By Drew Dietsch
| Published
Hey y’all, Drew Dietsch here for Giant Freakin Robot and we’re talking about Star Trek again.
But not just any Star Trek. We’re gonna take a look at a Star Trek series that broke all the rules, was controversial with fans, got halfway abandoned by the studio, had tensions behind the scenes with its leading actor, and ended up being the pinnacle of Star Trek storytelling.
Yes, it’s time to explore why Star Trek: Deep Space Nine failed.
Before we can even step foot on the Promenade, we have got to acknowledge and talk about Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It’s hard to really understand how much of a success Star Trek: The Next Generation was if you weren’t around during its initial run.
Yes, most Trek fans were over the moon when it came to the new series, but I’m sorry, Trekkies alone didn’t turn that show into a worldwide success.
Star Trek: The Next Generation hit big with mainstream audiences as it continued its television run.
The show became a focal point in pop culture by the time the two-part episode “The Best of Both Worlds” came around in Season Three, and the show’s quality and influence would continue to grow from there on out.
With the franchise now in full swing during the ‘90s, Paramount wanted to keep the ball rolling and introduce yet another new series towards the end of Next Generation’s run.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine premiered on January 3, 1993, right in the middle of Next Generation’s sixth season, with a pilot episode that even included Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard.
And here’s where we get our first hurdle that stopped some Next Generation viewers from even wanting to give the show a chance.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine kicks off its story with the character of Benjamin Sisko, a Starfleet officer, losing his wife at the Battle of Wolf 359, an infamous conflict led by Picard while he was assimilated by the Borg and became Locutus.
The show’s first episode has Sisko meeting with Picard and it’s immediately established that Sisko harbors resentment for Picard’s time as Locutus.
Sisko even mentions that he is considering resigning from Starfleet in the first episode, setting up the first lead Star Trek character who might not actually agree with the Federation.
Now, I always say a version of this as a safety net for anything else we’re about to explore in the video, so here it goes: I love Deep Space Nine. I love Benjamin Sisko’s character. You’ll hear nothing bad about the man from me.
However, there is no question that fans had become extremely endeared to both the character of Jean-Luc Picard and what he represented for Star Trek: The Next Generation as a whole.
And here was an angry Black man challenging that status quo right out the gate in a new Star Trek series, and using the fan-favorite captain of the popular show to do it.
We’ll focus on Avery Brooks himself in a bit, but it’s important to understand that the character of Sisko encapsulated a lot of Deep Space Nine’s narrative mission statement: it’s time to see how much this Star Trek idealism holds up against more difficult and morally complex ideas and stories.
And though I’m sure there were fans willing to give Deep Space Nine’s adversarial tone a shot early on, there was a vocal contingent that made their negative opinions known.
There was undoubtedly reticence from both fans and mainstream viewers when it came to embracing Deep Space Nine.
Here was a Star Trek show that wasn’t about being in a spaceship and heading out to explore the galaxy.
Set on a reclaimed Cardassian space station, Deep Space Nine made a lot of similar deliberate creative choices that rubbed up against the familiarity of Star Trek.
Instead of a captain, Benjamin Sisko begins the series as a commander.
Instead of a cast of immediately lovable crewmembers, we get the surly changeling Odo and the righteously angry Kira Nerys.
And though Deep Space Nine certainly has its warm and silly side, it’s not like the show deviated from its desire to dig into darker subject matter as it went on.
There’s no question that Deep Space Nine’s tone and mood turned a significant contingent of viewers off.
And as the show became more concentrated on multi-part episodes, recurring characters, and an overarching serialized storyline, it ended up turning more viewers away who felt out of the loop with the show’s stories.
Due to Deep Space Nine running in syndication, it meant that the show could play at various times across the country or even in a different order than intended.
Needless to say, for people who knew Star Trek as an episodic franchise that you could just pop into, Deep Space Nine didn’t exactly invite a fresh audience as it continued its run.
But there were other factors hampering the potential of Deep Space Nine to break out.
The gargantuan success of Star Trek: The Next Generation ended up hurting Deep Space Nine in the long run.
The studio compared the ratings of Next Generation to Deep Space Nine and were not enthusiastic.
Though the show started strong coming off the back of Next Generation, it quickly began to lose viewers and would steadily drop them throughout the show’s seven seasons.
To highlight this, the pilot episode of Deep Space Nine clocked over 18 million viewers while the series finale had 5 million viewers, less than a third of the initial audience.
And part of the blame for running off viewers lands directly on Paramount’s shoulders.
Just two years after the premiere of Deep Space Nine, Paramount launched their own network station, the United Paramount Network or UPN, and its premiere telecast was a new Star Trek show that would act as the network’s flagship program, Star Trek: Voyager.
Because Paramount had a larger vested interest in the success of UPN and therefore Voyager, it meant that Deep Space Nine took a backseat to marketing and awareness for the company.
Voyager also promised audiences something much more traditionally Star Trek with a spaceship crew out in the galaxy, making it a lot more accessible and episodic for newer viewers.
In many ways, Star Trek: Voyager came off as a response to Deep Space Nine in the eyes of fans and not a positive one.
And all during this time, Paramount was also funding and promoting Next Generation feature films.
While it seemed like Deep Space Nine was just another functioning part of this mega-franchise, the studio’s focus on optimizing the success of Voyager and the TNG movies made the creators and filmmakers behind Deep Space Nine feel like “the middle child” of Star Trek.
And then, there’s Avery Brooks.
Let me reiterate: I love Deep Space Nine. I love Benjamin Sisko. And I love Avery Brooks’ performance across the series and as a director of multiple episodes, especially “Far Beyond the Stars” which I did a whole video on that you should watch. It’s the best thing Star Trek has ever done.
But there is no question that Avery Brooks as the series lead played into why the show was not exactly beloved in its time.
Brooks is a truly unique actor. At the time, he was best known as the character Hawk from Spenser: For Hire and was celebrated enough on that show to get his own spinoff, A Man Called Hawk.
Brooks felt very strongly about his appearance on television as a Black man and wanted to maintain his bald head and goatee.
But, producers vetoed this since their last Star Trek lead actor was a bald man and they were worried people would just see Brooks as his former character, Hawk.
So it took multiple seasons before Brooks was allowed to adapt his preferred look into the character of Sisko.
Why are we bringing all this up? Because Brooks has stated in the past that he wanted to leave the show early in its run due to his many conflicted feelings during his employment.
Look, Star Trek fans like to think of themselves as extremely progressive and open-minded, but there have always been toxic, idiotic fans in every following and Star Trek is no different.
Brooks undoubtedly dealt with racism from fans as the first Black lead of the franchise, and there’s a very good chance he experienced it behind the scenes as well.
And I’m sorry if your rose-tinted glasses tell you otherwise, but a Black lead in a mainstream television show in the ‘90s is something certain white audiences were not going to accept.
Deep Space Nine showcased a number of Black characters and actors, and often featured scenes with no one on screen but Black actors.
You can get as riled up as you want in the comments about this, but it’s absolutely true that a section of the mainstream audience simply didn’t want to watch a Black man leading the charge every week on their space show.
Thankfully, Deep Space Nine maintained a positive critical response during its initial run, with reviewers at the time finding the change of pace for the franchise refreshing.
But, as Voyager kept finding its way through the Delta Quadrant and Picard was off swinging around like Tarzan on the big screen, Deep Space Nine played out its story and concluded its seven season run on June 2, 1999.
And frankly, it kind of faded out of conversation in many Trek circles since Voyager continued on and there were still more Next Generation movies happening.
For a while, it felt like Deep Space Nine was destined to remain a niche favorite for franchise fans.
Until, a new generation found the series through streaming.
It’s here that we start to see the real reevaluation of Deep Space Nine, both for fans of Star Trek and modern television viewers.
Thanks to the binge model of watching streaming shows and a larger cultural willingness for darker material in the wake of shows like Game of Thrones, new viewers were much more willing and able to settle in with Deep Space Nine’s longer stories and harsher tone.
Nowadays, you can find Star Trek fans like myself who proudly say Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek series.
Trust me, that was not the case when I was growing up during the peak of Star Trek’s popularity.
Star Trek: The Next Generation might be the overall fan favorite, but when it comes to mature storytelling, complex characters, and staying power, Deep Space Nine takes the cake.
It’s like the Andor of its day, except that show exists in a marketplace where the audience for a darker, more combative exploration of its franchise is ready and waiting for these kinds of stories.
Deep Space Nine was truly ahead of its time which is a big reason it still finds new fans.
It may have been seen as a failure at the time, but today, it’s proof that they haven’t managed to make any Star Trek as good as Deep Space Nine before or since.
