Alex Kurtzman is establishing a reputation akin to former CW creator Greg Berlanti

Star Trek has not had the best go of it with Alex Kurtzman at the helm. In what can only be seen as a nepotism hire, it looked like J.J. Abrams gifted him the job following his foray into the Star Trek film franchise. Since then, Kurtzman has done a mediocre job with the franchise. The longer he goes with the franchise, the more people question his methods and motives.

In a lot of ways, his timeline with Star Trek mirrors that of his friend Greg Berlanti and Berlanti's run with the DC television properties on the CW. A series of shows dubbed "The Arrowverse". With the end of Superman and Lois this year, a lot of people were left disappointed in how a promising show like Arrow turned out to be a tragically underwhelming franchise.

Over several years, Berlanti created more and more shows that catered to smaller and smaller portions of the audience as time passed. He started to hyper-focus on what a small number of social media fans wanted and steered into that. It eventually led to diminishing returns with the audience. Either due to the shows being too narrow in their scope to attract fans, or because the shows were losing quality with more and more writers departing shows after each season.

Star Trek has followed a similar arc. Discovery was intended to be a new Star Trek show for all Star Trek fans, but a decidedly darker focus, while hyper-focusing on making the show look like a big-budgeted movie, and making dramatic changes to the core canon turned off fans early and often.

From there, the shows just got darker, or worse, sillier to the point that none of the shows resembled anything like we fell in love with all those years ago. Eventually, Kurtzman would hit gold with Star Trek's Prodigy and Strange New Worlds, shows that went back and focused on storytelling over visuals. Shows that focused on Star Trek principles and ideals, instead of plot ideas made them the new trendy show.

It felt like Kurtzman wanted the next True Detective or Rick and Morty, not the next great Star Trek property. In a lot of ways, it feels like what Berlanti wanted to do. He wanted to craft shows that would become tentpoles of a franchise, but he did so by watering down magic and attempting to build new shows on the backs of better characters. He didn't mind insulting the core audience, because that audience wasn't the audience he wanted.

He wanted different fans, fans that didn't care about DC Comics. So he kept trying to make trendy shows that were targeted to people who simply didn't care about the show. Just like Kurtzman. The lone difference is that Kurtzman eventually listened to fans, while Berlanti had a hit and eventually stopped listening.

Now, Kurtzman is one of the most disliked members of the franchise, and for good reason. With Star Trek: Starfleet Academy right around the corner, maybe he can continue to earn goodwill back and rewrite how the fandom sees him. But only time will tell if he's able to do so.