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Lower Decks to end and Strange new worlds renewed for 4th season
eazzie
Member Posts: 4,226 Arc User
Lower Decks to end after season 5, but I'm seeing a trend here ... Discovery ends at season 5, now lower decks. Will SNW be next ?
https://x.com/Stu1701/status/1778902218785030285
https://x.com/Stu1701/status/1778902218785030285
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I'm guessing they're trying to avoid the "we ran out of ideas" issue TNG and VOY faced during their last 2 seasons.
There is an online campaign on X to save it
How could they be running out of ideas? While LD is considerably denser idea-wise than the rest of NuTrek (though SNW is close) they still only do a few shows a season. And DSC only ran ONE plot per season (except for season one where they ran three, two intertwined and the third was the extra episodes added as damage control at the end), essentially the whole five seasons only used seven ideas.
It is far more likely that they still use the five-year contract setup from broadcast TV and cut the shows before they have to renegotiate since it almost always results in pay raises and whatnot that cut into the profitability of the show. And what makes it even more ridiculous is that structure is obsolete nowadays since the five seasons of 26 shows (for hour-long shows) was originally the target since it was the minimum needed to syndicate shows after their initial run.
I'm surprised Discovery lasted this long, but i would have liked a continuation of Lower Decks.
Haven't seen SNW yet since it is behind a paywall.
Seen a few episodes from Prodigy and the childish style rubs me the wrong way.
I'm not saying they are running out of ideas, I'm saying they want to avoid that issue by ending before that happens.
While throwing out the baby with the bath water like that is not exactly unknown, it is still more likely that they are shutting the NuTrek shows down at the end of five seasons for the age-old Hollywood reason that the profitability takes a sharp nosedive after the initial five-year contracts run out and they have to renegotiate.
It is also typically the main reason shows after that five years often seem to drop a bit in quality since the networks would try to compensate for the pay raises as much as possible by cutting the budget for other things like SFX, scripts, sets, etc. which in turn makes it more difficult to come up with scripts that work with the new budgetary constraints.
And considering that few, if any, made-for-streaming shows put out more than a half a season (in fact there is a definite trend towards just producing an eight-episode miniseries each year, which is only a third of a traditional season), it would take 14 to 21 years to reach the same level of story fatigue that TNG, DS9, and Voy had in their seven-year runs. And to top it off, those shows even overlapped a bit so there was no "cooling off" period between them.
Even ENT didn't end because of a dearth of ideas or lack of viewership (Moonves cooked the books with that claim, viewership was actually going up when he axed it if you look at the statistics the proper standard way instead of the skewed cherrypicked set Moonves pushed) it ended simply because Moonves hated Star Trek and wanted to clear it out of the way for more of what he called "more substantive and relevant" shows like CSI and whatnot.
Of course, DSC (whether deliberately like some claim, or not), was not designed for longevity in the first place since it broke all sorts of common-sense TV-series budgetary axioms by having regular foreground characters that required very extensive makeups (Saru and Airiam, plus a lot of similarly extensive makeups on some of the lesser but still rather frequently seen supporting cast) along with centering on the stunts and VFX in their pursuit of "the movie experience in a TV series" that Kurtzman natters on about in interviews, and similar gaffs. As the "flagship show" of CBSAA the idea was undoubtedly to make a big showy splash to kickstart the service and they probably were not thinking about the show in the long term.
SNW is probably safe enough from the budgetary angle since it does use the conventional wisdom for that, but it does have some less-than-ideal aspects that limit its potential longevity. The biggest sticky point is that they only have about six or seven in-story years before they collide with TOS unless they do another timeline branch or confirm the very prevalent fanon idea that they are on a different timeline already. An easy solution would be to decouple the seasons from in-story years, but that is unlikely since the whole 'real year equals story year' thing has become so intrenched since it started in the 1980s or so.
Something else that could lead to premature idea fatigue is that SNW is probably a closed writer's room operation like all the other NuTreks instead of taking any outside scripts to freshen the idea pool, which means that unless there is a relatively high writer turnover they can fall into group-think ruts relatively easily even though the ridiculously low number of episodes means there are probably more writers than there are episodes to write.
Another one (which is a bit counter-intuitive on the surface), is that streaming shows have so few episodes that they are essentially a part-time job and many of the people involved do something else for the rest of the year. Not only does that mean they start up a bit "cold" again for the next season compared to a full-season show, but also the next season for streaming shows often do not get the green light until the last minute (part of the reason for that is to try and discourage service hopping if they announce cancellation earlier) so they are a bit rushed. Neither of those things are good for a consistent creative flow and the writers are more likely to write the show into a corner or stress out to the point of blanking on ideas.
Still, my bet would be on the contract structure thing causing the five-year shutdowns just like it does on so many other shows in the industry.