The most unbalanced show in the lineup of Nu Trek shows has got to be Star Trek: Picard. When the show worked, it was fantastic, but it didn't work often. Its use of creative characters like Elnor and Soji Asha felt lacking and uninspired, even though the characters themselves lent themselves to much grander story ideas. Its creativity, or lack thereof, for the returning cast of The Next Generation, didn't help matters, as the only thing that kept the last season of the show going was the interest in the nostalgia of it all.
Yet, despite all that, it was a show that had tremendous hype season after season. It had more to do with the returning stars of yesterday, but it had the hype. Fans gave it a chance. It just didn't work. Once the nostalgia wore off, the excitement was gone. There isn't a lot of demand for a fourth season of Picard.
In fact, fans want a spinoff instead, as opposed to more Picard, and that's for a variety of reasons. Picard was dark, edgy, uninspired, and did nothing but retread old story ideas again.
Yet, the biggest flaw, the worst crime it committed, was that Picard threw out what originality it had in the first season. There was potential, look at the cast, but by season three it was all gone. Say what you will about the new cast for season one, and for all the things that we'd hope to see in later seasons, the right call was to do an original story with an aging Jean-Luc Picard and those new characters.
They didn't do that, instead trying to find ways to attack Picard to characters and events from his past. While that's fine, it should've always been a reunion series then. It wouldn't have been memorable, as most nostalgia-fueled properties these days aren't, but it would've been more honest. We would know what to expect.
Instead, they tried to split the difference and give us the old and new at the same time. It didn't work and eventually, the show shifted gears into what fans had wanted from the start; the reunion of the TNG cast. It was a sweet moment but it didn't add to their legacy.
An original story, however, would have. One that was devoid of Seven of Nine, The Borg, Data, Will Riker, and anyone else from Picard's most obvious past moments. People like Elnor, Agnes Jurati, Cristobal Rios, Raffi, and Lariis were all the right characters, just in the wrong storylines.
Focusing on them, a new, unique mission and going forward with those characters (and a few others) would've made the show wholly uinque and interesting. Instead, it felt like nothing more than a cheap ploy to get fans from the 90s back to watch more subpar stories.