I enjoyed Enterprise. It was the first Star Trek I watched and I watched it with my dad. Next Gen and Deep Space 9 are still better. I don't think TOS is better though.
I've always liked Enterprise. Not perfect by any means, but I thought they did a good job overall of capturing the feel of early space exploration in the Star Trek universe. Underpowered, outgunned, no rules...they had to invent the concept of a red alert at one point.
They did almost lose me at the start of season 4. After the Xindi arc in season 3, they had those two episodes where it looked like another long story was being set up, and I was like, OH NO, I can't commit to this. In fact, I didn't watch them in their entirety until much more recently.
Of course, now, practically everything outside SNW is one storyline...but the seasons have far fewer episodes.
Of course, now, practically everything outside SNW is one storyline
It's not a problem anymore, because you don't need to catch every single episode on the day and time your local TV would care to show them, if they cared enough to show them all and in order.
Now you can just go to Netflix and watch seasons 3 and 7 of a new show on any time you wish.
But seasons 1,2, and 4-6 won’t be on there until six months from now, and the subscription price will raise again, and you have to cope with the fact that episodes of certain seasons will just be missing because they don’t feel like it agrees with their company beliefs.
Yeah, but there are times when I just want a monster-of-the-week episode...I get tired of the longer storylines sometimes. And you can't just go back and watch one of them and have it make sense.
I liked it because it wasn’t perfect. They were a bunch of goofs trying to figure it out. They weren’t loose with the rules because there were no rules— they just did the best that they could.
A lot of the writing was a bit rough, though. And that theme song was unforgivable.
I find TOS hard to compare to the others just because it was the trailblazer, it launched a franchise that is still going strong 60 years later. I'm slowly making my way through Enterprise, the theme song is out of place obviously, but its been enjoyable so far.
TOS feels like a completely different franchise when you compare it with TNG through ENT. I blame the tone shift on when it was created. There's almost 20 years separating TOS and TNG while TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT were back to back.
It's probably not a popular opinion but I consider TOS to be the weakest entry of Star Trek (that I've seen) and completely understand why it got cancelled.
I know it gets shit but I loved ENT. Sure the first two seasons were rocky but the last two showed they were getting their footing - I would have loved them to dive deeper into the beginning of the Federation.
Apart from the intro tune, I also didn't share the hate. Sure, the tone was different and it had a bit of a rocky start indeed, but ah well.. people often forget that the first season of TNG was hardly a bastion of solid writing and consistency, definitely rough around the edges.
While I like all the seasons of ENT, I actually liked the first two seasons the best. I find that Star Trek works best with an episodic format as opposed to long running plotlines. Watching the first crew to explore space finding out how unprepared they were, having to find a balance between optimism and pragmatism, and having to basically make up the rules that would later become future Starfleet policy was fun and enjoyable.
The time travel subplot was wasted by the writers. The Temporal Cold War set the series in an alternate reality from the rest of Trek and would have let them write whatever stories they wanted without having to worry about continuity.