Question above. My only experience is with a handful of episodes from the original series. They were OK, but I'm not sure I want to watch the whole thing. It's a little too low budget for me. Can I just jump into the movies or one of the later series?
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You have opened a two-gallon can of worms, I hope you know. The only reason I don't have a blog is because I'm too inconsistent.
I have the relatively unpopular opinion of not liking Picard S3 or SNW. They're not as overtly political, and sometimes even countersignal the left, but they're still sloppily-written and acted by overgrown theater kids playing themselves, instead of career men and military officers.
Of course I get it. Picard S3 and SNW aren't nearly as overtly political, and coming from the "Make the Empire Great Again" era of NuTrek, it's a breath of fresh air. The show isn't screaming about how much it hates me. But I'm gonna largely ignore that here, because it's a subject all its own.
That said, Picard S3 might be art of a kind, even if it's not especially good as a piece of entertainment. It's just hard to parse, and I haven't spent a lot of time with it. The problem is, it's so sloppy that it's frustrating to follow. I don't know what's intentional and not, or what's entertainment, commentary, or reflection, because I have to turn my brain off to avoid getting frustrated with the writing.
There's a moment in Picard S3 that poetically illustrates Picard's writing as a whole. They end the Grody Bitch Changling arc by flushing her, and her subplot, out an airlock. As soon as she's out, the show becomes something entirely different. Now it's a Borg episode, except somewhere along the way, it completely forgot that one of the last season's shizophrenic subplots was that the chubby girl became the Borg to save them with love, or something.
Granted, chubby girl Borg was a fucking stupid subplot and we'd do our best to forget it ever happened, but making the Borg the secret antagonists of the very next season only draws attention to it.
I can point to that moment as one of the most blatant examples of the show possibly rising above its station, but it's all over. For instance, Picard and Riker play big roles as sad, frustrated old men. They're then given an opportunity to rise to the challenge one more time, as their adult children all flounder, having been raised under their substandard care, into a world they bungled.
How much of that is the plot, and how much of that is just Stewart and Frakes being sad old men? Is there some subconscious recognition of their failures? Is that why it abandoned its shitty political messaging? If so, how the hell is the actual plot, the connective tissue, so dogshit? You don't have that kind of self-awareness, and then think the shit with the red door is clever.
As entertainment, I don't have a lot to say about it. Watch Q Who, Tapestry, Best of Both Worlds, and Family instead. As potentially unintentional commentary, it might be the best finale to NuTrek (even if SNW and STD aren't over yet), if you can possibly make sense of it. I'm sure there's something of value in there, I'm just not equipped or motivated to dig it up.
It was because of drama. Do you read screen rant? They're very good with citing articles, tweets, threads... Whatever.
People didn't just hate the politics. When Sir Patrick Stuart announced he wasn't signing any more contracts people went off. Not only had there already been a petition to make Picard non canon because it was considered that bad. People were tracking the weird shit the actors were doing because magazines were producing pieces on 20 something year olds signing on for a sci fi, and deciding to identify just like their character. Again, and again, and again.
This was the same time Lady Gaga went crazy making that movie I didn't see that required her to hire a nurse to be on set to finish the movie. So, the media was all cheerleading what should have been how the fuck are you identifying as an fictional starship AI? While people that were feeling just as yelled at as you describe were like, no one there was worried? And, it kept happening to the younger actors. It's all documented in magazines as. " their journey"
That clip I posted has comments on YouTube that say it better then I could ever. They didn't allow a different direction for the show. They lost their fans, the people they pandered to were never fans. So, they went back to basics. Because that's where their fan base was.
I enjoyed season 3. I binge watched it, and I don't usually allow myself to put that much time into the idiot box.