POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Without Patrick Stewart, No Star Trek As We Know It
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Without Patrick Stewart, no Star Trek as we know it By Dan Brown Every person who enjoys Star Trek today should thank Patrick Stewart for making the franchise a mainstream phenomenon back in the day. As you know, he died on October 28. Among Stewart’s many accomplishments was this: He saved Star Trek, moving it from the fringe to the centre of our culture. Granted, he didn’t do it alone, but the genial British actor played the biggest part. When Star Trek: The Next Generation launched in 1987, Trek wasn’t the force it is now. Also, since the series was competing for viewers in a network environment, it had to have a broad audience in order to continue airing. It was a critical moment. Yes, there were Star Trek movies, but they were uneven (the powers-that-be even let William Shatner direct one!) and the cast from the original series was rapidly aging out. It wasn’t the same as now. In 2026, a TV show can survive with nothing more than a cult following if it airs on a streaming platform. Network TV’s rules of engagement were different, demanding broad appeal for a property to catch fire. TNG remains the most accessible of any Star Trek property. Leading the cast, Stewart had a tough job following in Shatner’s footsteps as captain of the Enterprise. And the brain trust reportedly didn’t even want him. Creator Gene Roddenberry didn’t think a bald starship captain could work in the 1980s! Yet something about Stewart touched viewers. He connected on a deep level with the viewing audience at home, and that’s the main reason the show endured. We take for granted, with so much Trek content available to us now, that TNG’s success was inevitable. But it was never a given. When the sequel series left the airwaves in 1994, it had defied the odds; it did the unlikely by earning an audience that went far beyond people who wear Spock ears and attend fan conventions. Actual ordinary people had been watching. You knew the show had reached a critical mass when people started referring to it as simply “Next Gen.” The history of network TV is littered with spinoffs that failed. Stewart’s charm and powers as a thespian were the key ingredients that helped TNG to find, and hold, a mass audience. No disrespect to the rest of the ensemble, they each played a part, just not as major. The funny or ironic part is how TV has evolved since then. If the original series aired today on a streaming service, it could run for years and years with just nerds watching. That’s how you know Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, the latest instalment in the franchise, is a real stinker – even diehard fans wouldn’t touch that thing. So magnetic was Stewart, he was even able to extend his character’s adventures years later into yet another sequel series, Picard, which ran for three seasons on its own. Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard was the right captain at the right time. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
