I actually found DS9 to be the best of all of them. Aside from the terrible Dr Bashir character, they felt believable, and like any real environment had personality clashes, personal issues, baggage, and of course interpersonal conflicts.
The difference was that rather than turn it into soap opera porn, the characters actually tried to behave professionally (most of the time).
Thus "increasingly" :)
• DS9 only had a little soap-opera drama, serving as almost a kind of fanservice sprinkled judiciously into otherwise-thematic B-plots.
• VOY had more, with entire B-plots of episodes now being character-focused, including a few arcs that would have worked just as well if transplanted into some modern-age military drama with no SF elements.
• Drama-as-the-A-plot episodes were appearing by ENT.
(After that I stopped watching, but I've heard the trend has just continued from there.)
The Lower Decks was good as a love letter to older fans, I do recommend that. But both Discovery and Academy were horrendous and I regret the time spent. Picard had a few good episodes and it was nice to see the old crew but was not great. Stranger New Worlds had some good things and wasn't a butcher job but not anything to write home about in my opinion.
Strange New Worlds started strong. But the last couple of series was so bad for the drama. In fact one episode was a literal soap opera.
I would have ZERO issues with the wacky episodes if and only if we were back to the 20-ish episodes per season format. Then sure, do a puppet show. Musical episodes (for how much I HATE musicals, it was decently enjoyable, Klingon boy band was super unexpected).
But when you only have half a dozen-ish episodes per season, you can't afford filler.
My issue with the last season was that it was all gimmick and no substance. Literally the whole series was made up of filler episodes.
It’s such lazy writing.
I actually didn’t mind Academy. Yeah it was flawed and had a lot of lazy tropes. But it had an identity to it and some substance to it. Not much substance, but still something. Whereas the latest season of Strange New Worlds? It wasn’t anything. It had no substance. It had no identity. It was as if someone made a silly clip show (like the Stargate 200th episode) but instead of lots of short parodies in one filler episode, they made an entire series with each episode being one very long joke. A singular punch line stretched out over nearly an hour.
I hated the first season of Discovery. But that was still better than the season 5 of SNW. I hates the first season of Enterprise. And that was also better than S5 for SNW. And I wasn’t much keen on the first season of Lower Decks either. And even that was less goofy than S5 of SNW. And what’s worse, all of those spin offs that I said had poor first seasons ended up with excellent 5th seasons. And yet SNW started of strong and fizzled out it shallow jokes.
It honestly feels like the writers had nothing.
Agree. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they gave Captain Sisko's character -- not to mention Worf, O'Brien and others -- a lot more room to develop and grow.
I really enjoyed TNG as well, and DS9 probably wouldn't have even happened if not for TNG's excellence. I never really felt like the writers gave Picard's character a lot of room to change, though. A lot of the time, he was almost like the sitcom dad who was mainly there to teach the kids a lesson at the end of the episode. That's not a knock on Stewart's acting ability; I'd say he was almost certainly the best actor on the show.
Also agree about Bashir.
Though in defence to Bashir, without him you wouldn’t have Garak, who is possibly one of the best written characters in all of SciFi.
And some of O'Brien‘s best performances were counterpointing Bashir too.
I think as a solo character, he’s a little shallow. But he works exceptionally well at being an anchor for other characters to play off.
The Inner Light begs to disagree. Plus his Borg summer camp.
But yes, those instances were a bit rare.