today. So my criticism is really on a different level than modern sci fi.
TNG aged horribly for all the reasons listed by others above.
Never liked Enterprise to begin with.
DS9? Haven’t watched it for years, maybe I should give it a new shot.
 
Son_of_Niall said:
I think some of it is simply how our tastes change as we age. After not watching them for years I’m re-watching them on Netflix.
TOS is great fun, but some of the third season episodes seem now to be rather silly. Spock’s Brain looked like a discarded Lost in Space script. But even the worst original Star Trek is light years away from the trash they serve today. So my criticism is really on a different level than modern sci fi.
TNG aged horribly for all the reasons listed by others above.
Never liked Enterprise to begin with.
DS9? Haven’t watched it for years, maybe I should give it a new shot.
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Which modern science fiction shows are you thinking of? All I can come up with is ‘Lost’ which isn’t pure science fiction, and it’s not really new.

A fascinating experiment I undertook last year was watching most of the first season of ‘Space 1999’ which I watched as a kid but remembered almost nothing about except the glacial pacing, the sterile environment of the base and the odd casting of Martin Landau as a Kirk-like commander. I really liked it up to a point - one internet wag called it ‘Bergman in space’ - but the show’s inadequacies from a plot and resolution perspective made me think that it might actually be really hard to write good science fiction that is consistent narrative-wise, logical and scientifically plausible and literate. So what I’m trying to say is that compared to a weak unsuccessful show like ‘Space 1999’ Star Trek actually looks pretty successful.
 
tomarin said:
As Spock would say, ‘fascinating.’

I didn’t think to include the animated series in the ranking, because I haven’t seen it since Nixon was in the White House and I also don’t mentally associate it with the live action shows. But my vaguest of memories of it do jibe with the way you describe it, and I suspect it does belong at the bottom of the heap. I particularly remember the characters not moving much at all while they spoke, as if to actually animate them was too much trouble.

It’s very interesting to me that you rank the original series below the Next Generation (not to mention that it comes in third overall) - I wonder if that’s a generational thing as well as a personal thing. I grew up watching the original series in syndication and so my feelings about it are tied up in nostalgia about my childhood. But you’re certainly correct when you describe it as ‘hit or miss’ because for every great episode that bears rewatching as an adult there seems to be two that are pretty bad. And they’re not all from the infamous third season either. I particularly dislike the ones where an alien civilization mimics a period from Earth’s past, often with the most flimsy of explanations (just for equality’s sake, it would have been nice if once they visited a planet whose inhabitants were mimicing a period from Vulcan or the Klingons’ past)* or the ones where Kirk talks a computer into blowing up. And as I mentioned above, even some wonderful episodes like ‘All Our Yesterdays’ to name one example are marred by pretty serious plot holes or logical inconsistencies if you’re willing to look for them. The exigencies of heightening dramatic intensity often contradict the internal logic of any given episode.

So it’s a classic but not without its flaws.

*incidentally I’ve heard this tendency ascribed to budget concerns. It’s a lot cheaper to reuse sets and wardrobe from a historical period show than to build brand new set representing a futuristic society. On this topic, does anyone remember the Earth colony from 'Operation: Annihilate!"? I recall as a kid thinking it looked convincingly ‘futuristic’ but if you watch it now it looks like any other 70’s office park!
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I actually rate TOS better than TNG. TOS’s weakness however is as you describe. There are far too many episodes where Kirk and Co. come across Earth cultures that are out there, and usually with flimsy rationale at best (Nazis in space anyone). They were clearly just excuses to utilize Paramount backlots on the cheap. Basically I feel like TOS got worse the longer it went on. The first season was to my mind the strongest, second less so, third… well it’s not particularly good on the balance though it did have a few standouts, the Enterprise Incident, Tholian Web, fox example come to mind.

Reason I rank TNG below TOS is that it lacks the 3 character cohesiveness that TOS has to get it through those rough spots for example. And some parts of TNG really do feel like retreads of TOS ideas attempting to perfect them, with mixed results at best. That and TNG by virtue of lasting 7 years, not only aged from broadcast to now, it aged in it’s own time. For me this is exemplifed by my wife walking in when I was watching “The Gambit” from season 7 this past weekend, and she stated, “this must be season 7, they look so old.” And she was right, though it wasn’t just their looks. Their acting, etc… was just tired by the end like they were phoning it in. TNG’s best moments were in Seasons 3, 4 and 5. After they’d ironed out the issues with Seasons 1 and 2 but before they just stopped seeming to care.

But back to my list, one thing I have to say that has always stood out to me about Voyager in particular (but also DS9 until midway through Season 5) was the uniforms. They were the most functional of all the uniforms having a looser everyday uniform look to them. The women in particular weren’t all stuck in form hugging outfits as they were in TNG and DS9’s later seasons.
 
With a Kzinti character? That rings a bell - although I didn’t know about Ringworld at that age so wouldn’t have been able to make the connection. But I do think I saw that episode.

Another memory is surfacing - there only seemed to be a handful of episodes ever produced, because they ran the same 3 or 4 whenever I watched. I think this was broadcast on Saturday mornings alongside all the other ‘kiddie’ fare; kind of a humiliating demotion on the face of it. (Then again when else are you going to run a cartoon, in prime time? I think not.)
 
That and The Counter Clock incident are the only two episodes I can recall being all that interesting. And that one was really only interesting because we met Robert April, aka the first Captain of the 1701.
 
Kind of glad that didn’t happen. That was one of the odd things about Enterprise, that we were introduced to new big Alpha Quadrant races like the Denobulans who apparently had strong ties to pre-Federation Earth and Starfleet or even worse the Xindi and their whole arc… who then somehow never appeared or were mentioned in TOS, TNG, DS9 or VOY. It wasn’t until Season 4 that they got down to doing what Enterprise should have been doing from the start, giving us more back story into the races TOS and the later series had universe built around. Andorians, Tellerites, the Romulans and Romulan War lead in, Klingons, Vulcans, Corridanites, etc…
 
The two universes don’t seem compatible to me but then again I’m not a studio executive.
 
For me, TNG got better when the uniforms received collars. The jump suites were terrible. And TNG got even better once Troi was wearing a standard uniform again

DS9 got better once Worf joined the crew

Voyager got better once Seven of Nine joined

I loved Enterprise, but the last season was kind of lacking. But once it started getting good with the Romulans it got canceled. 😦

As for the TOS, I’m going to have to watch that again, it’s been years and I never appreciated it when I was young.
 
The sets of Star Trek remind me of the sets of “Barney Miller”. Or the earliest sets of “The Avengers”. Sort of like stage sets with cameras.
 
Monte_RCMS said:
The sets of Star Trek remind me of the sets of “Barney Miller”. Or the earliest sets of “The Avengers”. Sort of like stage sets with cameras.
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The TOS sets definitely had that look. The newer series less so. What’s been kind of annoying about the 1080 and 4K TV craze however, is that all the Star Treks, and many other scifi shows like Stargate Atlantis for instance, take on a more stage look to them. I’ve yet to watch TOS in 1080 but I can’t imagine how bad that looks.
 
DS9, TOS, TNG, ENT, VOY.

In that order. Voyager and Enterprise are nearly interchangeable. I liked the characters in Enterprise better but the retconning and egregious use of sex to sell is insulting. Sure, TOS had it’s share of skin, but something about how Enterprise handled it felt really scummy and skeevy. The decon scenes were the WORST thing ever in Trek. Which is unfortunate because those scenes could have been really interesting if it weren’t naked people rubbing goo all over themselves. The Xindi were dumb, and so was that temporal cold war. And the finale was a huge mistake.

Voyager loses points for that too - Seven of Nine could have been really interesting. But that catsuit… seriously. It’s insulting to think we need that to be interested in what could’ve been a very interesting character. Unfortunately Voyager became the Seven of Nine show after that, which was too bad. Tuvok and Neelix were delights.

TNG is great. It suffers from the same first season badness that all new Treks deals with. It’s a classic for a reason. I won’t gush for too long because I assume this is the most well-known series. The TNG movies though… were so bad. Soooo bad. Franchise ruiningly bad.

TOS is also a classic. The first season was great. Even with the hammy acting, what they accomplished is something amazing. And the sex-sells moments weren’t creepy like in Enterprise.

DS9 has been my favorite for two reasons. The first big reason is because it explores societies that AREN’T Federation. And not just one. DS9 made the universe feel really big, with lots of facets. My favorite characters in Trek ever are Quark and Garak. EVERYTHING they did was complex and interesting. The other big reason I like DS9 better is because they couldn’t really do the ‘planet of the week’ thing. Sure, they did sometimes. But the majority of the stories were about characters. There were long-running arcs. And the characters grown and change. It makes it really interesting. Even the big war drama at the end (which was a weaker point) was flush with character drama and externalization of internal issues. Dukat was great too.
 
phil19034 said:
For me, TNG got better when the uniforms received collars. The jump suites were terrible. And TNG got even better once Troi was wearing a standard uniform again

DS9 got better once Worf joined the crew

Voyager got better once Seven of Nine joined

I loved Enterprise, but the last season was kind of lacking. But once it started getting good with the Romulans it got canceled. 😦

As for the TOS, I’m going to have to watch that again, it’s been years and I never appreciated it when I was young.
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With regard to Voyager, I’ll agree with that to an extent, except to say on re-viewing, the first two seasons had a quality with regard to crew conflict and the like that was lacking in the latter years, and which was quite interesting. Late in the 2nd season in the early 3rd before they started building to the big Borg encounter the show did get kind of aimless. But I agree, Seven was a good addition, other than her catsuits. Luckily they toned them down from the initial really skeezy silver one. I always figured it was done to make up for the fact the VOY style uniforms were the least revealing ever worn by a Federation Starfleet crew when compared to the TOS (and the mini skirts and Kirk’s torn shirt), the body hugging TNG uniforms (particularly for the women even after the collar’s were added), and the more form hugging First Contact/Late DS9 uniforms with the grey yoke. Same could probably said of Enterprise which had fairly utilitarian uniforms with the exception of T’Pol’s catsuit (particularly seasons 1 and 2). It’s like Star Trek either had fairly revealing uniforms for everyone, or utilitarian with one member wearing a body suit.
 
1.) TNG

2.) DS9

3.) Voyager

4.) Enterprise

5.) TOS

Note my moniker…this is definitive!
 
1.) TOS–the original, by which all others must be compared to. OK, the third season is…cringeworthy, but it broke a lot of ground, and even with the cheesy special effects and very dated costuming, most of the stories still hold up well.

2.) DS9–flawed characters with interesting quirks (instead of the nearly perfect crew of TNG whom we got told were really very interesting but never really came across that way.) But IMO, they screwed up when they made Dr. Bashir genetically enhanced. My family was fond of the character as he originally was because he was so very much like my brother–extremely smart, but a social idiot. We sometimes wondered if somebody was following my brother for inspiration on the character. And I wish they’d had Robert Urich guest-star as an old friend of Sisko’s named Spencer. (And points if you get why this should have happened.)

3.) VOY–Interesting premise and by and large, good characters. Stories could be a bit hit or miss, though–they seemed to be either really good or really bad, not much in between.

4.) TNG–Too many of the early episodes seemed a ripoff of the original series, and too many of the male characters seemed the same as the original series characters. Troi annoyed me, as did Wesley. I liked Yar, but they killed her off.

I can’t rate ENT, because I never got past the first three episodes. I wanted to like it, because 1.) It was Star Trek, and 2.) Scott Bakula. Whom I am in love with. (OK, along with a couple of other favorite actors. 🙂 ) But I was watching it, and found myself thinking, “I guess the old saying is true–there can be too much of a good thing.” I realized I was just burnt out on Star Trek at that point.
 
My order:
Forbidden Planet :D. The precursor to Star Trek. I suspect Roddenberry got many of his ideas for the series from this film.
The Original Series. When it was struggling to stay on the air, not trying to live up to anything other than itself. It had no other choice but to produce good stories, or else.
The Animated Series. I rather liked it. Even now in my fifties I find the stories more adult than other Saturday morning fare. It seemed a decent continuation of TOS.
Deep Space Nine. Haven’t seen it for a while. I remember it being somewhat claustrophobic being set on the space station. The stories and characters seemed more realistic.
The Next Generation. Aged badly IMO. Riker, Troi, and Wesley were characters we could have done without.
Voyager. Seemed to re-tread TNG.
Enterprise. I found to be boring.
 
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