Paramount Says Enterprise Cancellation Is Final

Kethinov writes "The Save Enterprise campaigns appear to have been for naught. Paramount has declared that they will not be accepting any amount of money from fans to continue to produce Star Trek Enterprise. With the decision final, Star Trek Enterprise will be the first Star Trek show since the original series not to run a full seven seasons." From the letter: "Paramount Network Television and the producers of Star Trek: Enterprise are very flattered and impressed by the fans' passionate outpouring of attention for the show and their efforts to raise funds to continue the show's production." Commentary also available from TrekToday.

Comments

Just like TOS

[Kethinov]

Enterprise never had a chance to grow. The first two seasons of Ent were decent, but still a bit mediocre. The third season was a nice ride, but not the show we really wanted out of the prequel. Manny Coto's 4th season is EXACTLY what the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd seasons should have been, but too little too late. I love the show, always will, but TV politics have ruined many a good show. Look at the original Star Trek, or look at Farscape...

In their place, reality TV dominates. Why watch intelligent TV when we can have Growing Up Gotti?

Re:Just like TOS

[TexVex]

Enterprise should not have needed a chance to grow.

After TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voyager, Enterprise should have come sprinting out of the gate. It didn't. Blame those who did the writing and producing for the first two seasons for giving the show a gimp leg and dooming it right from the start. Its potential audience tuned out. And, once that happens, there's no saving it. Those people no longer care, and you're not going to recapture their attention.

Re:Just like TOS

[Abalamahalamatandra]

In the case of Firefly, I can tell you why.

First off, Fox put it in a cruddy timeslot on a cruddy day - Friday night.

They didn't advertise it worth a crap.

They showed it out of order.

They preempted it CONSTANTLY so that it got to the point that, unless you had a really good guide, you didn't even know if it was going to be on or not.

Basically, just about everything a network can do to not encourage a following, they did.

Re:Just like TOS

[Illserve]

Never had a chance to grow through 4 seasons?

As a Firefly fan, I'd like to be the first to tell you to shut your goddamned piehole.

Re:Just like TOS

[Etherwalk]

> After TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voyager,

*coughs pointedly*

Actually, Not to go into the long history, but I've always thought Voyager was largely to blame for the downfall of the franchise. No, no, let me explain (briefly):

TNG - great, largely episodic, we got used to 2-parters, though.

DS9 - great, took a while to really get on its feet. It was competing with B5, which showed us that Yes, Story arcs longer than two episodes can work in sci-fi. It also gained its own momentum, shifting away from a purely episodic series into an ongoing bit of war. The war was the beginning of the end- they did it well enough, but it was responsible for trek getting away from being about ideas, and getting towards being about shooting the funny sci-fi weapons. When Voyager rolled around, this mentality had invaded the minds of the writers, and consistency had gone completely out the window.

Voyager really showed a lack of artistic understanding. They had one or two good actors, and I'll admit that for some of them I don't know if its the actor or the character that was bad- but for the most part, it lacked quality. The show got away from its core demographic and wound up with a much more transitory audience. So when Enterprise came along and actually had some decent writing again, much of the franchise audience was gone, and it had to start from scratch.

The most glaring example of artistic failure in Voy is, of course, the borg. There are others, but the power of the borg as an evil was in their evil, not in their weapons. When the ratings drooped, Voyager brought out the borg. It effectively transformed them from an unknowable menace that was so different from humanity that it was practically pure evil, to a bunch of pansy-ass default bad guys that drove around in blocks and spheres.

OH SNAP

[Anonymous Coward]

Breaking news: Cancelled show cancelled.

Re:Rephrase

[vivin]

"Star Trek Enterprise is yet another Star Trek show since the original series to run a full six seasons."

Maybe because it's getting cancelled after the fourth season? :)

Bullshit

[fm6]

Your comparison is lame, because TOS had a lot of good scripts during the first two seasons. They didn't start to falter until the third and final season, when most of the best writers and producers had left.

I do get pissed when I see a good TV show cancelled before it has a chance to find an audience. But a proper chance is two or three months, not 3 years.

Even most Trekkies found the early Enterprise scripts rancid. Stand back from your Trekkieness for a minute and consider that from the network's POV. They spend millions of bucks on a TV show, and it can't even inspire enthusiasm among hard core fans who are supposed to be a lock. Any other show that screwed up that badly wouldn't have lasted a full season, never mind getting renewed twice. Didn't get a chance? Spare me.

Give the money to Nasa....

[Malluck]

earmarked to keep the voyager probes up and running.

That way you'd be funding real space stuff and it still has Star Trek relevance.

Star Trek has too many white people.

[Anonymous Coward]

When Gene Roddenberry created the original series, he attempted to make the series as inclusive as possible. The TOS included characters such as Uhura (black African, NOT African-American), Sulu (Asian, not Asian-American), Chekov (Russian), and many other diverse characters. In one eposiode of the TOS, when Kirk was going through some kind of court-martial based on video evidence, the Starfleet judges (admirals, actually) included not only a person of Mongoloid descent but also of Asian Caucasian descent (he looked like a South Asian). That is two out of 5 judges which is quite impressive given that the TOS was made during the 1960s when racial equality was just coming of age.

After the TOS, successive Star Trek shows became more and more white and American-centric. Anyone who looked Asian in those successive shows could not be mistaken as a person who came directly from Asia as their behavior was too American. Ditto for the "blacks". Travis Mayweather is a prime example of this American-centric nature of the successive Trek shows. Why couldn't they just have named him Emekah Olowokandi or something like that??

Where the heck were the Africans, the Indians, the Chinese, the Middle Easterns, the Egyptians, the Brazilians, the Mexicans, and of course, the Australians in the Trek shows after TOS??

Only Trek: Deep Space Nine even tried to come close to Roddenberry's ideal. Dr. Julian Bashir was obviously Middle Eastern. But they could have had a Nigerian or a Kenyan as the black commander instead of Benjamin Sisko from Louisiana.

Unfortunately, Star Trek TOS was and still remains the ONLY Sci-Fi show that attempted to be inclusive of all cultures and individuals around the world. After TOS, nothing came close. Not even Battlestar Galactica.