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UPN Renews 'Star Trek: Enterprise'
Tycoon Guy writes "TrekToday reports that 'Enterprise' has been renewed for a fourth season. UPN will make the official announcement on Thursday, but production executives already told the SaveEnterprise.com fan campaign the show will be back, and the show's actors have been ordered back to work. The only snag? It looks like 'Enterprise' might be moved to Fridays next year, and Firefly fans can tell you what a great place that is..."
Well, this is good news. Enterprise is not my favorite flavor of Trek, but it's better than nothing. Besides, there have been a couple good episodes this season.
I'm sure some people would have revelled in an Enterprise cancellation... to them, I'd like to pose a question which always bugged me: if you don't like a show, you don't watch it, right? If you don't watch it why would it matter to you whether or not it is cancelled? It just seems so mean-spirited to wish for a show's cancellation-- over a hundred people lose their jobs as a result, and I'm not talking about high-paid actors, I'm talking about camera men, editors, janitors-- normal people. It's not fun losing a job, folks.
Anyway... on with the flame fest.
jrjBlog
Please tell me they are leaving that dreadful theme song behind.
.-=Wit is educated insolence=-. -Aristotle
We just know how Star Trek fans are all out paintin' the town red on Friday nights.
What UPN should do is just send small cheap TV sets to every collectible card shop in the country, so fans of the series can watch the show while playing Magic: The Gathering in the back.
While they're at it, they should send some Red Bull and Cheetos, too.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Why do they always try to drop shows when they reach their peak?
I'll be the first to admit that Enterprise doesn't live up to the standards of TNG or DS9 but IMHO Season 3 has been much better than the first 2 seasons.
They should be more worried about being on UPN. Buffy fans can tell Enterprise fans what that's like.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Fridays are definitely a death slot on the UPN network. Many UPN affiliates, even some the network owns, have Friday-heavy packages to air games from the local MLB team. Stations affected include...
Boston's WSBK "UPN 38" which airs "Friday Night Baseball" Red Sox Games nearly every Friday night in the season.
Connecticut's WCTX "UPN 8" is part of the Mets broadcast network.
Seattle's KSTW "UPN 11" is the flagship of the Mariners broadcast network.
In short, it's hard to get anything to work on UPN Fridays during the start of the TV station because about a quarter of the network just plain falls apart on any given Friday night due to baseball coverage when its in season.
Thousands of Enterprise fans will, after celebrating, move back into their parents' basements to plot their next letter campaign.
But first, a celebratory all-night Magic: The Gathering game! Bring on the dancing girls! (oh, wait...)
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
This happens all the time with Star Trek for some reason; they never start out well. The first season of TNG was particularly terrible. The most infamous example being "The Naked Now", where the crew (with their standard Star Fleet issue miniskirts) became 'drunk' from an anomaly and Data had sex with Tasha Yar.
Conflicts with the Romulans and the Borg didn't heat up until about season 2 or 3, although Q did have his fair share in the beginning.
DS9 had a more successful start, but didn't get really interesting until Season 3 when The Dominion were introduced.
In every Star Trek series there seems to be a counter-evil they perpetual battle, ie.
Star Trek TOS - Klingons
Star Trek TNG - Romulans
Star Trek DS9 - The Dominion
Star Trek Voyager - The Borg
And with Enterprise it's the Xindi, but you start to feel the redundancy. Trying to out-evil Cardassians or the Borg is going to prove challenging.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
Come join the cerebral fun on UPN!
Renew Enterprise. Cancel Berman and Braga.
Can never be happy. Stay with me on this one before you hit that mod button :). Basically either you have shows people liked that get cancelled in their prime, thus to be lauded forever as the best show ever if only it had been able to reach its potential...
OR
You have them where they go on too long and thus should have been cancelled long ago. Thus you have purists that only recognize seasons 2,3,5, but not 4 where they went to that alternate dimension, what were they thinking!.
I guess this can be said for most shows, but it seems to apply more to scifi for some reasons. I think really only Babylon 5 went out on the perfect note, mainly because thats when it was supposed to happen.
There goes my hopes for the return of Quantum Leap :)
I doubt that's true: I would venture a guess that it takes at least twice as many people (and 5 times as much money, which goes into the economy through special effects shops, etc.) to make an episode of Enterprise than it does to make an episode of "Who Wants to Marry a One-legged Garbage man with a Flattulance problem?"
:)
It's not quite a zero-sum game.
jrjBlog
Since both Andromeda & Mutant X have been cancelled, Enterprise can hire those excellent writers to improve the show. Perfect. (I kid! :)
Oh, plus Enterprise should hire more babes - the babes of those two shows (especially Lexa Doig, the hacker 'Cowgirl' herself!) would certainly improve ratings.
When the 'new Trek' concept was being worked on, it was apparently down to two concepts - the 'pre-Federation' concept (which we got), and a more military-themed one about a Starfleet strike force of some type, with lots of fighting. Let me tell ya - Enterprise got a lot better right after they added more fighting (and a military team aboard Enterprise, which they've totally wasted so far). It seems obvious that they chose the wrong concept.
Though I do like what they've been doing with T'Pol, but they've basically eliminated Hoshi and others this season, which is too bad. I certainly like this collection of characters more than those of any of the other Treks, as a whole. DS9 had a _really_ annoying cast of characters. (Okay, I loved Ezri just too damned much!)
More opportunity for Rick Berman to urinate on Roddenberry's vision.
:-) The man just doesn't understand what Roddenberry created, and now he's trying to compete head on with other Sci Fi or with the memory of Babylon 5. Is it any wonder Star Trek has been in a downward spiral for the past 10 years?
I know it's cool to knock Enterprise, but I've been knocking Berman since long before it was cool.
Enterprise's ratings weren't good enough "just exploring" (and as they were doing a poor job of it I'm not surprised), so instead they spent a third of season 2 building up a relationship with the Klingons only to drop it at the last second to run off on a blatant 9/11-inspired warmed over mini-epic. (And stolen from a 1980s Star Trek computer game for the Commodore 64 called "Star Trek: Rebel Universe".) Everything about it is predictable, from the plot right down to the characters involved. And of course there's no tension, because we all know (since it's a prequel) that Earth isn't going to be destroyed.
Of course, Berman isn't pitching to people who know Star Trek, he's pitching to 20-somethings that the beancounters like to pitch to. Of course, those people don't watch Star Trek BECAUSE it's Star Trek. Don't alienate your existing fan base to go after a new one that doesn't want you.
Of course, after this season's finale, then what? Go back to exploring? Yeah, that will help ratings now that they've said that exploring "isn't big enough". Throw in another huge season-long pseudo-epic plot thread to further destroy the timeline? I don't know what they're going to do.
On the one hand, it's Trek, yay, there will be more. On the other, this isn't the Trek I grew up on (TNG and reruns of TOS), and I wouldn't greatly miss it.
Although moving the show to Friday night means that it won't be lasting much longer. That is how NBC killed the original series, after all.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
What I would love to see next season, is more on the Klingons, the Romulans....the Vulcans. How the war between the humans and the Klingons came about....The formation of the federation, Invention of tractor beams, shields....
In short, try to channel the story to the TOS timeline.
Those of us who were around for Star Trek: The Original Series remember that, after NBC was forced to renew ST:TOS thanks to the massive letter-writing campaign, they moved the show from its original 8:30 time slot (Thursdays the first season, Fridays the second) to Fridays at 10 PM, thereby ensuring that the show would never make it to a fourth season because that time slot was a ratings graveyard.
Today with VCRs and TiVos abounding fans of the show will probably be able to catch it no matter when it airs, but still, couldn't they have found a better time slot? Seems to me it's sort of like being in a half-empty movie theater and choosing to sit in the worst seat possible.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I for one am glad that Enterprise will be renewed. I've never owned any ST merchandise much less been to a convention, but I have watched all the Star Trek series and I liked having them around.
I agree that Enterprise is not perfect, but show me a Star Trek series that was?
TOS had more than a few god-awful episodes (e.g. And the Children shall lead, Miri, Charlie X (title?).
TNG started out very shakily IMHO as the actors/writers settled into the characters (e.g. Picard wasn't quite yet his reserved and commanding self, and Worf just snarled at everything); and for the length of the series you had many fans screaming about any episode which Troi or Wesley starred in.
DS9 was pretty good, though I think the situation is somewhat comparable with Enterprise in that the show, IMHO, has a stronger and more interesting supporting cast than the 'starring' captain.
Voyager had a lot of well-known problems.
Perfect shows are rare - enjoy your favorite parts of this one and hope the other parts get better.
Anyone remember that? The Suliban and all that? What happened to it?
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Personally, I find the usual format of star trek (one captain/crew/ship) limiting. After all there is supposed to be an entire FLEET of ships zooming around the galaxy, but it seems there is ever only ONE ship having interesting adventures. I would like to see a anthology ST series, sort of like the old Police stories series where you feature a different ship/crew every week (or two). You could use the premise of history lessons at starfleet academy to set up each episode and tie the series together. It could be called 'Star fleet chronicles' or some such. Of course, whatever type of series they make, they need better, more imaginative scripts, that aren't retreads of the same old tired themes. (time travel, alien possesion, ect.) That and I wish they paid more attention to continuity. I don't read Star Trek novels, because they have nothing to do with series or movie cannon.
We can but hope that Berman gets cancelled. A quote attributed to Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek: The Next Generation artist Andrew Probert opines that Berman doesn't know jack about scifi...
/. headline: Berman on Enterprise: "It's dead, Jim."
;-)
Personally, I think the mooted Friday-night slot is ironic, the final nail in the coffin. Anyone remember where classic Trek was put by the network for its third season before cancellation?
Yup. Friday night. When its core audience was out doing other things, the sort of things young people, young adults, do... if they'd had demographics back then, the advertisers would've run away in droves. (As it is, they didn't bring in the demographics til much later - and classic Trek proved, in syndication, to be an ideal show for the advertisers to hit certain groups.)
As an ex-Trekkie, all I can say is... roll on those Friday nights, I'm waiting to see the
(Or, admittedly, a clip of Dean Stockwell on the bridge, saying something like, "Uhh, Sam... you're not really a starship captain...")
"It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." -- Zork
I think it was lack of fan interest. The Tal..er Suliban did not impress anyone the way they had hoped, so they were pulled. The same thing happend with the Ferengi in ST:TNG. Roddenberry expected them to be the major adversaries of the entire series, but once these snarling barely-sentient Perot's saw the light of day no-one was impressed and they too were pretty much phased out until they were re-tooled for DS9.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
My gripe with this show is that it seems to be little more than a vehicle for leftist propaganda. It only makes a half-hearted attempt at being subtle in this regard. I was greatly concerned the first time I saw captain Archer whine at the Klingons. Playing the pussy diplomat may be consistent with modern euro-centric left-wing political ideology, but it just doesn't work in the real world, unless of course you're trying to get someone to attack you. The episode about AIDS, disguised as a vulcan mind disease, was particularly insulting. I don't know about you, but I've been fully aware of the AIDS epidemic for about 20 years now. I really don't need a TV show to preach to me about it.
What Enterprise needs to do is hire some of the writers from Farscape and wrest control away from the ideologues who think the show is there so they can propagandize.
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