Where to begin? The characters in ST:TNG were just dreadful. The crew was a collection of shiny, happy, perfect, cold fish, with no depth, no passions that ever seemed more than a put-on, and who were evocative of nothing--the sort of people you'd send millions of miles away just to get rid of them. This was probably inevitable, given the circumstances of their creation. Most of them weren't created as "characters" at all, but were conceived as nothing more than line-item gimmicks--an empath, a Klingon, a teenager, a Pinnochio-modeled android, a blind man at the helm.
Whatever glue Gene Roddenberry was sniffing at the time convinced him that the last--a blind man leading them--was a *fantastic* metaphor (luckily, cooler heads later prevailed, and the blind guy was packed off to Engineering).
Most of the show's significant elements were cannibalized from earlier projects. Storywise, a gap of about 80 years is supposed to exist between the original series and TNG, but they're still using exactly the same technology, in the time of TNG, as they were in the original. All of the same equipment, with all of the same capabilities and limitations; technology hasn't advanced an inch in eight decades. TNG's one technological "innovation" was the holodeck, and even it was lifted from the ST: Phase One project from the '70s (which had mutated into ST: The Motion Picture, sans holodeck). That project also provided two of the other TNG characters: Will Riker was Will Decker from STP1, with Troi as the Ilia-modeled empath with whom he'd formerly had a relationship.
TNG also cannibalized the original series for stories. The first season of TNG was littered, from beginning to end, with plots and other elements lifted directly from the original. This unmotley crew of gimmicks spent their first season blandly going where the first Enterprise crew had gone before. The show improved significantly later but its major defects were structural, and stayed with it throughout (which is why it's so hard to watch in re-runs). The improvements shouldn't be overstated, either: TNG ran for 8 seasons, and if one were to extract all the good-to-great episodes from the entire run, there wouldn't be enough to fill a single season. I found much of it unwatchable when first running, and it holds up even worse on second viewings. Overall, just a really awful idea, done, for the most part, badly.
The writers also seemed genuinely committed to the notion--and this is one of the things I hated most about TNG--that meaningless technobabble is a substitute for competent writing. The ultimate outcome of what seemed like dozens of episodes hinged on whether a polymorphic induction framistat could be made to generate a positronic field, or whether Geordi and the robot could rejigger a 10 power electron thingamabob to elliptically convert alpha waves into magnetized mercury particles.
"Make it so, Number One." And he does, and the universe is saved. Except that's really, really stupid, and unengaging. This was a problem TNG never overcame.
Whatever glue Gene Roddenberry was sniffing at the time convinced him that the last--a blind man leading them--was a *fantastic* metaphor (luckily, cooler heads later prevailed, and the blind guy was packed off to Engineering).
Most of the show's significant elements were cannibalized from earlier projects. Storywise, a gap of about 80 years is supposed to exist between the original series and TNG, but they're still using exactly the same technology, in the time of TNG, as they were in the original. All of the same equipment, with all of the same capabilities and limitations; technology hasn't advanced an inch in eight decades. TNG's one technological "innovation" was the holodeck, and even it was lifted from the ST: Phase One project from the '70s (which had mutated into ST: The Motion Picture, sans holodeck). That project also provided two of the other TNG characters: Will Riker was Will Decker from STP1, with Troi as the Ilia-modeled empath with whom he'd formerly had a relationship.
TNG also cannibalized the original series for stories. The first season of TNG was littered, from beginning to end, with plots and other elements lifted directly from the original. This unmotley crew of gimmicks spent their first season blandly going where the first Enterprise crew had gone before. The show improved significantly later but its major defects were structural, and stayed with it throughout (which is why it's so hard to watch in re-runs). The improvements shouldn't be overstated, either: TNG ran for 8 seasons, and if one were to extract all the good-to-great episodes from the entire run, there wouldn't be enough to fill a single season. I found much of it unwatchable when first running, and it holds up even worse on second viewings. Overall, just a really awful idea, done, for the most part, badly.
The writers also seemed genuinely committed to the notion--and this is one of the things I hated most about TNG--that meaningless technobabble is a substitute for competent writing. The ultimate outcome of what seemed like dozens of episodes hinged on whether a polymorphic induction framistat could be made to generate a positronic field, or whether Geordi and the robot could rejigger a 10 power electron thingamabob to elliptically convert alpha waves into magnetized mercury particles.
"Make it so, Number One." And he does, and the universe is saved. Except that's really, really stupid, and unengaging. This was a problem TNG never overcame.