Paramount’s Star Trek Strategy Is Completely Failing Its Greatest Series

For six decades, fans have been boldly going where no one has gone before. With a dozen TV shows and 14 movies, Star Trek is one of the longest-running and greatest sci-fi franchises in history. And while the original series and Star Trek: The Next Generation get most of the praise, another Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine, has been making waves over the last few years.

The best Star Trek series, DS9 was purposely different than the two live-action series that came before it. Set on a space station instead of the Enterprise or any other ship, the show focused on ongoing political and religious conflicts in a region instead of having weekly adventures on different planets. Airing from 1993 to 1999, DS9 was an early adopter of the more common serialized TV that has become popular.

The ability to spend time digging into character arcs, as well as having ongoing storylines helped make DS9 a hit when it came to streaming services, getting the praise it always deserved but never received when it was originally airing. But, while TOS and TNG were both remastered for HD, Paramount has allowed DS9 to linger in standard definition, hurting its ability to become an even bigger fan favorite.

Paramount Remastered TOS And TNG, But The Budget Wasn't There For DS9

Standard definition shows are in 480p, which never looked great to begin with, but look even worse with modern TVs. Along with having to stand next to shows in HD or 4k, shows that are only available in 480p have to deal with being seen at picture sizes it wasn't intended for, and being transmitted in a format that hadn't been considered at the time — pixels.

Both Next Generation and Deep Space Nine were shot on 35mm film and transferred to video for editing in a native standard definition. When the two shows aired, the average size of a TV was 20 to 30 inches. Today, the average size is 55 to 65 inches. And while the CRT TVs of old blurred things just a bit, helping to hide the issues of 480p or even 720p, modern TVs make everything pixel-perfect, so the poor image quality really stands out.

Paramount was quick to remaster Star Trek: The Original Series and Next Generation for HD for physical media, but while TOS was a relatively easy remaster, for TNG, the time and cost were far higher. Essentially, the entire series, all 176 episodes, had to be rebuilt from the original negatives. This meant editing each episode on film to match what was seen when they originally aired on TV and then redoing the special FX. Adding to it all was the need to match modern-day sound. While Next Generation was originally finished in 2-channel stereo, it needed to be remastered in 7.1 DTS.

It was costly, but the studio knew that disc sales would more than cover what was spent. But with Deep Space Nine, which was never as popular as Next Generation, they couldn't be sure that the math would work out. Adding to the issue was the rise of streaming. As services like Hulu and Netflix took off, people started buying less physical media. Paramount couldn't risk the huge amount of time and money it would take to remaster Deep Space Nine.

Adding to the cost for DS9 is how the visual effects were done. While TNG used model photography shot on 35mm for its ships and planets, DS9's FX were done with CGI and rendered at standard resolution, meaning that they can't be upgraded to match HD and would need to be recreated from scratch.

The Cost Of Remastering Deep Space Nine Is Worth It Now

While Paramount's reasoning made sense in 2014 when the last season of Next Generation made its way to Blu-Ray, it doesn't make sense today. Thanks to streaming, Deep Space Nine's fanbase has grown considerably over the last ten years, even in hard-to-watch standard definition.

And now that Paramount has its own streaming service, it is shameful that they have not taken the time and effort to remaster not just Deep Space Nine, but Voyager as well. These two shows are trapped looking like lesser versions of Star Trek, which in turn will make newcomers believe that they must not be as good as the other shows. After all, if they were, the studio would surely want to present them in the best quality possible.

Yes, it would be a costly venture, but perhaps instead of trying to spend billions to buy Warner Bros., Paramount could focus on ensuring that the biggest franchise the studio has is given the respect it deserves. Deep Space Nine should not be treated as the overlooked middle child of Star Trek. This is a series that helped lead the way to modern TV, with a more intense style of storytelling than what had been seen before. It is not only important to Star Trek, but to the history of TV in general, and it should be treated as such by the studio that owns it.