Star Trek recently took down an episode of Deep Space Nine, raising an interesting question.
Gizmodo recently wrote about how Paramount+ took down the season one episode from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, entitled “Duet”. In the episode, Major Kira Nerys interrogates a man she thinks is a violent war criminal from Cardassia. As the Cardassians illegally occupied Bajor until recently in the show’s canon, this was a major moment for Kira, who finally got an opportunity to get some form of justice by putting away this “butcher”.
Turns out he wasn’t the famed villain, but just a Cardassian who was carrying the guilt and shame of the occupation and was trying to find a way to pay for the crimes of his people. It’s a brutally touching episode and one that shouldn’t be missed by any Trek fan.
Yet, Paramount+ took it down. Originally they said it was due to “streaming rights”, but the episode was returned to the lineup later on the same day. Clearly, it wasn’t due to “streaming rights”.
It was a silly situation that Ira Steven Behr even commented on. This prompted the question that I’m asking today, is having Star Trek all in one place really what’s best for the brand?
Star Trek would be better served if it was easily accessible
Obviously, what’s best for the brand isn’t best for the company but the company doesn’t care about things like “ease of access”, they care about winning. They care about money. They care about being able to beat their competition into nothing. So Star Trek is mostly behind a paywall on one exclusive network that not a lot of people care about.
Sure, there’s a free channel on PlutoTV that you can watch Star Trek on, but I’ve never seen any show other than The Next Generation on that channel, so good look trying to find something else if you’re curious.
And that’s the issue, finding Trek. See, Trek is well known, but it isn’t very popular. Not “build a streaming service around it”, popular. Look at Disney+, they are anchored by the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Star Wars universe. Both of those franchises alone are popular enough to carry an entire service.
Star Trek simply isn’t. Star Trek benefited the most from a service like Netflix (and syndication) because it got people who weren’t Star Trek fans into being Star Trek fans. People who never saw Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or Enterprise were giving them a shot after they finished The Next Generation.
It funneled nonfans into the chance of being fans. After all, very few people were getting Netflix solely to watch Star Trek. Yet, they ended up finding it after a while and it helped raise the profile.
Paramount is now trying to build an entire platform around Star Trek and Yellowstone, two series of varying degrees of quality, who are both suffering from the fact that while they may be must-see TV to some people, are not big enough to warrant being the sole headliners of a streaming service.
Trek would be better served as part of someone else’s library, not the stars of their own service. Trek just isn’t big enough to carry Paramount+ and in being forced to do so, potential fans are missing out on the wonders the franchise carries.
It’s not a surprise that the “streaming wars” are going to end up hurting platforms and properties more than they’ll end up helping them. Hopefully, at some point, these network execs change course and start partnering up in order to get their catalog in front of as many eyes as possible.
With so many of these platforms carrying billions of dollars of debt, it seems almost inevitable that this will end up happening until only a few major services remain standing. Which ones will be interesting to see.
Hopefully, then, Trek will be put in front of hundreds of millions of potential viewers, instead of just the 30-odd million the service has.