Former Star Trek Showrunner Brandon Braga Outlines A Massive Problem In Modern Day Streaming Television

While Hollywood has all sorts of problems, and the Star Trek franchise in particular has taken a turn to go so political with most of its content that much of it has been unwatchable, Brandon Braga, showrunner of Star Trek: Voyager and Enterprise, outlined a big probelm with the way current streaming shows only offer 5-10 episodes per year, likening it to "Tinder dating.”

At the Las Vegas Star Trek convention, it was pretty obvious that fans were not interested in the modern offerings of Star Trek. The panels for Strange New Worlds were mostly empty, but packed for the Voyager cast and Jonathan Frakes (Riker, The Next Generation), showing that, largely, the audience has tuned out to the Kurtzman era of Trek.

There are a lot of reasons for this, many of which are insults to the fans in the mishandling of continuity in the prequel series to make a nonsensical reality for the shows. On top of it, shows like Picard felt like identity politics political bait-and-switch segments where it didn’t focus much on Jean-Luc Picard at all, but a bunch of women space lesbians who solved the crises for the feeble old man.

But there is an element of modern streaming shows that audiences simply cannot connect with the characters like they used to, and that’s the number of episodes that are on the air and then the time between seasons. Where TV used to have 26 episodes a year, fans watching heroes week in and week out and really drawing attachments as a result, that’s not the case now.

Brandon Braga posited about the current state of television at Star Trek Las Vegas, “I look at this audience, and I think you’re here because you had a long-term relationship with Voyager. Voyager was 26 episodes a year. Some of you probably keep it on because it’s cozy, and that’s the kind of relationship you had. A lot of shows now are Tinder relationships—eight episodes every two years, I don’t think so. That’s not going to be something you necessarily pass on to your kids. And I think that’s a loss… It’s a new paradigm. And some shows are still doing it… NCIS does like 22. But I really don’t know what’s in store for the future of Star Trek, the TV franchise anyway, but I hope, I hope that eventually they get back to a longer, more sustained season.”

He does have a great point about it being unrelated to connecting on that level with television shows, but at the same time, the content that’s being pushed now is always so dark in tone and so identity politics-driven, there’s a problem with the characterizations and heroic concepts in the landscape where the characters simply don’t resonate as well.

Hollywood faces a lot of problems, but it does seem the current streaming model for television shows does not work. That said, British shows have had this model forever with sci-fi epics like Doctor Who and Red Dwarf having short seasons much like modern streaming television, so perhaps it is more about the content than the format.

What do you think of Brandon Braga’s statements? Leave a comment and let us know.

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