by Emily Maesar, Associate Editor, TVJawn

The journey to a new generation of Starfleet on the USS Enterprise was a long one, filled with ups and downs. Not to mention lots of opinions from the original crew about what it might mean for their legacy. First thing was first, though. Paramount needed to figure out how to even make a new series in the franchise. It had been well over a decade since Star Trek was on the small screen, and the landscape of storytelling on television had drastically changed, with shows like Hill Street Blues starting in 1981, which is often cited as the show that brought serialization to modern, American TV (outside of Soaps). 

When Paramount reached out to Gene Roddenberry about producing the new series, he initially said no. The strain that The Original Series had put on his home life seemed like a non-starter. But, as is often the case, he was convinced because Paramount didn’t feel like they could make the show without him. Nothing like money to help make a choice very, very clear! Greg Strangis, who’d been hired previously to brainstorm ideas for the new series, was fired and Roddenberry took full creative control. His legacy, however, is pretty set—considering it was his idea to have the Klingon Empire and the Federation become allies, which led to the wonderful character of Worf. Which, all things considered, is a pretty good legacy to have.

However, many of the actors from The Original Series felt like their legacies (especially with the films continuing on) might get sullied, or otherwise confused, with the creation of a new show set in the same universe as theirs. DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and William Shatner all had some choice words. From Kelley’s “there’s only one Star Trek, and that’s ours,” to Doohan saying that he felt like the studio was trying to fool the public with a new cast and characters. All the way to Shatner being worried about how the “overexposure” of a new show might affect the future of the films. 

All these concerns were silly, of course. As the eventual success of The Next Generation proved that there was not just a market for The Original Series in syndication, but that new entries into the world of Starfleet and a future utopia would be welcomed with open arms and, quite often, hundreds of episodes.

When Star Trek: The Next Generation first aired in September of 1987, it did so with a two-parter and in broadcast syndication. Basically unheard of for scripted shows, even to this day, broadcast syndication means there’s no network of origin. The Original Series, for example, had aired on NBC before being sent into syndication, but The Next Generation just started on all of them. There were concerns for this, obviously, and how it might affect the viewership. However, the series quickly skyrocketed to success. By the end of the first season, it was the highest rated syndicated series, outranking Wheel of Fortune and even Jeopardy!, creating a mini-trend for several other shows to go straight into broadcast syndication. 

I will say that, upon learning that information, I feel like a lot of my childhood makes sense. The Next Generation was the Star Trek show that was always on in my house. Wanting to finally experience the series in order, as it was presented to the world at large, was a huge contributing factor to why I wanted to do Captain’s Log this year. But knowing that part of the reason it felt ever present was because it was just on everything, brings parts of my TV watching childhood into perspective. 

To introduce us to the new crew of the USS Enterprise (specifically the USS Enterprise-D), the two-part pilot creates probably the second most well-known antagonist for The Next Generation: Q. Played by John de Lancie, Q is an extra-dimensional being. Truly unknowable, but with immense power, he is often viewed as a foil to Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean Luc Picard. (A potentially queer thread we shall come back to later, I’m certain, with quotes from Stewart, himself, about the possibility. Love that man.) The arrival of Commander William T. Riker (Jonathan Frakes) as the new First Officer to Picard is thrown out of whack by Q’s game of morality with the crew.

And just like that, we’re watching Star Trek again. Twenty years later, the show is still episodic in its week-to-week storytelling, but now the characters are much more serialized than they’d been in The Original Series. It’s the kind of procedural show that doesn’t really exist anymore, outside of investigator, cop, and lawyer shows—but it was all the rage across different franchise archetypes at the time. It’s the best of both worlds and it really worked for the new crew of the Enterprise. 

Other than the new uniforms, which I’ll talk more about as I get further into TNG because I have thoughts, another thing that’s new and different about this crew is that it includes more than one alien. Plus, an android and a teenager! The team is much more diverse in that way, which is an asset to the vast world of the Federation. We’ve got Lieutenant Worf (Michael Dorn), the first Klingon officer in Starfleet, Commander Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) who is half-Betazoid, and, of course, everyone’s favorite android Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner). What’s interesting to me is that between Deanna and Data, the interest points that made Mr. Spock so appealing has been sliced in half and given to two different characters. You’ve got Deanna rocking the half-alien thing, which is fun and useful to move plot along. It’s nice to be able to have somebody who can tell you exactly what people are feeling and their intentions, even through a screen. But Data has the actual “alien” appeal that Spock had. He’s a bit more fun, I’d argue, than our beloved Vulcan, but it’s quite clear that the fandom surrounding him is similar to that of Nimoy’s.

But what about that teenager? Wesley Crusher is the character that people have the most Opinions™ about, played by the great Wil Wheaton. Now, listen. Wesley is perfectly fine. Annoying in the way teenagers often are, but I actually quite enjoy him. Maybe that’s just for now, in season one, but I think if you were a genius teenager who’d lost your father and was underestimated by all the adults around you… you might be like Wesley too. Cut the kid some slack and go to therapy. 

Also, not that The Original Series wasn’t like this—but good god is TNG so horny. In the best possible way, of course. Honestly, watching this first season made me really nostalgic for sex and sexuality on broadcast in this very particular way. Everyone’s romantically entangled, even when there isn’t a lot of kissing like in TOS. And everyone talks about sex and relationships in a way that just open in a really refreshing kind of way.

In a retrospective kind of way, that’s what’s so refreshing about The Next Generation—even watching it today. It has everything fun and appealing about The Original Series, but expands the lore, the characters, and the ideas. It brings a modern sensibility to the idea, even if it's not fully modern to us in 2022. It’s easier to see our current state of progressive ideals in TNG, than in TOS, no matter how much we love the original crew and the stories they star in. 

But seven years is a long time for a television series to run, and there are distinct ups and downs in both the stories on Star Trek: The Next Generation and the behind the scenes of the series. From Roddenberry slowly stepping away (or possibly being forced to), followed shortly by his passing, along with firing and rehiring of actors, and multiple cameos from TOS cast members who finally came around. TNG marked a very specific time when Star Trek was truly proving itself as a long-lasting franchise.