39 Years Later, the Most Important Sci-Fi Series of the ’80s Is Officially Free on Stream

Star Trek fans had plenty of reasons to be skeptical in 1987 as Star Trek: The Next Generation changed almost everything audiences knew about the franchise. Kirk, Spock and McCoy were gone. The show jumped nearly a century into the future, put a Klingon on the bridge and handed command of the Enterprise to a very different kind of captain.

Even with enormous anticipation surrounding Star Trek’s return to television, the reception wasn’t exactly glowing. Washington Post critic Tom Shales memorably dismissed Jean-Luc Picard as “a grim bald crank who would make a better villain” and compared Data to “a San Francisco street mime.” Nearly 40 years later, with all seven seasons of The Next Generation now streaming for free on Pluto TV, those early reactions are fascinating to revisit.

History, of course, had other ideas. The Next Generation didn’t just overcome those early doubts. It proved Star Trek could thrive without Kirk and Spock, and in doing so, it created the blueprint for the franchise we know today.

Star Trek without Kirk and Spock

Image: Paramount

It’s easy to forget just how strange the idea of The Next Generation must have seemed in 1987. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy weren’t characters from some distant chapter of Star Trek history. The original cast was still making movies, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home had become the franchise’s biggest box-office hit ever less than a year before TNG premiered. Audiences weren’t clamoring for replacements because the old crew had stopped working.

Of course, these weren’t exactly replacements anyway. Jean-Luc Picard wasn’t another James T. Kirk. Patrick Stewart’s older, more reserved captain preferred diplomacy to throwing a punch, while William Riker looked more like the square-jawed adventurer audiences might have expected to find sitting in the captain’s chair. Data shared some of Spock’s outsider perspective but approached humanity from the opposite direction: He desperately wanted to understand the emotions Spock often tried to suppress. Perhaps the biggest change was Worf. The Klingons had spent decades as some of Star Trek’s most recognizable enemies. Now a Klingon was wearing a Starfleet uniform on the bridge of the Enterprise.

The series wasn’t asking viewers to accept substitutes for characters they already loved. It was asking them to accept that Star Trek itself was the thing worth coming back for. Once audiences embraced Picard, Data, Worf, and the rest of the Enterprise-D crew on their own terms, the franchise no longer needed Kirk and Spock to boldly go anywhere.

TNG needed time to find itself

Convincing audiences to give a new Enterprise crew a chance was only half the battle. The Next Generation then had to become a show worth sticking around for, and its first season didn’t make that easy.

Looking back, the problems are obvious. The characters feel underdeveloped, the tone swings wildly from episode to episode, and the series often seems caught between recreating the Star Trek of the 1960s and figuring out what Star Trek should look like in the 1980s. “The Naked Now” essentially revisited an Original Series story in only the show’s second episode (the words “Data” and “fully functional” should never be in the same sentence). And the cringey “Code of Honor” (Season 1, Episode 4) remains an episode just about everyone involved would probably prefer to forget.

Even Picard wasn’t quite Picard yet. The captain who would eventually anchor episodes like “The Measure of a Man,” “The Best of Both Worlds,” and “The Inner Light” could be stiff and distant early on, so Tom Shales’ brutal description of him in 1987 is a little more understandable. He wasn’t reviewing the Jean-Luc Picard we remember today. That character, like the series around him, was still a work in progress.

Most importantly, The Next Generation got the time to chart a better course. The show gradually found its voice before taking a significant leap forward in its third season, when its characters, storytelling, and vision of the future finally coalesced into the TNG fans remember now. It’s difficult not to wonder what would happen to a similarly uneven series today. TNG didn’t arrive as one of Star Trek’s defining shows. It was allowed to become one.

The blueprint Star Trek still follows

Image: Paramount

By the time The Next Generation ended its seven-season run in 1994, the biggest question surrounding Star Trek was no longer whether the franchise could survive without Kirk and Spock. TNG had answered that years earlier. The question was where Star Trek could go next.

The answer, as it turned out, was just about anywhere. Deep Space Nine left the Enterprise behind for a space station and eventually plunged the Federation into war. Voyager stranded its crew on the other side of the galaxy. Enterprise went backward to explore a time before Kirk, while later shows like Discovery and Strange New Worlds continued finding different ways into the same universe. None needed Picard and his crew to be Star Trek, just as TNG hadn’t needed Kirk and Spock.

That’s the blueprint The Next Generation created. Its greatest contribution wasn’t establishing that every Star Trek series should look like TNG. It was proving they didn’t have to. Captains could change. Crews could change. Ships, settings and even the kind of stories being told could change. Star Trek had become an idea bigger than any one version of it.

Watching TNG today on Pluto TV means seeing that transformation happen onscreen, from a shaky first season still searching for its identity to a series confident enough to eventually hand the franchise to yet another crew. Nearly four decades later, Star Trek is still making the same bet The Next Generation made in 1987. Give audiences something different, but make sure that somewhere underneath it all, it still feels like Star Trek.

The Next Generation now streaming for free on Pluto TV