Star Trek: The Next Generation Review

The first two seasons are bad and everyone involved knows it. Scripts arrive stiff, the characters lecture each other about how enlightened they have become, and critics of the day treated the whole project as a franchise cash grab that could not clear the shadow of the original. Then Michael Piller takes over the writers room in the third season and the series turns into the thing it is remembered as.

From there through the sixth it runs at a remarkable clip: a ship of professionals solving problems by argument and curiosity rather than force, a structure elastic enough to hold a courtroom drama one week and a first contact puzzle the next, and a dozen or more hours that still top all time television lists. Patrick Stewart is why it works. He plays Picard with a stage actor's weight and makes moral reasoning watchable, and Brent Spiner turns what could have been a gimmick android into the emotional center.

The flaws never fully clear. Plots lean on technical fixes invented in the last two minutes, subplots are handed to Wesley Crusher and Deanna Troi and then abandoned, and the syndication budget shows in every rubber forehead and repurposed corridor. Dialogue is functional far more often than it is memorable. What lands is the argument underneath: a future run by decent people would still be full of hard problems worth an hour of your evening.