over the past year or two i've found myself becoming more and more of a "star trek" guy instead of a "star wars" guy. I think it's interesting to see myself going down this route, and there are a lot of hypothetical reasons for it but ultimately i think it functionally comes down to the fact that I think the Star Wars franchise is in kind of a really weird place right now, and that's unusual for the franchise, whereas the Star Trek franchise is in a really weird place right now and that's pretty much standard for the franchise, as far as I can tell.
I'm not a Trek obsessive -- at the time of this writing I still haven't seen TNG outside of an occasional episode. I've seen almost all of DS9 (loved it), a fair chunk of TOS (mostly loved it), all of Lower Decks (incredible), and all of SNW (generally great). There's still a lot of Star Trek that I haven't seen! And that's kind of fun and exciting even if I know a bunch of it will suck.
Star Wars has this eternal curse on it due to the fact that the original works of the franchise (the original trilogy) are actually fucking incredible. Like, putting aside all the weight of the franchise that has been heaped on them afterward, all the posthumous Importance of those movies -- they're just really well made and fun films.
They're nuanced! and they're adventure-fun-stupid! and they are well-paced! And they're comedic, and dramatic, and they have a lot going on in general. Lucas was a weird, idiosyncratic creative who had a lot of disparate interests that were all dumped into Star Wars, and you can tell!
Of course, that means that everything else in the franchise is now living in its shadow. You can't really blame Lucas or the franchise writ large for that, they were just trying to make the best thing they could.
Star Trek does not have this baggage. TOS is good -- sometimes even like, sublime television -- but it is not at all without its clunkers. It's a long show, many of the episodes are just stupid. They're generally still fun, but they're stupid. At time of release, Star Trek TOS was a flop.
I put that post by hthr up top there because I think about it all the time, or some variant of the phrasing there. Star Trek is a perfect example of something that is almost great. It's not quite there, it is at some points, but rarely all the way through.
I think this is generally true for all the Star Treks that I've seen, too -- I think DS9 is sublime television, but also it has some truly stupid episodes. The heat that is contained in Star Trek is intrinsically related to some of it being kind of stupid. It's the required nutrients in the meal.
And there's a real reason for this, too -- Star Trek is allowed to experiment, to try weird things, and to fail. A lot. I'm mostly paraphrasing Sarah Zedig's excellent video essay on Doctor Who here (which talks about a very similar phenomenon w/r/t Who, give or take. apologies to sarah if i'm biffing that explanation), but what makes Star Trek work is its conviction to experiment and its freedom to experiment due to episode orders and length. That's a material grace that is afforded to (television-originated) Star Trek and not to (movie-originated) Star Wars.
Star Wars material in the post-OT world (so, numerically, the vast, vast majority of it), has rarely approached the level of nuance and stupid-fun-adventure as the OT, and even when it approaches it (The Clone Wars, Rebels, Force Awakens) it is often hamstrung by a lack of resources required to match the execution of the OT. It is a really tough bind to be in, genuinely, and I have as much deep annoyance for the current creative direction of the franchise as I have sympathy for folks still trying to make it work.
In my opinion, the only pieces of Star Wars media that have managed to be "as good as" the OT are Andor and TLJ, whereas everything else just... lives in its shadow. I love most of the cartoons, I liked Rogue One quite a bit, the current games are much better than people give them credit for, but they often rely on callbacks, responses to the OT rather than building on what made it great.
I don't want to get into a "what if Star Wars did [x] thing better" conversation here because... frankly, I am tired of having that discussion over and over and over, but what I do think is very interesting that I have noticed in my Trek endeavours is how much the dumb stuff sticks out to me.
Star Trek has such a history of being kind of dumb, and experimental, and from drawing influence from so many things that are not Star Trek that even when it stumbles it tends to at least be interesting. It's an approach that I wish Star Wars was more willing to partake in, since when it does do that (I'm lookin' at you, Andor) it has proven an ability to knock it out of the park.
Good art requires those risks! It requires taking those risks, with reasonable fallback. It requires embracing the fact that not all the risks are going to pan out, and building your work in such a way that it can be resilient to those risks if possible -- for Star Trek, that was mostly through having a bunch of episodes. And it worked. People don't remember the clunkers as much as they remember the highs. That's the power of television, baby.
This is a mirror of a post on my blog. Feel free to read it there too!