The Star Trek: Discovery Halftime Summation Part I: CBS All Access

Since Star Trek: Discovery premiered back in September, lots of people have been recapping and analyzing each episode as it comes out. (I highly recommend the recaps Andi from the Women at Warp podcast has been doing--you can find them here) I really admire people who can turn out thoughtful and funny material on a weekly schedule. I wish I was one of them, but I'm not. So rather than analyze every single episode, I thought I'd use the midseason break to look back at the show so far and discuss a few different aspects of it.

When I was a kid, some of my favorite toys were Lego sets like this one:

It can be fun to follow the instructions and build the thing pictured on the front of the box, but maybe the best thing about Legos is putting the pieces together in new and interesting ways. Now, imagine you had a friend who yelled at you whenever you used the pieces of your Lego set to build anything other than the picture on the box. That's what a noisy minority of Star Trek fans are like.

In 1987 they were furious at Gene Roddenberry for rebooting the franchise with a new cast and a different tone. They didn't want a new series with 1980s sensibilities; they wanted a continuation of the Original Series with the old familiar cast. And in 2017 they're furious with the producers of Star Trek: Discovery for rebooting the franchise with a new cast and a different tone. They don't want a new series tailored to 21st century audiences, they want a continuation of the Next Generation-era Star Trek that Rick Berman produced until it became so boring and repetitive that everybody stopped watching it.

Right now somebody's saying "But I never stopped watching it!" Yeah, and a few people bought M.C. Hammer albums after 1991, too. Just not enough to matter. Having your preferences ignored by a huge multimedia conglomerate might hurt your feelings, but there it is.

Many of these angry fans have focused their ire on CBS's decision to put Discovery on the CBS All Access streaming platform. I've read many of their arguments on the subject, and they all boil down to this:

Perhaps you think I'm being unfair. So I've prepared a Q&A based on actual statements I've seen online since the day we learned that Discovery would be exclusive to CBS All Access.

Q: Star Trek has never been behind a paywall before. It's not fair. 

A: From 1979 - 1986 the only new Star Trek productions were movies. Movie theaters charge admission. There was a literal wall between you and Star Trek that you had to pay money to get past.

Q: No, you idiot! I mean televised Star Trek has never been behind a paywall before! 

A: That's because the last Star Trek show went off the air in 2005. Streaming services weren't a thing then. 

Q: Premium cable channels were, but Paramount didn't put Enterprise on Showtime. 

A: That's because their business plan at the time was to use Star Trek to prop up UPN. (I didn't say it was a good plan.) 

Q: But fans in Europe get to watch Discovery on Netflix! And in Canada it's airing on a cable channel! 

A: How very perceptive of you to notice that things are different in other countries.

Q: But CBS is extorting the fans by charging them to watch Star Trek! 

A: Charging a market-comparable price for a product people want isn't extortion. It's capitalism. 

Q: It's a matter of principle! I'm philosophically opposed to paying for Star Trek!

A: What's that I see on your Facebook wall? It's a picture of your huge collection of Star Trek merchandise worth thousands of dollars! If you're willing to drop $5,000 on a replica phaser rifle, is a $5.99 subscription really the hill you want to die on?

I could go on, but you get the idea. The people who are still mad about CBS All Access are the same folks who believe that the right to free Star Trek was why George Washington fought Nazi T-Rexes in the Civil War. Streaming services are a big deal now. CBS saw how Netflix, Hulu, and HBO used original programming to lure subscribers, and they wanted a piece of that. The promise of new Star Trek was the best way to get it. As my high school economics teacher used to say, nobody is in business because they love you.

I believe All Access is the best place for Discovery. Network TV is very much a quantity-over-quality business. We'd get a longer season if the show was on broadcast TV (26 episodes instead of 15) but given the more hectic schedule and tighter budget, not all of those episodes would be good. And there's no way the show would be as lavishly-produced. The last genre show to air on CBS was the first season of Supergirl, and by the seventh episode they were pulling out the old "superhero loses their powers" trope to save money. And because CBS is mainly the network that senior citizens watch NCIS on, Supergirl's ratings weren't high enough to justify its cost and it got moved to the CW.

Now take a show like Star Trek that has more special effects than a superhero show, and everything you see on screen has to be built from scratch. It wouldn't have done any better in the ratings than Supergirl, and it wouldn't work on the CW because too much of the cast is over 30. So it would've been deemed an expensive failure by the CBS suits, cancelled, and we'd go another decade or so with no new Star Trek.  But on All Access, it can be the most popular show on the platform. And we can get 15 really good episodes per season produced at near-feature-film quality.

Ah, but what about those episodes? Are they really good? I'll start to tackle that question in my next post.