25 Years Of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’: Looking Back At Season One
Star Trek: The Next Generation turns twenty five years old this year, and to celebrate Paramount Pictures and CBS home video have just released the entire first season on Blu ray with a new meticulous high def transfer, made from the original camera negatives. The restoration job that was done for TNG’s first season is the new industry standard for restoring vintage shows for high definition. But before I get to reviewing the Blu rays themselves, a little history on the series itself, both my own relationship with the show, and the series’ place in television history.
TNG n’ Me
Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered right after I turned thirteen, and went off the air just about the time I turned twenty, so I spent my entire formative teenage years with this series. In 1987, there wasn’t a lot of options for a geek in terms of television shows, aside occasional short lived shows like V, and re-runs of the original Star Trek or the Twilight Zone. So when TNG premiered, a generation of geeks like me welcomed it with open arms, even if some of us weren’t really Trek fans before that. During that first season I never missed an episode, and my love of the new series made me a hard core fan of the original show in return. Before that, the old show had come across as too cheesy for me, being a Star Wars generation kid who couldn’t see past older, bad effects and just embrace the storytelling. The Next Generation is what really made me a huge fan of all things Trek.
Ever since the show ended its run, TNG has remained in my heart, even above arguably superior shows like spin off series Deep Space Nine, and more sophisticated modern sci fi shows like Battlestar Galactica. I’ve had all the episodes on VHS, taped from off the air, and then the DVD sets that came out around a decade or so back. I’d watch and re-watch my favorite old episodes late at night, kind of like warm milk or a comfortable blanket to help me fall asleep. But among those old favorites were almost no episodes from the show’s troubled first season. This new Blu-ray set afforded me the chance to re-watch some of those episodes for the first time in more than a decade…. and it wasn’t always pretty. But before I review the new Blu-ray set itself (that’s next week) a little overview of season one itself is in order first. So here is how Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first season came to be, and all the bumps and bruises along the way.
How The Enterprise-D Came To Be
While TNG debuted in 1987, this wasn’t the first time that Star Trek almost came back to television. An attempt was made a decade earlier in 1977, when Paramount decided to launch what would have then been a fourth television network. Star Trek Phase II would have reunited almost the entire original series cast, with the notable exception of Leonard Nimoy as Spock, who was going through an anti Trek phase at the time (he wrote a book called “I Am Not Spock” around this time. Several decades later, he would write “I Am Spock.” That had to be some therapy bill.) The basic premise of the show would remain the same as the original incarnation, but Captain Kirk was now the older seasoned captain, and his new first officer Will Decker was the ambitious young buck who wanted his own command one day. Another new crew member would be Ilia, an exotic alien woman with whom Decker had a previous relationship with. Filling in the Spock role would be a full blooded Vulcan named Xon, who instead of supressing his humanity wanted to learn to be human. If this all sounds a lot like TNG characters Riker, Troi and Data, it just goes to show that Roddenberry never threw out an idea he thought was good, even some over a decade old.
Plans for Phase II were scrapped when Paramount decided not to pursue a fourth network. However, since sets were already built, and a little movie called Star Wars had just come out, the pilot episode script was reworked into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Although The Motion Picture was a commercial success upon release in 1979, it was a critical flop and most fans hated it for not capturing the adventurous, fun spirit of the now classic original series. In many ways, the disappointment was akin to what Star Wars fans felt upon the release of The Phantom Menace some twenty years later, where the movie was pretty much hated, but fans kept going back hoping maybe this time, the movie might be good, making the movie a box office hit.
Eventually under the auspices of new movie series producer Harve Bennett, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was both a critical and commercial hit, and both parts III and IV continued Trek as a hugely profitable and popular franchise. During all that time, Roddenberry was all but shut out of Trek at the time it was finally really making money for the studio. The Motion Picture was seen as Roddenberry’s baby, so his approach was not wanted for the subsequent movies, although he was paid as a consultant (even if all his consulting was ignored) Despite all this, when Paramount decided to give Trek another go on television, they went to the man who started it all, if only to keep cred with the massive fan base. In October 1986, Star Trek: The Next Generation was officially announced by Paramount as big budget syndicated series.
Growing Pains
To say that the first season of TNG was a rough one is kind of putting it mildly. When TNG went into production, Gene Roddenberry was at the helm of a major Trek project for the first time since 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and he brought as much of the “old gang” from the original classic series as he could. He brought on producer Robert Justman from the classic show, as well as former series writers DC Fontana and David Gerrold. William Ware Theiss was another 60’s show alum that was brought on as costume designer. But sometimes getting the old gang back together doesn’t work out as planned, and that is more or less what happened with the first season of TNG. It often felt like a show that was out of date, all while looking state of the art. William Theiss’ costumes had a 60’s/70’s look to them, and that didn’t help with making the show feel fresh. But the costumes were the least of their problems, especially with some of those early scripts.
When it came to the writing, most of the first few episodes of year one suffer from being re-hashes of much better original series episodes. The second episode aired, The Naked Now, is a much worse version of the classic series’ The Naked Time, except with the principal cast all doing a terrible job drunk acting (well, “space drunk”) and a teenage Wesley Crusher taking over the Enterprise. Then right after came Code of Honor, a staggeringly racially insensetive episode where the leader of a planet full of “space Africans” kidnap security chief Tasha Yar and force her into combat similar to that of the classic episode “Amok Time“, only way lamer and far more offensive. Equally racist was Justice, and episode that would have been decent, if not for the extremely cheesy planet populated only by half naked people who only like to jog, do yoga, and have sex. The reason it was so racist was because this planet, described by several characters as “Eden like” was only populated by caucasian blonde people. So “Eden” is an Aryan Nation propaganda world? Really?? How either this or the “Space Africans” made it to filming showed how out of touch everyone behind the scenes of this show was at first. It would have all been just as bad in the 60’s, but by the 80’s it was just unforgivable.
And while TNG changed the opening lines to “where no ONE has gone before” from “where no man has gone before,’ the first season of the series was filled with some pretty blatant sexism. Despite having three female crew members in important positions, including security chief, it seemed that in season one the female characters were very poorly used. Dr Beverly Crusher is seen almost only as dutiful single mother, or worse, as jealous of any woman that comes into Captain Picard’s life….or even any officer that cuts into her alone time with Jean Luc.
The only episode that centers around Deanna Troi deals with her betrothal and wedding, as of course, women only care about marriage and babies. There’s even a scene in that episode, while having an official meeting with her commanding officers, she refers to Number One as Commander Riker and not by his first name Will, and Riker says “isn’t that a little formal?” Umm, no it isn’t a little formal for your subordinate to call you Commander during on duty hours, whether you used to date or not. In another early episode called Hide and Q, Tasha Yar actually flirts with Captain Picard and says “oh Captain….oh, if you weren’t a captain.” Sometimes all this sexist behavior in season one made me think I was watching Mad Men. It is no wonder that Denise Crosby, who played Tasha Yar, asked to be let go from the series before the end of year one, based on the kind of scripts she was getting at the time. Gates McFadden, who played Dr.Crusher, would soon follow suit.
Most of the problems that first year lie at the feet of Gene Roddenberry primarily. In the years following the end of the original series, and its subsequent transition into a pop culture icon, Roddennbery was labeld “the Great Bird of the Galaxy” by fans for his vision of a future in which all races get along and humanity has no conflict with one another. (even though the original series was filled with such conflicts, but whatever. He’s not the first person to believe their own hype.) No conflict was the Roddenberry edict; and many scripts for the first thirteen episodes or so were heavily re-written by Roddennberry to fit his drama free version of the future. This pissed off writers DC Fontana and David Gerrold,who quickly left the series. Due to his declining health, after the first round of thirteen episodes, Roddenberry’s took a much less active role in the series, and the show got much,much better.The truth is, the less Roddenberry had to do with anything Trek related after the original series, the better it got.
What They Did Get Right
Now that I’ve detailed all the ways that Gene Roddenberry’s interference f-ed up TNG in the early days, I can’t not talk about what Roddenberry got right from the get go. First off, the casting on TNG is impeccable. Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard and Brent Spiner as Lt. Commander Data simply owned those roles from the first moments they set foot onscreen, and they make even the most terrible first season episodes watchable today. The same goes for Michael Dorn as Worf, even if he barely got a chance to shine in season one.
Other actors were not so fortunate; Jonathan Frakes as Commander William Riker is so stiff and cheesy in the first season as to be annoying (in year two he’d grow a beard and become a jazz afficiando and loosen up considerably) Geordi LaForge had very little to do except pilot the ship and deliver exposition, and the character who sadly got the brunt of the worst stories was Wil Wheaton as Wesley Crusher, the fifteen year old genius who seemed to exist simply to make the supposedly capable adult officers all look stupid. All of these characters would do much better as the series went on, showing how tight the casting was in the first place; it wasn’t ever the actors that were bad, it was how they were being handled. The following seasons proved just how crucial those initial casting decisions were to the show’s success in later seasons.
Then there is the entire look and design of the series, which still look great all these years later. Andrew Probert’s designs for the Enterprise-D still look amazing, especially in HD. Make up guru Michael Westmore also did an amazing job of creating new alien races week in and week out, and making all look different from each other as best as possible, and all of those were early choices made for season one.
Despite all the bad episodes that opened the series, there are still several episodes in season one that are absolute gems. Where No One Has Gone Before is an early episode where the Enterprise encounters an alien who can make the ship travel at velocities that take them to a place in the universe where thought becomes reality. The Big Goodbye is one of the first holodeck centric episodes, and still one of the most fun, were the crew get lost in a 1940’s detective noir world. This episode won a well deserved Peabody Award that year. Symbiosis is pure Trek, and deals with the topic of drug addiction and the Prime Directive in a very allegorical way that Trek was always so good at. Other episodes that have their charms include Heart of Glory the first TNG Klingon centric episode, Coming of Age, Conspiracy, and The Neutral Zone. Most of these episodes came during the latter half of the first year, and was a sign of better things to come. Season two improved considerably, and by season three TNG was a well oiled machine producing classic episodes on nearly a weekly basis.
If viewers of the time weren’t so starved for genre fare on television, and if the Star Trek name didn’t carry so much weight, TNG would have surely been canned by the end of the first season almost without a doubt. But I know fans like me are thrilled that the show got a chance to grow (something afforded few shows these days) as it ended up being one one of the greatrst science fiction series of all time. It just took a little while to get there.
Next Week: An in depth review of the TNG Blu ray season one set.
