> Plots are simplified and repeated. Viewers are often shown and then told important points multiple times, just to make sure they don't miss them.

This kind of TV writing really frustrates me. I’m currently rewatching The Wire (just finished Season 3) and the producers, writers and directors take the complete opposite approach. Each season has a large number of characters with many subtly inter-relating plots. To get the most out of the show, you need to be paying attention and to have a good memory for recalling details from previous episodes and previous seasons. The first two times I watched the show (more than 15 years ago), I watched in on DVD (lower resolution, 4:3 aspect ratio). This time I’m watching it in 16:9 HD on Bluray and I’ve picked up so many plot points and characterisations that I hadn’t picked up (or don’t remember) before, e.g., one very brief shot in Season 1 explains how Bubs gets his nickname. It’s such a breath of fresh air for the writers to pay so much attention to detail and for the viewer to be treated like a reasonably intelligent adult.

I agree with your take on Picard. However, I didn’t enjoy Discovery so haven’t bothered with any of the other recent Star Trek series. Thanks for the summaries of the other two shows. I’ll add Lower Decks to my to-watch list.

To your point, the Lower Decks writers were clearly TNG fans.

For me, DIS wasn't so much a case of "the problem with" as "amongst the many problems with".

Things as you say, but also: didn't know show's own technology history (Klingons with cloaks before they should've had them), adding in spore drive then needing to retcon it.

The show din't seem to know what it wanted to be and kept pulling in different directions, one of the early plans was an "anthology series, with each season being a standalone, serialized story set in a different era", which would have suited this much, much better: one or two episodes about the Klingon war, one showing Pike's command before Enterprise, young Spock's first mission, even some about a spore drive and the problems it has, some AI-takeover stuff, some post-TNG stuff, one episode about galaxy-threatening event, one about some post-apocalyptic thing like The Burn isn't even bad. But all that smooshed together with the same crew? Nah.

The reason Michael Burnham had a male-coded name was teased but never actually revealed (could have been interesting e.g. "adopted by Vulcans who didn't notice it was male-coded because that's a silly human thing"). Her character shifted way too hard and way too fast, from "Vulcan persona due to upbringing" to "traumatised normal human", a nature-vs-nurture tale could have been an interesting thing to explore.

And Michael Burnham was correct to want a show of force against the Klingons! Sure, wildly violated how command hierarchy works, but she was correct, and Starfleet Command should have known that because she got advice from Sarek. Not that she should have been Sarek's never-before-mentioned adopted daughter, we need to see new characters rather than just repeating the old ones; I mean, Vulcan is an entire plant, not a small Pacific island. (Amusing trivia from some fan-site I visited decades ago: VOY had the opposite problem, in that the list of extras appearing as background crew was larger than the crew complement).

And in the battle before they went off to the far future, that unexploded torpedo inside Enterprise, which the admiral heroically sacrificed herself to disarm… (1) it's antimatter, how does that "not explode"?, (2) it's ~ 50 megatons and inside the ship and in TOS an overloaded phaser pistol was supposed to be able to blow out multiple decks, (3) what, are their transporters not working? Can't you either beam it out, or the admiral out after she disarms it? (4) Why send in an admiral, did they run out of ensigns and non-officers? And Control (the AI) was proto-Borg, right as we had three seasons of Picard with season 1: Romulans, Borg, and Androids; Season 2: Q, Borg, and time travel; Season 3: Borg, Changelings, and Crusher saying "no one has seen or heard from the Borg in a decade".

The Visitor (S4, E2) was nominated for a Hugo award. The main character in this story is an older version of Jake Sisko, played by Tony Todd.

For myself there'd be many but it's difficult to name them in isolation. For instance 'In the Pale Moonlight' is obviously going to be near to #1, but I think if you don't have the buildup and character arc to that point that it might not hit with the same sort of impact as somebody who'd watched the show to that point.

It's kind of like Game of Thrones and 'The Red Wedding'. That episode is zomg, but if you watched it in isolation with no knowledge of the character arcs to date, it'd probably be interesting, but wouldn't have anywhere near the same sort of punch.

Duet is monumental. I've watched all the recent greats, from Sopranos to The Wire, and Duet remains the best realized hour of television I've ever seen.

"Far Beyond The Stars" is also incredibly tight and affecting writing and Avery Brooks delivers an absolutely stone cold believable performance while also keeping up the very Avery Brooks scenery chewing. Might be lost one someone who didn't know the characters outside of the Benny Russell scenarios but holy smokes.

Stargate SG-1 in their episode Wormhole X-treme, which released Sep 8 2021, so just before 9/11, made fun of the TV industry trend of pushing everything towards darker, edgier, "extreme" styles.

What are you talking about? I liked them as people. Amos was comedic relief, a psycho, the rest of them are ... people with human personalities.

Oh wow. Had no idea there was an earlier production of Dirk Gently. I've only seen the BBC-America one, which is magnificent.

As a lover of Douglas Adams (and a non-American), I adored the concept of Dirk Gently but felt the entries were some of the weakest material he'd ever released. There were so many great ideas but the characters were a confusing mess. The US adaption by contrast is possibly the most perfect blend or midpoint between of American and British humour I've ever seen, and one of the tightest time-travel stories that you can wish for without taking itself too seriously.

Looking forward to watching this previous series, I like Howard Overman and Matt Jone's other work.

That’s not true.

Plenty of great places all over the country.

Being liberal isn’t the same thing as being a Marxist.

Love it or leave it isn’t a valid argument.