Family oriented seems the target.
It’s pretty gritty for kids, but many school aged kids are up for that. It’s especially so given that Prodigy uses the classic situation of exploited orphans who are given hope and opportunities for something better.
It’s also taking advantage of the fact that Janeway in particular and Voyager generally has been the gateway for preteens into the franchise since its been available on streaming.
It was originally targeted for Nickelodeon, but children’s linear television viewing has dropped severely since 2017.
Worse, Paramount’s US cable carriage deal with Comcast would have required Paramount to wait at least 6 months to stream after a Nickelodeon premiere. So, they flipped it to run first on Paramount+. The show got decent views, but didn’t necessarily get to the target family and kids. Paramount seems to be reducing its focus on reaching kids as a streamer.
With Nickelodeon tanking further in the pandemic, it’s too expensive for them so the cable-led option is still a nonstarter.
I’ve been trying to think of which non-Disney streamer has enough of a kids and family audience globally to make Prodigy both profitable and reach the target demographic.
Distributor Wildbrain Spark (formerly DHX) has had a deal with Paramount+ and PlutoTV to carry some of its extensive kids library, so they could reverse and have Paramount license to them.
Wildbrain Spark (run principally through YouTube) has 168 million subscribers globally and 21 million unique views monthly in the US alone. They tend to skew younger, but may be extending into the older school age and middle school market.
“Such deals are very slow moving…”
Understandable but still very unfortunate.
Meanwhile, Paramount will be facing a major gap in its Star Trek releases in either winter 2023-24 or following Discovery season 5’s run - like both.
Glad to have you with us!
It’s also something that happens in real navies and the coast guard.
Sending a candidate for captain or first officer to shadow on another ship before a command level promotion is regular practice. In some cases, they are expected to complete shadowing on as many as two or three ships other than the one they regularly serve on.
I like it when the new shows incorporate regular naval or military practice even though many fans, unfamiliar with military service, take unnecessary exception. (This goes for negative fan reactions to Ortegas behaving exactly like many combat pilots in real life.)
I suspect many of us also take exception to the intransigent insistence on using the perjorative ‘STD’ when that is not and never has been the short form for Discovery. (We haven’t see ST:TOS and ST:TNG in use in decades.)
I love Prodigy and am advocating strongly for its return. What I have no tolerance for is denigrating another show in the franchise, that has been successful in its own audience niche, to promote the ones I most wish to see.
Knowing what we were told of Seven’s experiences in Picard, and Mack’s track record in writing about trauma, I expect this to be a fairly sad book.
For those that aren’t aware, Mack has co-credit for the script of DS9 Only a Paper Moon which dealt with Nog’s PTSD.
Novelverse author Greg Cox’s attempt, to ‘dance between the raindrops’ to explain away a major 1990s war in Trek canon that no one could see in real life, was quite inspired.
There were however still numerous unexplained inconsistencies.
Beyond the ‘how is it really a war if no one knows it’s happening?’ aspect, there has been an inconsistency ever since TNG’s premiere Encounter at Farpoint pushed the timing of World War III back to the latter half of the 21st century.
Given this shift was based in Roddenberry’s own direction, Akiva Goldsman has a strong point that the Great Bird wanted the Trek universe to always stay a possible one for current viewers. As it happens, we can attribute the biggest shift in the Prime timeline to Roddenberry. There seem to have been further tweaks, but moving Khan’s birth to a later time seems a direct corollary of Roddenberry’s fiat in 1987.
TOS is fairly clear that the Eugenics War was the precursor of WW3, but TNG implied they occurred more than a half apart unless the timing of Khan’s rule and the Eugenics War is pushed back. Not to mention the hand waving to explain how none of us noticed Khan ruling a large portion of the global population.
While many don’t remember, this apparent discontinuity was a reason some TOS fans argued in the late 1980s TNG wasn’t in the same continuity as TOS.
Then there are other discrepancies such the later development of the Warp Drive and all the other Berman-era episodes that implied a shifted timeline. Voyager’s findings of temporal interference in 1990s California and the development of computer technology seem to imply that the writers were working off a bible with a revised timeline all along.
Greg Cox himself finds the explanation of accumulating effects of intertemporal interference to be a better solution. You can find his view on this in the comment section under Di Candido’s review of the episode Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.
Another Trek author, Christopher L Bennett who wrote the Department of Temporal Investigations books, also weighed in positively on the episode. He attempted to figure out when the major perturbations in the Prime Universe’s river of time took place, with Encounter at Farpoint being the first major one.
I’m a Relaunch novelverse fan myself so I understand where you’re coming from.
I grieve the end of the novelverse, especially when I feel it often outshone the serialized writing that the new live action Trek shows have been struggling with. (I do note that some of the shows have been incorporating parallel plot and character evolutions and events to both the novelverse and STO.)
All of the new books, with the exception of the ones continuing to build on Vanguard/Seeker suffer from the requirement that the writers must “put all the toys back where they found them.” That is, they have to slide within canon and, by form, not have any lasting impact on the characters or universe. I think that’s why Mack’s latest Vanguard-related offering ‘Harm’s Way’ was considered by many to be the best new novel of last year.
That said, with Mack, McCormack, Swallow, and Miller writing the Picard-related books, they’ve all been better than I had ever expected them to be. Working off the bible for the show, they have dove deeper and often made what came on screen much more coherent.
All to say, I expect this one to be very strong.
One of our older teens likes it and Lower Decks best of the new shows.
TNG Picard was a better captain, I can agree.
Not sure I can say that about movie Picard, and would definitely disagree that Picard in Picard was better than Kirk in TOS or the movies.
I’m from an older generation that saw TOS and loved it long before TNG existed. Taking the long view, I think it’s great that the shows are demonstrating that different kinds of leadership work, and some work better in central contexts than others. SNW seems to be making that point directly, but it’s also not afraid to laugh at itself and ask us to join in.
In the 90s, I became a huge TNG fan, loved its more serious tone, idolized Picard as an leader, and found TOS’ campiness hard to take. So I stopped watching TOS other than the movies that were still coming.
Another 30 years on, TNGs flaws (and Picard’s) are more evident to me. At this distance, TOS is such an artifact of its time that I can just accept and enjoy it again for what it is.
But in the 90s, there were other, vocal, OG TOS fans who never got that Star Trek feeling from TNG. They wanted more adventure, but I suspect that some also wanted more of the cheekiness and cheesiness that TOS delivered with a straight face. I felt at the time that both Voyager and Enterprise were to some extent designed to bring them back to the television side of the franchise, but in hindsight were also very much a reflection of the era in which they were made.
Its really good to hear from 90s Trek fans who are willing to give TOS and new shows like SNW and Lower Decks a genuine try and appreciate them for what they are.
Now, I hope you and OP will give TAS a try. There’s some great stuff in there!