Star Trek: Enterprise is a much better show than Entertainment Weekly will lead you to believe.
I can spot anyone who hasn’t watched Star Trek: Enterprise by where they place it in the overall list of shows. If it’s under Discovery, I know they never watched it. Enterprise is not a bad show. It’s not even close to being a bad show. Enterprise is a great show, actually and maybe had the best lead actor in Scott Bakula.
The issue with Enterprise is that the show is 21 years old, and most of the opinions and views of the show are just as old. The fact is that the show was unfairly judged due to the sheer volume of Star Trek that fans were given.
It was hard to stand out when so many other episodes were so similar to one another across the franchise. There are only so many different stories Star Trek can tell, and when you’re trying to tell different stories across 600+ episodes, you’re bound to have some similar feeling episodes. The Next Gen did this to The Original Series but being 25+ years apart helped keep TNG fresh.
For 18 straight years non-stop, fans got Star Trek and after a while, burnout happened. Look at the MCU for a more recent example, since Endgame fans are tapped out.
So whenever a website ranks the Star Trek series and doesn’t keep this in mind, you know the list is bunk.
EW gets it wrong on Star Trek: Enterprise
Entertainment Weekly gave Star Trek: Enterprise the 9th spot out of 11 when it comes to shows and where they rank among one another.
- Deep Space Nine
- The Original Series
- The Next Generation
- Strange New Worlds
- Lower Decks
- Voyager
- Discovery
- Prodigy
- Enterprise
- The Animated Series
- Picard
Frankly, this list insults me and my sensibilities but they have the right to be wrong, but to be as critical of Enterprise as they are, and put it as low as they did, especially under Discovery and Lower Decks, to me, is proof they haven’t seen it recently.
The way they also describe it, as;
"…a show best enjoyed by Star Trek fans that like to pore over the Memory Alpha wiki and familiarize themselves with Trek minutiae"
And insinuates it’s a show to watch if you do Star Trek trivia nights. I don’t say this lightly but this is clearly someone who’s not a Star Trek fan talking about these shows. This show isn’t for die-hard fans, only. In fact, Enterprise was literally created to be an easier point of entry for non-Trek fans.
The fact Entertainment Weekly doesn’t get that says all that needs to be said about why you shouldn’t take their listing very seriously. Especially when they go out of their way to say that Discovery had just one good season to it, yet has a much higher spot.
Makes no sense.