Could a series similar to Star Trek: Enterprise be successful today?

Next year, it will be twenty years since Star Trek: Enterprise was cancelled, but the current availability of the series on Paramount+ has garnered new interest and new fans. Though it only lasted for four seasons, Enterprise is, to some fans, one of their favorite series. And there is much to love about it if you take out the theme song and the fact that Star Trek was left off the title for two seasons. Those are minor issues that have little to do with the success of the series.

According to Collider, Star Trek: Enterprise was "doomed to fail from the start" and "faced its own Kobayashi Maru." And there were a lot of issues that challenged the series, no doubt. The network, UPN, for one, wasn't the biggest network and didn't have the clout to put behind a Star Trek series. Yes, there were problems with the first and second season episodes, but virtually all of Star Trek has had bumpy episodes, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation during its first and second seasons as well.

But now, with the availability of streaming and the opportunity to take more risks, could a series much like Enterprise, an origin series that goes back further in time than Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, be successful? To basically start from scratch, not as a reboot, but a new series that explores the universe before the Enterprise got all the bells and whistles, before there was as much technology as there is now. Could that work?

Removing much of the higher-end production costs would certainly be beneficial for Paramount+, but would fans be satisifed with a stripped-down version of Star Trek? I think it's worth a shot. Why? Because Paramount+ is struggling financially, but the executives know fans still want Star Trek. And in the 1990s and 2000s, we were happy with what the creatives were able to do with the series. Yes, we've been spoiled to a certain extent, but we still enjoy the character arcs of the series. So maybe scaling back, not to the point of Star Trek: The Original Series, but to a more simpler Trek would work.

It costs a lot of money to produce a Star Trek series, but one that's not as technologically-advanced as Star Trek: Discovery could put the focus on more character-building than world-building. We've seen what Star Trek can do, but what would it be capable of without millions of dollars per episode? Sometimes, less is more, and that just might work for some of us who are missing the old-school Trek.