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It's not "grit" that they want.
By Dogface

Looks like a few people are not getting the point. It is not the "gritty" that is setting Galactica off from the sad state that Trek sank to. Focusing on "grit" is pretty much as bad as what the producers/lawyers at Paramount did to Trek. They abandoned real strengths in search of a "look". In an effort to become as inoffensive as possible, Trek was castrated. While, from our perspective, ToS is remarkably nice and tame, in it's day, it was hardcore, standards-rocking television. It actually mentioned the Viet Nam war--in a fiction series! It showed a white man kissing a black woman! It presented an "enemy" as people who, while they might be dangerous, might also be worth getting to know. It also probed questions of the limits of power and the limits of responsible liberty in a way that TV fiction had hitherto never done, at least not any US-produced ongoing series.

What, on the other hand, did the successor series give us? Progressively blander and blander fare, sticking very hard, almost obsessively so, to safe subjects, to things that it was easy to pick a side and root on. "Serpents for Eden"--Kirk realized the horrible moral ambiguity of arming the Federation's proxy in that episode, but he did it, even though he knew it might end up being the wrong thing to do in the long run, because it seemed necessary.

The new series, especially the last one, were safer by comparison to what else was already available on TV in the same years the new series were being first-run. As they went along, each successive Trek series pandered. They pandered to those within Paramount who demanded inoffensiveness in search of big ratings, and they pandered to fans who wanted, more than anything, Trek image with nothing to upset their rose-colored vision of Trek.

It was not lack of "grit" that put Trek to sleep, I'll agree with that, but those who point to Galatica as having what Trek needed to keep are not pointing at "grit". They're pointing at what Trek used to have--relevance and willingness to possibly offend fans in order to tell a good story.

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