6:54 PM

Just read a really interesting interview with Mike Sussman, one of the writers for Enterprise. Well worth a read if you’re a Trek fan, especially the bit about killing the golden goose (again):

“It’s very funny in that people say, ‘oh the franchise needs a break, the show needs a break.’ But in the minds of many TV viewers, the show wasn’t even on!” Sussman notes. “I can’t tell you how many parties I went to, where if someone asked me what I did for a living, the response, nine times out of ten, was `Is Star Trek still on the air? They’re still making new episodes?’ How can you fight that? I think the perception was that you didn’t really need to promote it--the Trekkies would always tune in so why bother? I think inevitably the franchise started to slip out of the consciousness of the general TV viewing public.”

…

“It was the Christmas break that killed us, literally got the show cancelled, because we came back in January, nobody knew the show was on, nobody knew we were airing new episodes. It always took a couple of new episodes in January before people started tuning in again.”

Sussman also laments that the show’s DVDs weren’t released at a more opportunistic time. “I think that if they’d released season one of Enterprise on DVD over Christmas, the advertising that that would have generated for the show could have boosted our ratings in January, and our ratings hopefully would have held. Again, look at a show like 24, which really struggled in its first year. In an effort to promote the show, [the studio] released the entire first season on DVD that summer. And people rented those DVDs and watched the entire season from beginning to end, and then when season two premiered a few months later, the numbers went up, as a direct result of the DVD sales.”

Sussman notes that the ratings didn’t necessarily reflect Enterprise’s audience given all the ways people can now access entertainment media. “It’s like the 1960s all over again when the original was cancelled,” he points out. “The apocryphal story is that demographics came into being in the late 60s and when NBC cancelled the original Star Trek, the demographics people told them, you just killed the golden goose. This show had the best demos of any program on television. In some ways we’re in the middle of a revolution right now. Not a demographic revolution, but a revolution in terms of the internet, DVDs, cable television--first run cable programming like Battlestar Galactica. If you look at lists of the most downloaded programs--illegal downloads on the internet—Enterprise is almost always in the top ten. If you look at the most TIVOed shows, I think Enterprise was in the top 25 in TIVO’s last list of the most season passes. The show is popular in ways that are difficult to measure right now with current systems and current technology. I think when and if they decide to bring Star Trek back, maybe it will be a show that you pay $9.95 and you download the latest episode to your hard drive. Maybe that’s the model that will make it profitable for Paramount. Star Trek still is profitable for Paramount, but they’re not making as much as they were before. But it’s too bad that in this world with all of these different opportunities and different ways of making money off of this franchise, it would have been nice if they’d tried a little harder to keep it around.”