Gizmodo’s James Whitbrook has yet more to vent on Paramount+‘s cancelation and erasure of Prodigy.
I hadn’t considered the cancelation from the perspective of systemic misogyny, which Whitbrook effectively is carating.
However, given that Janeway was surely chosen as the legacy captain for Prodigy because Voyager had proven itself to be an effective gateway for younger and new viewers on Netflix, Whitbrook’s inference Paramount views her less important to the franchise than Picard is biting.
Paramount wouldn’t dare treat what it’s done for Patrick Stewart and Jean-Luc Picard as a tax break. Casting aside everything that Prodigy stood for, and in the process doing the same to Mulgrew and Janeway’s legacy, is a cruel twist on what is already a cruel fate for the show.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
It’s very easy to take a point of view that makes it look like mysogyny whenever a show with a woman-led cast gets canceled but let’s face the simplest facts first: Paramount+ is a shit streaming platform with a limited library. Prodigy is a kids show and kids shows don’t drive subscribers. If they really wanted the show to succeed they would have put it somewhere with an actual audience.
When it comes down to it, Paramount+ itself was an idiotic play. They should never have tried to go solo but all they could see was a gold rush, now they are finally starting to see that they were actually late and are stuck scrabbling for scraps with their limited offerings
Perhaps they weren’t seeing the long-term demand they were hoping for… as in, even if it was pulling in ok numbers now they didn’t see a way to ramp those numbers or even maintain them going forward.
In general, compared to the other new Trek shows I’ve seen much less buzz around Prodigy on both the web and with real life acquaintances, with it not even being acknowledged in many cases. I have yet to watch it myself not because I hold anything against it personally, but because its trailers didn’t grab me and I suspect that’s a somewhat common experience among Trek viewers… I think Prodigy may have faired better had it been a much more direct sequel to Voyager (similar tone, feel, etc) and had been marketed as such.
I’m no expert in showbiz though so I might be catastrophically wrong, haha.
Agreed on the buzz. Even among Trek discussions it feels like Prodigy is mentioned about as often as TAS.
I think it’s a worthy addition to the franchise, and if you’re enough of a fan to be commenting in a Star Trek Lemmy instance of all places, I recommend watching it at some point. Just be warned it takes several episodes to find its groove and feel like Trek. I enjoyed it from the start (I love seeing different perspectives within this universe), but it kicks off in a very different setting than we’re used to, and I think that turned some people away. I.
Maybe this allows them to bring back Janeway in the new spin off from Picard. I would love to see the whole voyager crew appear in that.
If anything Janeway and the Voyager officers should be given their own limited live-action series or direct-to-streaming event movie.
I’m in no way sold on the idea of a 25th century using the Titan-to-Enterprise G as a nostalgia tour for legacy-of-the week and supporting an overarching arc of Jack’s hero’s journey.
While Picard season 3 made a strong case for an early 25th century show, what’s been proposed in the series finale and Matalas Twitter and interviews isn’t a satisfactory concept. Matalas is overpromising relative to what a single ship-based show can carry. I’d rather have the Titanprise really get out further across the galaxy, not be tied down to featuring legacies, not locked into serving a principal character’s journey, but rather to build a new ensemble exploring the 25th century that we still haven’t seen much of.
For Janeway, other Voyagers, the DS9 ensemble, I like Kurtzman’s idea rather of legacy characters getting each their own vehicle and focus be it 1 or 2 hour standalones or a limited series.
I would prefer a SNW monster of the week style with maybe a guess appearance here and there from Voyager. Nothing like what Picard did were one character shows up and all needed at the end. I much prefer the old school one off episodes with maybe a background over all goal.
They cancelled it?? The bastards!
I don’t think that the cancellation of Prodigy has anything to do with systemic mysogyny, (though I can see how it can look that way).
First off, a Star Trek aimed at kids was a hard sell. Sure, it might have made sense to Paramount, seeing all the Jar Jar Binks toys that got sold, but Star Trek has always been at it’s best when it’s aimed at hard questions that society is dealing with right now. If it’s an ethical dilemma that an 8 year old can figure out, it’s not exactly an ethical dilemma. It was experiment that was tried and didn’t work; unlike Lower Decks which is an experiment that tried and did work.
Secondly: TNG literally re-launched the franchise from a 3 year 1960s sci-fi serial that managed to get 5 movies (two of them good at the time), to an entire franchise, from which Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and all the rest were launched. Of COURSE Picard was more important to the franchise than Janeway.
But mostly, Voyager wasn’t very good.
That’s really what it comes down to. People saw Picard, rightly or wrongly, as the continuation of a character and a story that they absolutely loved - TNG. Who wouldn’t have wanted another season of TNG (which we kind of got in Picard Series 3)? Now, honestly - look me in the eye and say: Do you really want another season of Voyager? Especially near the end when they were really running out of ideas?
There might have been a nostalgic draw to having Mulgrew come back as a holographic version of Janeway, but that’s about it - in all honestly, the inclusion of Janeway turned me off from wanting to check Prodigy out, because I did not like Voyager.
There’s also one last counter to the “This is systemic misogyny” argument and that is - Star Trek doesn’t seem like a franchise to be unaware of systemic misogyny and, if anything, works to combat it. Yes, there were a lot of problems in the Brannon/Braga era (I got turned off of Enterprise with the obvious fanservice in the first episode, and what’s up with Troi’s first/second season uniform?), but by and large, if there ever was a franchise that took a hard look at prejudices and systemic problems, that’d be Star Trek. The joke, of course, is “When did Star Trek get so woke?”- the answer is 1966!
So - I get how taken in a vacuum, this can seem like systemic misogyny. And maybe it even is, I just don’t think the preponderance of evidence supports the theory, and I don’t think it fits Occam’s razor.
I feel like Paramount always saw Voyager as a family show. That’s why they were so irked when they wanted to make it darker.
