CBS doesn’t care about Star Trek
By making one bumbling mistake after another with ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ CBS has lost many loyal Star Trek fans.
CBS is a very profitable and major television network. With how successful many of their sitcoms are you can’t say that it’s an incompetent company. That can’t be said for whoever has been spearheading the decisions on Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek in general at CBS though.
There’s a very well written article on io9 today about Discovery and CBS. The articles author Katherine Trendacosta lays out all the ways CBS has dropped the ball with Discovery. The article is great and you really can’t argue with the points made in it. There’s just no way even the most optimistic Star Trek fan can excuse some of the calls CBS has made in regard to Star Trek: Discovery.
This week on the Sector 001 Podcast we talked about the growing disconnect between fans of Star Trek and CBS. It’s not just the bad calls, at this point the tone of CBS in regards to the fans is almost confrontational.
The crazy thing is that it shouldn’t be this way. Fan films like Axanar have proven that Star Trek fans are more than willing to get on the side of a new Star Trek production. Instead of learning from Axanar though CBS just alienated another group of Trekkies. Axanar made some mistakes, and we aren’t Axanar fans or apologists, but when you compare the way the two groups interacted with the fans it’s night and day.
CBS’ attitude towards Trekkies is very much a “we don’t need you” attitude, but the truth is they do need Star Trek fans. The entire idea of putting Star Trek: Discovery behind a paywall is based on needing Trekkies to be willing to pay for the service.
We hope we’re wrong and Star Trek: Discovery turns out to be a great show and a bit sucess, but it’s getting harder and harder to see that happening. CBS doesn’t really seem to understand or care about Star Trek or its fans. CBS just wants a quick cash grab and possibly more subscribers to CBS All Access.
CBS is continually talking about how much they love and care about Trek, but nothing they’ve done backs that up. If CBS wants to repair their relationship with Star Trek fans they are going to have to reach out in more meaningful ways than just cast announcements.
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What do you think? Will Star Trek: Discovery succeed? Let us know on Facebook or in the comments below.