Star Trek: How Paramount Sabotaged Deep Space Nine

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine always had an uphill battle engaging with audiences due to syndication issues and Paramount’s lack of faith in the series. Launched in 1993, Deep Space Nine was primed to capitalize on the popularity of the franchise at that time, attributed largely to the wildly successful Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was unlike any other Star Trek project that had come before. Exploring strange new worlds was out the door, as DS9 took place not on a starship but on an immobile space station. It also dealt head-on with themes like religion and war, which were generally forbidden in earlier incarnations of the franchise. As the show progressed, the subject matter got decidedly darker, and it delved into the kind of serialized storytelling that would eventually lead it to be a cult classic decades after its initial run.

SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY

But Paramount was spooked by the radically different series. Serialized storytelling in syndication was a dicey proposition; if viewers missed an episode they risked not knowing what was happening, and there were no DVRs or streaming services to make catching up easy back then. The show never quite approached the popularity of TNG, and it was relegated to being “that other Star Trek show” for its first couple of seasons.

There was a chance for Paramount to put their promotional weight behind Deep Space Nine after The Next Generation ended in 1994. But instead of doubling down on their existing series, Paramount put their efforts into promoting the new Star Trek: Voyager, which launched in 1995 on the network UPN. Voyager was the flagship series for the new network and enjoyed the kind of promotional push and budget increases that Deep Space Nine never did as a moderately popular syndicated series. The fact that Voyager rarely, if ever, equaled DS9 in quality just added insult to injury.

To their credit, the creators of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine never let their in-house status as the least important Star Trek series deter them from telling great, thrilling stories. DS9‘s Captain Benjamin Sisko remains one of the most interesting, complicated leads in all of Star Trek, and the Dominion War arc set the tone for how innumerable 21st-century science fiction shows would handle their long-term storylines. The show has found new life in the streaming era and has been routinely reassessed as the best, most consistent Star Trek series of all time. Not too bad of a fate for a show that very few people at the top believed in when it was still in production.

Moon Knight Episode 4 Poses 8 Questions & Headscratchers

About The Author

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *