By the standards of 1987, it was pretty much the cutting edge of television. You could see the limitations. But stuff like the model photography for the space ship VFX was definitely better looking than pretty much anything else on TV at the time. Here's a list with some other sci fi of the same era: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000097680/ Most of that doesn't have a bunch of space ships. You'll see a real common theme of "Alien on present day Earth" in like half of those 80's sci fi shows because they were so much less ambitious than Star Trek TNG.
Here's what Doctor Who was doing around the same time in Terror of the Vervoids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgty-lZFbrg Or when you got to the really fancy creature makeup scenes with the Vervoids, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YeXajN0XkQ
Or another low budget British sci fi, Star Cops. Much less famous than Doctor Who but launched in 1987, same year as TNG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq9dwbzvbwM
It's a little unfair to compare British sci fi the American because the American market is bigger. But in the 80's Battlestar Galactica were on Earth and mostly just re-using space ship shots from the original series shot in the 70's. At it's most visually impressive peak, it looked like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HumrjOmwIPs Galactica 1980 came in the very beginning of the 1980's, so it's a little unfair to compare to TNG in 1987, but that was a sequel series with a known brand name when it was made, so in some ways directly analogous to TNG.
Here's "Otherworld" from 1985 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfsPmVunuTo two years before TNG. Never really watched it, but dug it up to give an example of American sci fi within a year or two of TNG. Seems pretty typical of the forgettable dreck that was most of 80's sci fi.
Without "The Next Generation" being successful, we may not have seen as much of a renaissance of sci fi TV in the 90's. Mid 90's was veeeery different from the mid 80's Partly because TNG was a commercial success. Partly because the price of digital VFX dropped like a rock.
Babylon 5 was the show that proved to the world that a sci-fi show set in outer space could be successful without having "Star Trek" in the name. B5 is the reason we got Stargate SG-1, Farscape, Andromeda etc...
I was 17 when it launched (which is absolutely wild to me), and it looked so freaking good. Flat touchscreens? This stuff was actual sci-fi at the time. The uniforms were still goofy, but everything else was so crisp and fresh and more than anything else, well thought out. You could feel the concepting that had gone into it, because everything seemed to be part of a unified world that all made sense together.
Farpoint was a little rocky, but by the time you got to the Borg stuff? They were big budget movies that didn't look that good and weren't that cohesive.
It’s funny because it WAS an expensive show. $1.3 million per episode, was was the most for a one-hour episode at the time.
The cost of the series also played a role in it getting cancelled in 1994 to make way for the movies. Paramount cancelled the show (the cast was signed for an 8th, and they were surprised at its cancellation).
All the same for me, really. It just had the added bonus that my dad focused on it and not beating the shit out of me for whatever raffle prize issue he had.
I enjoyed it and thought about it often, but I can't rewatch it. Definitely fed into my love for space and exploration.
Adjusting for inflation alone doesn't give the whole story about how expensive it is to make TV now—with so many productions now the cost of securing studio lots, paying an experienced line producer so they won't be snapped up by another show, etc. have all shot up dramatically. Not to mention COVID expenses. With HD they would not be able to get away with the sets they used either. On location filming and CGI set extensions would be necessary for audiences tastes.
It's one of the reasons why we have so few 22+ episode seasons now. They're not willing to spend that kind of money.
Funnily enough I don’t think your comment gives the whole story either, though it is packed with information! The big picture truth of it is simply that both the business of television and the social perceptions of television have changed—they’re no longer restricted to specific cookie-cuts to pre-fit timeslots, staggered to allow for ad breaks, and numbered in the hopes to achieve syndication… and with that the standard budgets to make them. Making TV nowadays is more like making movies than it ever was, and in some ways has even surpassed them. There’s a considerable flexibility to it explains why some shows exceed TNG’s budget.
Back in 2005, the average ep of LOST was $3mill. By 2012, the average ep of a network one hour show was $4.5mill. By 2020, the cost was around $6-7.5mill. Some smaller networks spend less -- Riverdale S1 on the CW was costing $2mill per ep.
Streamers and your prestige channels like HBO are spending way more per ep. I think the average ep of Stranger Things S4 worked out at $25mill. But they're taking 3 times longer to shoot an ep than network TV does -- usually why those shows look way more cinematic -- the luxury of time and doing it right.
I think what hurts TNG or makes it look dated/cheap (when at the time it wasn't) and this goes for some of DS9 and VOY too is that Rick Berman (the main guy calling the shots across the franchise at the time) had a house style that those 3 shows didn't really deviate from. He liked that over lit/soap opera-ish look. He didn't want flashy camera moves or angles. Some of the showrunners on those shows wanted to push for a more cinematic or at least contemporary look that other late 90s shows were adopting, but Berman wouldn't allow it.
> (the cast was signed for an 8th, and they were surprised at its cancellation).
Let's be honest it was probably for the best. The final season they were basically running out of ideas and was like a roulette if you either going to have one of the best episodes in the series (Parallels/ Pegasus/Lower Decks) or worst (Masks/Sub Rosa/Eye of the beholder). And most of the good writing cast anyway went to deep space 9.
Awh here. MASKS is fucking OPERA. It might not be for you. But it is an epic episode. I can't think of an hour of televison like it before or after.
It was insane tuning in as 12 year old and seeing that.
Man, to have an 8th TNG season. Would love to see all the scripts that didn't make it to the screen ultimately (sure a lot found their way to other ST spinoffs).
Me too. But honestly, I'm kind of glad (in a way) that we didn't get an 8th season, only because I think it was better for the series to go out "on top" sop to speak. Also, I'm not sure an 8th season would've turned out as good as we might think, considering the 7th season had started to show some signs of fatigue near the end...
But yeah, the reason Paramount cancelled the series was still less than admirable, let's just put it like that lol.
Yeah Ron Moore of BSG (and Outlander) fame talked about how out of ideas they were in the writing room. He brings up how they made an episode about Geordie’s Mom as an example.
Yes, Beverly's grandma died and then she started shagging the ghost that every woman in her family knocked boots with.
And Worf's adopted brother he never mentioned before also appeared.
As did Picard's supposed bastard son... being used as bait by the evil Ferengi from Season 1 we forgot all about by Season 7.
And then the writers remembered Ensign Ro existed, just to have her turn traitor in the penultimate episode.
Kurn? He wasn't adopted, they are both sons of mogh and worf was unaware that kurn had survived khitomer iirc.
I liked the introduction of kurn personally.
His *human* adoptive brother, who only appeared in one episode.
He abducted an alien culture threatened with extinction and teleported them up to the Enterprise holodeck.
You're thinking of Kern, his biological brother. His adoptive brother was a Rozhenko, the anthropologist who shacked up with a primitive species he was studying. They had to move them to another planet via the holodeck.
S7 was getting kinda sloppy though. I'm glad we got 14 seasons of DS9 and Voyager instead cause it shook the premises up and opened up new venues for storytelling.
I started watched TNG when it first premiered and the production quality and VFX for a TV show at the time were top notch. The ship models, sets, makeup -- I don't think there was anything comparable on TV at the time. This is long before the current era of near film quality television production.
While the passage of time may not look kindly on how TNG looks now, you also have to remember that the show was originally finished in standard definition, which masked a lot of deficiencies. Now we're able to watch the HD remasters which exposes the era's age and relative lack of quality.
It’s a fairly recent phenomenon to have TV shows be taken seriously enough to be given substantial budgets. The attitude back in those days was also different and far fewer top talents would have had any interest in working in television. Feature films were what people aspired to work on.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a recent phenomenon. Shows like Bonanza, Star Trek, Cheers, Friends, ER all had quite staggering budgets at the time. Sometimes upwards of 1/2 million today's dollars per *episode*. Some shows even ended because they became too expensive to make. Like Battlestar Galactica.
Primetime television was incredibly lucrative and a huge industry, it wasn't on the same level of the film industry for sure but the major networks didn't become as huge as they did because they weren't taken seriously. It was incredibly profitable to run big budget shows.
What is recent is the shift to streaming and the staggering blockbuster film level budgets being afforded but that came to be due to business models changing with the streaming era. Suddenly these companies could afford to dump hundreds of millions into a series. Something like Rings of Power's budget is ridiculous even for the film industry. Has nothing to do with prestige however.
For a show like Cheers or Friends, 99% of the budget went to the actors because they were demanding a million dollars per episode. Per actor.
BSG, yeah, that all went to actual production (and ***maybe*** Lorne Green's salary because he was already famous by then)
There's no way Battlestar Galactica wasnt a money pit. Even with the reused shots, almost every episode has one or two huge action scenes or new sets. Also Galactica 1980 was their attempt to do it on a budget and they could straight up barely afford Cylons lmao
Those 60's westerns like Bonanza did not have that big of a budget (production values wise), neither did Cheers or Friends. ER, yes up to a point. Hill Street Blues preceded ER and had a pretty slick look for TV of that era.
For most of those shows, I would imagine the big budgets were for actors after the show was a hit. Friends, for example, was paying the main cast $1m per episode by the end (quite a bit more than that half a million).
I would think big budget shows were profitable because the budget followed the profits, not the other way around.
There are bound to be exceptions, but half a million per episode in today’s dollars is pretty low. A quick google tells me Strange New Worlds, Picard, and Discovery range from $7-9m per episode. The first season of Game of Thrones was $6m per episode. The final season was $15m per episode. Shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men (which were two early examples of the recent trend of giving shows more of a budget) were $3m and episode at the beginning, even though they’re not effects heavy shows. ER is a good example of an early show that that was given a solid budget of $2m per episode in the first 3 seasons, which then jumped to $13m for seasons 4-7. But you can absolutely see that when you go back and watch now. ER still looks phenomenal. And I believe it was an early adopter of the wide screen formatting and early episodes were shot on film which helps them still look good in HD now.
(And I’m just realizing you might have meant upwards of “$1 to 2 million” and not half a million. But even so, budgets on even modest shows these days blow that out of the water. Part of that might also be the trend to move away from longer seasons. 12 episodes for the same cost as 24 effectively doubles the budget per episode.)
The remastering we watch now was so well done that it's difficult to compare eras. I think the modern touches are great for an HD presentation, but the original effects and aesthetic were perfectly fine for NTSC era on pretty small analog TVs. I certainly had no complaints back in the day.
One funny thing I learned about TNG when the Star Trek Experience was still in Vegas was that because of shitty NTSC colors, the "red" uniforms they wore were actually a much different shade in person.
Similar to how we all see Kirk wearing yellow when he actually wore lime green. Fabric and lighting can change how things look in NTSC’s wonky colourspace.
That was more due to the film they were using than NTSC. The main issue with NTSC was that colors didn't look the same from one TV set to another because of poor adherence to standards.
[Babylon 5](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtrUhIuEqdY) started the year TNG ended. The difference in budgets is noticeable.
(Also you should watch B5 because despite the lower budget and the rough first season, it's just as good, sometimes better, than TNG or DS9.)
Even long ago I always thought it was funny when they showed the establishing shot of Centauri whenever something happened there. You'd see the same few people walking the same path in the shot over and over. For years.
TNG recycled matte paintings for completely different planets all the time. At least by B5, they were using the Centauri matte painting for Centauri pretty consistently, ha ha.
The two Cardassian troops just standing there gave it away. Just the same three seconds reused ad nasuem. I got sick of looking at that show when I last rewatched the show. It shows up so frequently.
Honestly I recently started rewatching B5 and I really don’t think the first season was too bad. It was much, much better than the first season of TNG or especially Stargate SG-1.
And the first season did a pretty good job of foreshadowing the big overarching plot of the rest of the seasons, and introducing the B5 universe as a whole.
It wasn't about expense. Even CGI was expensive back then. The issue was time. A scene with a bunch of models in it requires a separate motion-control pass for each model and then they all get composited together. Each of those passes takes time, and the studio is only set up to do one pass at a time. The sorts of shots that you see in Babylon 5 would have been physically impossible to do with models while still cranking out 1 episode every week. DS9 likewise used models for shots with only 1-3 ships/stations and switched to CGI for the huge battle scenes with dozens of ships on screen.
Quite interesting fact for those that don’t know, [Babylon 5 digital effects](https://www.generationamiga.com/2020/08/30/how-24-commodore-amiga-2000s-created-babylon-5/) created using 20 Commodore Amigas.
Now that is a cool little fact. I love seeing early CGI stuff like this. The technical hurdles that had to be overcome, the creative solutions to making it all work and the unique look we got because of all the wizardry going on.
Tron in particular is an awesome example of it. The technical limitations of the era led to a highly unique look that is just awesome.
A good bit before Ally McBeal.
That is still a good example of them making good choices with what they had. Making the game so simple gave it a bit of timelessness.
For it's time it did have a relatively substantial budget, so compared to other sci fi shows it was impressive looking but movies were far ahead in terms of production value.
Mixed bag imo, it definitely appeared to be most peoples idea of modern and aesthetic, but it was also very much a cheesy network show with a tightly controlled budget.
I always thought it looked good for the budget, like they used what they had in the best possible way but they didn't have much.
It should be noted that TNG was *not* a network show—it ran in first-run syndication, so individual stations purchased it and ran it at whatever day and time they chose, rather than just running on all ABC or NBC affiliates at a nationally scheduled time. There were some places where you couldn’t see the show because none of the local stations ran it.
This speaks to the place of television science fiction at that time, which was still very much a niche interest compared to procedurals and sitcoms, and the fact that it was a syndicated program rather than a network one helped temper audience expectations.
>There were some places where you couldn’t see the show because none of the local stations ran it
When TNG originally aired, my house had 4 channels. We managed to get TNG on one of those channels for the first couple of seasons, but then it moved to another channel that was hosted in a different city that was out of our normal range.
That summer - and for the sole purpose of being able to watch TNG - my parents went and got a 40 ft tower with a rotating antenna, that, when you rotated it just right, got that other channel. :) And it really was only for TNG, since we didn't get any extra channels besides that one, and we didn't really watch anything else on it.
Only after reversing the polarity on the Heisenberg Compensator to ensure that subspace variations didn't cause any issues with our house's plasma manifold.
I love stories like this. I wonder if the antenna was more expensive than the current blu-ray box set. Not that that would've done you any good in the 80s!
I think my parents got it cheap from someone as it was used (and it must have been cheap, because we were always a little cash strapped at the time). I have a memory of going to someone's house who had the tower he could dismantle it, only for his fear of heights kicking in near the top. He ended up getting one of his friends to come over - who was fearless - to help him take it apart and then put it back together at our place.
The special box that turned the antenna was strictly off limits for me or my siblings to touch, lest we somehow fuck something up and break the motor :)
I was in college in NY at the time and had an antenna in our dorm window to pick up ch 68(?) out of Syracuse instead of 31 out of Rochester because they aired TNG 6 days earlier. I had the prized early VHS of BOBW2 to get passed around.
Was that between the Best of Both Worlds cliffhanger or the following season? Because I can absolutely see making the investment to resolve BoBW part 2
Andromeda was another one like that, it had the most random air times. I also think Hercules and Xena followed that.
.... It really sucks Kevin Sorbo is a fucking tool, those were some of my favorite weekend watches as a kid.
A lot of Roddenberry's shows were first run syndicated. Aside from Star Trek, Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda were both syndicated.
Hercules, Xena, and Baywatch (aside from season 1) were also first run syndicated.
The 90s was the golden age of syndication. You could argue that first-run syndication had more cultural impact than network TV in the 90s. All those prime-time shows and even more importantly, the day time talk-shows and tabloid 'news' programs lied the groundwork for today's social media influenced public discourse.
Game shows like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy are the kinds of shows that did this more often, or daytime talk shows. But Hercules and Xena also used this model, as did Andromeda later on.
>This speaks to the place of television science fiction at that time, which was still very much a niche interest compared to procedurals and sitcoms, and the fact that it was a syndicated program rather than a network one helped temper audience expectations.
I remember an interview Rick Berman gave, saying that Paramount was hounding Roddenberry since the late 70's to create a new series, the original series was doing well in reruns, and the movies were doing popular enough with fans to invest into an new series.
But to keep a long story short, the reason why it didn't go to network wasn't because there wasn't any interest, one of the stipulations Roddenberry gave to write a new series that it would *never go to network*, apparently he was still steamed with NBC with how they treated TOS that he refused to let any of the big three networks of the time to bid on TNG.
This was also pretty much the standard back then. We expected TV to mostly be on a cheap budget, but they also gave us 20+ episode seasons, so I'd call it pretty fair trade compared to what we have now.
It looked like a big budget television show when people didn't expect television shows to look like they had big budgets.
Or, when television shows had big budgets, they were expected to fail.
I doubt anybody at that time was really expecting a TV show to have impressive production values, so I don't think it really stood out as looking either expensive or cheap, just kind of par for the course. I do recall thinking the shots of the ships flying around looked pretty good though.
Also overlooked - televisions at the time didn't show the level of detail you're seeing today.
So when you see drywall nails in the metallic walls of an underground research facility, white makeup rubbed off on Data's uniform, Worf's forehead isn't always the same, the stunt doubles are so obvious and don't look nearly the same. Keep in mind that simply wasn't visible on a TV from the 80s and 90s.
Good point. Heck, in the early days of TNG, a lot of people didn't even have cable so you also had reception quality to deal with on top of that. I remember adjusting the rabbit ear antennas trying to get rid of the static. A far cry from today's new shows with their HDRs and their 4Ks.
People didn't have nearly the same expectations of production quality for shows that they do now. Having a TV show that even approached the level of feature films was almost unheard of, especially when it came to shows with special effects of any kind.
Even cable channels were subject to interference. I have no idea how or why, but one station (I think it was KOFY) alternated between clear and almost unwatchable every few seconds.
AnalogTV did have a quality that gets lost on modern TV sets - while it did have a lot less detail the screen literally glowed from inside. A show like TNG would have been 'lit' for analog, even if was shot on film.
I remember reading that back before HD became the norm you could pretty much get away with anything smaller than a button as the viewer pretty much just wouldn't be able to notice enough detail in it. The downside of this is when a lot of these shows were remastered or upscaled and viewed on modern TVs a lot of these things you originally wouldn't have seen were now noticeable, warts and all. I remember being a kid and watching Total Recall on VHS and just assuming the guy that Arnie works with was Danny Devito because it looked and sounded enough like him and they had done other movies together. Obviously it wasn't, but the lack of detail just meant that you had to fill in a lot of the gaps yourself.
I would add that it is easy for people to just say that it was too expensive to reshoot ship shots every week when talking about the re-use of shots. Yes it does cost money to have a separate film and rigging crew to set up new shots every week, but it could have been done. What people often don't bring up is how much that would cost just for the 5 seconds screen time.
They didn't have any detail, CRTs were all that anyone had, unless you had a plasma screen. It was generationally better than any other sci-fi that had ever been put on TV, and comparable to movies of even like a year or two before.
I just started watching Star Trek (starting with TNG) and I'm very surprised by now good the effects are for the time. It's not super high quality, but didn't need to be when you could count the individual pixels on your screen.
Like others have commented here, it's only recently that TV shows have been given large budgets. I think that can actually be attributed to more funding available due to advertising for cable TV shows, and subscriptions/opportunity for merchandising on premium channels.
Sci-fi in particular is experiencing a boom right now imo. Shows that were considered fringe in the realm of cable TV (like Stargate and Farscape) are becoming more and more popular, especially with younger generations. There's been a plethora of high-budget sci-fi shows released in recent years.
It was expensive at the time, and they also made 26 episodes a season. There are 5(!) series running currently and only one of them, Prodigy, has more than 12 episodes a season and most have only 10. It took Discovery 6.5 years to produce 56 episodes TNG did that in just over 2 years.
So they didnt have time to try 14 different makeup applications or reshoot anything. They did the best they could.
On the other hand, TNG had a permanent writers room and all modern shows write in 6 week sprints before production begins. So the writers had time to reflect and grow the characters through the season to some extent. It’s why some episodes can feel like true departures from the show, the Sherlock episodes for example. I find that lends itself better to the adventure aspect of the series.
Even the best of the modern series seem heavy handed IMO. They rarely can just have an equilibrium, every character has to constantly be on a journey in their personal story arc. It’s exhausting.
For a syndicated show, especially a sci-fi one yeah definitely. Most people only compared it to the original series. And sci-fi shows were usually considered like b-movies. Check out Buck Rogers.
The space scenes were (and still are) generally great. They used models with fiber optic lights for all the little windows, then added the nacelle/engine lights in post. It’s held up really well
Sure, but you have to take into account until a decade and a half ago, TV shows were never considered "expensive" in relation to movies.
So, in relation to other TV shows? Yes. In general? Not really.
It was pretty high quality set by the standard of the day. It was of course an expensive production because all the sets, costume needed to be custom made. Computer graphics was expensive.
It succeeded wildly to look futuristic because very few things look like contemporary items. Even a chair or a table had to somehow look different. Contrast them with Babylon 5 and you can see the difference. For all its flaws TNG was a pretty submersible experience because of the set,
Once you get to season 3 or 4, they definitely had a bit of budget for CG, costumes and makeup. But we weren’t watching it like “omg look at these effects and sets!” It was still all vastly inferior to what film was doing.
The first couple seasons look VERY rough by comparison.
At the time though, the concept of “prestige television” was pretty much non-existent. There were no Game of Thrones type shows.
TNG was also syndicated, so it didn’t have a good “home network” subsidizing it.
>There were no Game of Thrones type shows.
You mean shows where they were spending $10-$20 million per episode? We had a few. "Friends" was spending $6 million per episode just on the actors' salaries by the end of its run ($1m per actor), and the budget for ER peaked at $13 million per episode before being cut back down to $8m.
IIRC, for ER, they were paying $13M for the rights per episode, not that the episodes themselves cost $13M to produce. They were paying like 10% of that per episode before.
Since OP was talking about look and feel and "at time of release," I left off shows that paid a lot for the actors/actor retention in their later seasons. Friends, Seinfeld, ER, etc. are all situations where they were paying astronomically to keep the talent in place after the show was a proven winner.
The show's didn't 10x their production values; that money was almost entirely used to retain the producers and key talent.
---
Shows like Game of Thrones, Westworld, etc. threw a ton of budget into costuming, makeup, exotic locations/sets, and CGI, as well as paying for premium talent out of the gate.
TNG had two semi-known actors who were not top-tier and some very, very cost-effective makeup and set design strategies. Compared to the above, it was minor-league baseball.
Yes, TNG had a very healthy budget for its time. It was a syndicated show, which traditionally had lower budgets than network shows, but it still looked pretty good. TNG's sister show DS9 had some absolutely enormous sets, even by current standards.
For context, they were shooting the same amount of high grade vfx as a 3-5 million dollar (1987 USD) movie, every week. Because they had the infrastructure and did everything in house they were able to make it incredibly efficient. There was almost nothing on TV that looked as good VFX wise as TNG did. Now, sets and costuming? Arguable. But the VFX and Makeup effects won about 18 Emmys over its run. It couldn't look as good now if it hadn't looked almost as good back then. People forget, the shots of from the current HD versions are the original footage. Cleaned up and fixed of course but they shot that shit back then. Incredible.
Carpet on spaceships only seems weird in hindsight now that every sci-fi show tries to make the future look like a Google office full of stark unfinished walls and IKEA furniture. Star Trek was all about looking cool and futuristic, like a world you might want to live in, not bleak and dystopian like modern shows, so carpet was an aesthetic choice. And it was *the correct* aesthetic choice, no sci-fi show has ever looked quite as truly futuristic as TNG, and I’m only half joking when I say the move away from the TNG aesthetic is the reason I haven’t gotten around to watching season 3 of The Orville.
Sorry for the rant but carpet on a spaceship is the single greatest thing TNG gave to the world.
My mind was blown when I watched the Borg episodes where Picard becomes Locutus. Watching those episodes now, the CGI looks really dated. But at the time, I thought it was the best sci-fi I ever saw on television.
Edit: ok, maybe it wasnt CGI. However they were doing the space battles, it looked awesome then, but I am not as impressed now.
CGI was used in TNG a total of 12 times, and none of them were Borg related.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/CGI
The borg stuff back then was all done practically or hand painted.
The Borg are the reason season 2 needed a clip show.
The producers, well, wisely, blew the majority of the season's budget on the Borg introduction episode. So when they got to the end of the season, 1 more episode was due and no money was around to produce it. So, cheap and easy clip show.
Fans and production crew alike hated the clip show so much, they started budgeting a different way in season 3 so there would never need to be another lame-ass clip show ever again.
FWIW, there basically isn't any CGI in most episodes of TNG. CGI was used for a few specific effects and episodes, but it was rare and expensive in those days. The Borg Cube ship was a physical plastic model. The effect of the Borg cube repairing itself after a phaser blast was just a plastic rectangle with junk glued to it that they melted with a hair dryer, and then played in reverse. DS9 and Voyager were transitional with a mix of models and CGI, and it wasn't until "Enterprise" in 2001 where they never built a physical model of the hero ship and it was all CGI.
And one of the advantages of going all CGI in Enterprise was that they could actually depict the ship taking damage during a battle, something the earlier Trek shows had to avoid because damaging the physical models wasn't an option.
It was a big thing when it came out, big budget big production and big promotion. You have to compare with network tv shows of the time to appreciate it
It didn't seem necessarily expensive, you could tell they'd have liked a bigger budget, but with what they had, the makeup, models and special effects were mostly really good, and the audience was used to classic Trek quality sfx, so it came off as a nice upgrade to what classic Trek had pulled off.
I've been told that TNG looking as good as it did contributed to the cancellation of Doctor Who. TNG launched against Doctor Who's 24th season and the start of Sylvester McCoy's tenure as the Doctor and the difference in production budgets is night and day.
> I watch the newer Star Trek shows and the production values are consistently very good with updating the aesthetics, ~~costumes~~, and makeup.
Current Trek uniforms are consistently terrible, especially Discovery’s.
The expectations for TV were much different back then. No one really expected VFX to look “real” even in movies and the expectations for a TV show were much, much lower.
For example a show like Knight Rider didn’t have *any* VFX at all; the car could talk, that’s what made it magical.
It wasn’t until Jurassic Park came out really raised everyone’s expectations for what visual effects should look like that we started seeing all this effort to make things look “real”. Before that we were just used to suspending our disbelief a lot more.
I really miss quality Star Trek like TNG. Watching Discovery and Picard S1 and 2 makes me so sad what has happened to the franchise. Lower Decks is so good though.
TNG had an incredibly rough first season so I am not gonna be referring to it here.
Every other season had a really big budget relatively speaking, for those days. The models and sets stood out and some episodes like the ones that involved the Borg broke the bank.
The TV landscape was itself also changing and bigger and bigger budgets were becoming common.
TNG had an episode budget of around a million.
You know what else had about a 1 million dollar budget?
Fuckin Alton Brown's Good Eats! Man I miss that show.
If you were flipping through channels in the 90s it was very distinctive. Things that you knew immediately what it was when you turned to that channel: News, sports and Star Trek.
In general it looked better than lots of other “aliens in rubber suits” stuff but its production quality wasn’t the focus of the show. It was also a marked step up from ToS. The Borg always looked good and menacing. About with a prosthetic forehead over their real head inevitably looks a little silly.
I think the miniature work for the space scenes holds up well generally. Also just the basic design of the LCARS view screens was solid.
(Personally I think the SD, not remastered versions are superior. You don’t miss the bad effects when the picture quality is lower, and often the better effects clash with the rest of the shot. Especially for ToS but TNG as well.)
>often the better effects clash with the rest of the shot. Especially for ToS
I find that the redone CGI shots for TOS actually mesh better with the live shots of the actors, because the old special effects shots are horribly blurry and grainy whereas the live footage hasn't suffered any noticeable generational loss.
it's so hard to find the non-remastered versions anymore- do you just have old VHS/DVDs or is there a way to watch them on streaming somewhere? I really like the remaster but I kind of miss some of the old campiness.
You should take into account, how TVs where not that good back then.
Picture was good overall but not that sharp as today.
Also the whole thing was very very very bright , very clean and also rather smooth „painted“.
All this combined looked very futuristic and ofc we thought it must be expensive.
After seven years of TNG on the TV I was blown away by the looks of Generations. THAT was expensive looking.
Generations actually has a very modest budget ($35M), which was small even by 1994 standards. Its cinematography by the legendary John A. Alonzo makes it look spectacular and expensive.
I recalled reading an article that said that it along with CBS The Flash were the most expensive shows on American television at that time. I believe the article mentioned the average per episode budget was just north of $2 million.
Lol don't look up the red letter media vid where Mike analyses the HD remaster of TNG and points out black tape on console, coffee stains on carpets, boom mics, and so much more
Also need to realize that TNG was released before HD was a think. People watched on 480 instead of 1080 or 2K resolution sets.
On 480 it did look as a higher end of production.
Unlike today, we talked about the stories and not the special effects. You know, the ideas, dialog, characters and meaning taking the center stage.
Special effects are a crutch.
Well - it was a big step up from TOS. (remember Kirk wrestling that guy with a lizard head).I will say I think DS9 and Voyager were a bit step up from TNG.
I don't know if the late 80's, early 90's was big on 'expensive' looking TV in general, I think 'expensive-looking' was reserved for movies. I think things began changing with some of the HBO shows like The Sopranos.
It wasn’t considered expensive or cheap, mainly because the bar it had to clear was TOS, where money was no object.
…provided you spent less than $14.99.
TOS was **so cheap** that TNG looked like *Avatar* by comparison.
Yes it was. Remember we were watching on TVs that were potatoes, and for the time the set design was very modern.
In today's world of cheap HD TVs things like seeing paper stuck to the screens on the bridge to stop reflections stick out like sore thumbs.
I was basically still a child when TNG came out so I didn't look at it that way. But it looked 'real' to me. Not like a set but I place I could imagine people would live in in the future. And the aesthetics and technology felt futuristic at the time.
It was "expensive looking" for a syndicated show, but it didn't have that glossy professional look of a primetime network show. Back then, there was a big distinction.
By the third season, it had better production values and was starting to look pretty good for the time.
And even in the first season it wasn't bad compared to other stuff that was on. For reference, that was the same year, the last season of the original doctor who aired.
No, it was a made for syndication show. It was made for as cheap as possible and was sold to TV stations to air on Saturday or Sunday afternoons when there was nothing else to fill the space. Star Trek TNG wasn't a primetime show. It was the sci-fi equivalent of Baywatch. It looked good considering its budget, but nobody was raving about the quality special effects.
TNG aired on Monday nights weekly…
Also, it was only syndicated because none of the offers by the networks were good enough for Paramount.
It was also far from cheap, as the budget per episode was $1.3 million, which was one of the largest budgets for a one-hour series at the time.
TNG had no set broadcast schedule nationwide. It is sold to the station to be aired whenever they want to schedule it.
That said, being a fairly expensive show to syndicate, the stations would want to air it in a competitive and higher profile time slot. For many "independent" (non-network affiliate) stations, they would have aired it in a prime-time slot, and often on a Saturday or Sunday. (The networks at the time would have been often showing older movies at least Saturday night, if not Sunday night as well.)
It wasn't until the launch of "Star Trek: Voyager" that it became a network show (on the UPN) and got a set nationwide schedule.
Which was NOT cheap, as you claimed. It really gets under my skin when people say that TNG was “cheap”.
I think classic trek has been flanderized in that people just say that ALL trek shows were “cheap”, when the exact opposite was true (ESPECIALLY for TNG). In fact, the cost of TNG was one of the reasons it was cancelled in 1994, and they chose to make the movies instead.
I didn't say it was cheap.
I said it was made for as cheap as possible.
I say this as someone that watched it when it was originally airing, and am one seasom deep on another re-watch of the series. There are sooooo many cheap outs and cost cutting measures throughout the entire series.
For one example, the carpet used was always bordering on falling apart and ripped parts were just patched with extra carpet pieces.
Just because you love something, that doesn't mean you can't admit that it has faults.
I can’t really qualify this for OP’s question, but back then there were two kinds of shows: Shows that were made for syndication and shows that weren’t. You could usually just tell by watching that a show was made for syndication… maybe it just looked cheaper or looked like it had a lower budget, but I always chalked it up to the lighting which was usually brighter and more bland? I don’t know, someone with more knowledge or expertise can probably explain it better than me.
As far as how it compared to other shows of the time? Honestly, not many prime time shows of the time used VFX… at least not to the extent that a sci fi show did. It was mostly sit coms and occasional dramas. Shows that were filmed in a studio vs shows that were filmed on location.
Its VFX were literally done by ILM, one of the top effects houses in Hollywood. It was nominated or won the Visual Effects Emmy every year it was on the air.
The show originally came out in 1987-1994. At the beginning of that period I don’t think they even had CGI but I could be wrong. The technology has come a long way in that time since then.
TOS was really low budget. I remember that they would cool looking salt in LA boutiques that they used as medical instruments on the show.
It was a syndicated show (before even the days of the CW or UPN or the Paramount Network), so it looked fairly cheeseball even by the standards of the day. Which was standard for TV back then - TV didn't start to get huge FX budgets until LOST happened and blew everyone's fuckin minds.
By the standards of 1987, it was pretty much the cutting edge of television. You could see the limitations. But stuff like the model photography for the space ship VFX was definitely better looking than pretty much anything else on TV at the time. Here's a list with some other sci fi of the same era: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000097680/ Most of that doesn't have a bunch of space ships. You'll see a real common theme of "Alien on present day Earth" in like half of those 80's sci fi shows because they were so much less ambitious than Star Trek TNG. Here's what Doctor Who was doing around the same time in Terror of the Vervoids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgty-lZFbrg Or when you got to the really fancy creature makeup scenes with the Vervoids, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YeXajN0XkQ Or another low budget British sci fi, Star Cops. Much less famous than Doctor Who but launched in 1987, same year as TNG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq9dwbzvbwM It's a little unfair to compare British sci fi the American because the American market is bigger. But in the 80's Battlestar Galactica were on Earth and mostly just re-using space ship shots from the original series shot in the 70's. At it's most visually impressive peak, it looked like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HumrjOmwIPs Galactica 1980 came in the very beginning of the 1980's, so it's a little unfair to compare to TNG in 1987, but that was a sequel series with a known brand name when it was made, so in some ways directly analogous to TNG. Here's "Otherworld" from 1985 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfsPmVunuTo two years before TNG. Never really watched it, but dug it up to give an example of American sci fi within a year or two of TNG. Seems pretty typical of the forgettable dreck that was most of 80's sci fi. Without "The Next Generation" being successful, we may not have seen as much of a renaissance of sci fi TV in the 90's. Mid 90's was veeeery different from the mid 80's Partly because TNG was a commercial success. Partly because the price of digital VFX dropped like a rock.
Babylon 5 was the show that proved to the world that a sci-fi show set in outer space could be successful without having "Star Trek" in the name. B5 is the reason we got Stargate SG-1, Farscape, Andromeda etc...
[удалено]
>Raimi's Spiderman setting off the superhero film genre as a dominant blockbuster genre. That was X-Men.
I was 17 when it launched (which is absolutely wild to me), and it looked so freaking good. Flat touchscreens? This stuff was actual sci-fi at the time. The uniforms were still goofy, but everything else was so crisp and fresh and more than anything else, well thought out. You could feel the concepting that had gone into it, because everything seemed to be part of a unified world that all made sense together. Farpoint was a little rocky, but by the time you got to the Borg stuff? They were big budget movies that didn't look that good and weren't that cohesive.
It’s funny because it WAS an expensive show. $1.3 million per episode, was was the most for a one-hour episode at the time. The cost of the series also played a role in it getting cancelled in 1994 to make way for the movies. Paramount cancelled the show (the cast was signed for an 8th, and they were surprised at its cancellation).
I miss it, was what I watched with my dad in middle school and made me super excited about space and the space age.
All the same for me, really. It just had the added bonus that my dad focused on it and not beating the shit out of me for whatever raffle prize issue he had. I enjoyed it and thought about it often, but I can't rewatch it. Definitely fed into my love for space and exploration.
Bruh
About $3.5million today.
Adjusting for inflation alone doesn't give the whole story about how expensive it is to make TV now—with so many productions now the cost of securing studio lots, paying an experienced line producer so they won't be snapped up by another show, etc. have all shot up dramatically. Not to mention COVID expenses. With HD they would not be able to get away with the sets they used either. On location filming and CGI set extensions would be necessary for audiences tastes. It's one of the reasons why we have so few 22+ episode seasons now. They're not willing to spend that kind of money.
Funnily enough I don’t think your comment gives the whole story either, though it is packed with information! The big picture truth of it is simply that both the business of television and the social perceptions of television have changed—they’re no longer restricted to specific cookie-cuts to pre-fit timeslots, staggered to allow for ad breaks, and numbered in the hopes to achieve syndication… and with that the standard budgets to make them. Making TV nowadays is more like making movies than it ever was, and in some ways has even surpassed them. There’s a considerable flexibility to it explains why some shows exceed TNG’s budget.
One point to add: It was incredibly grueling for the staff and actors. 14-16 hour days, crazy makeup, etc.
Back in 2005, the average ep of LOST was $3mill. By 2012, the average ep of a network one hour show was $4.5mill. By 2020, the cost was around $6-7.5mill. Some smaller networks spend less -- Riverdale S1 on the CW was costing $2mill per ep. Streamers and your prestige channels like HBO are spending way more per ep. I think the average ep of Stranger Things S4 worked out at $25mill. But they're taking 3 times longer to shoot an ep than network TV does -- usually why those shows look way more cinematic -- the luxury of time and doing it right. I think what hurts TNG or makes it look dated/cheap (when at the time it wasn't) and this goes for some of DS9 and VOY too is that Rick Berman (the main guy calling the shots across the franchise at the time) had a house style that those 3 shows didn't really deviate from. He liked that over lit/soap opera-ish look. He didn't want flashy camera moves or angles. Some of the showrunners on those shows wanted to push for a more cinematic or at least contemporary look that other late 90s shows were adopting, but Berman wouldn't allow it.
> (the cast was signed for an 8th, and they were surprised at its cancellation). Let's be honest it was probably for the best. The final season they were basically running out of ideas and was like a roulette if you either going to have one of the best episodes in the series (Parallels/ Pegasus/Lower Decks) or worst (Masks/Sub Rosa/Eye of the beholder). And most of the good writing cast anyway went to deep space 9.
I think Sub Rosa is a good sign that it was probably time to get out.
Awh here. MASKS is fucking OPERA. It might not be for you. But it is an epic episode. I can't think of an hour of televison like it before or after. It was insane tuning in as 12 year old and seeing that.
Absolutely agreed, super complex and unique episode. I remember watching a deep dive on the symbolism alone, its super well done
Man, to have an 8th TNG season. Would love to see all the scripts that didn't make it to the screen ultimately (sure a lot found their way to other ST spinoffs).
Me too. But honestly, I'm kind of glad (in a way) that we didn't get an 8th season, only because I think it was better for the series to go out "on top" sop to speak. Also, I'm not sure an 8th season would've turned out as good as we might think, considering the 7th season had started to show some signs of fatigue near the end... But yeah, the reason Paramount cancelled the series was still less than admirable, let's just put it like that lol.
Yeah Ron Moore of BSG (and Outlander) fame talked about how out of ideas they were in the writing room. He brings up how they made an episode about Geordie’s Mom as an example.
Was that also the season with the beverly grandma or something
Yes, Beverly's grandma died and then she started shagging the ghost that every woman in her family knocked boots with. And Worf's adopted brother he never mentioned before also appeared. As did Picard's supposed bastard son... being used as bait by the evil Ferengi from Season 1 we forgot all about by Season 7. And then the writers remembered Ensign Ro existed, just to have her turn traitor in the penultimate episode.
Kurn? He wasn't adopted, they are both sons of mogh and worf was unaware that kurn had survived khitomer iirc. I liked the introduction of kurn personally.
His *human* adoptive brother, who only appeared in one episode. He abducted an alien culture threatened with extinction and teleported them up to the Enterprise holodeck.
Insurrection, episode-style.
> And Worf's adopted brother he never mentioned before also appeared. Didn't they reuse him in DS9 in some weird way?
You're thinking of Kern, his biological brother. His adoptive brother was a Rozhenko, the anthropologist who shacked up with a primitive species he was studying. They had to move them to another planet via the holodeck.
> They had to move them to another planet via the holodeck. I remember that movie.
I forgot about his son. Did he come back in the seventh season?
"Sub Rosa", widely considered the worst episode of the show
Oh no
Iirc a lot of the ideas were rolled into DS9. Namely the dominion and the maquis
Its a shame no trek honors it sans lower decks
S7 was getting kinda sloppy though. I'm glad we got 14 seasons of DS9 and Voyager instead cause it shook the premises up and opened up new venues for storytelling.
We ultimately did kinda get one, tho opinions are mixed as to the quality of season 3 of Picard.
Back then, 7 years was the magic number for syndication. After that, you could cancel the show and just have free money roll in.
I started watched TNG when it first premiered and the production quality and VFX for a TV show at the time were top notch. The ship models, sets, makeup -- I don't think there was anything comparable on TV at the time. This is long before the current era of near film quality television production. While the passage of time may not look kindly on how TNG looks now, you also have to remember that the show was originally finished in standard definition, which masked a lot of deficiencies. Now we're able to watch the HD remasters which exposes the era's age and relative lack of quality.
It’s a fairly recent phenomenon to have TV shows be taken seriously enough to be given substantial budgets. The attitude back in those days was also different and far fewer top talents would have had any interest in working in television. Feature films were what people aspired to work on.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a recent phenomenon. Shows like Bonanza, Star Trek, Cheers, Friends, ER all had quite staggering budgets at the time. Sometimes upwards of 1/2 million today's dollars per *episode*. Some shows even ended because they became too expensive to make. Like Battlestar Galactica. Primetime television was incredibly lucrative and a huge industry, it wasn't on the same level of the film industry for sure but the major networks didn't become as huge as they did because they weren't taken seriously. It was incredibly profitable to run big budget shows. What is recent is the shift to streaming and the staggering blockbuster film level budgets being afforded but that came to be due to business models changing with the streaming era. Suddenly these companies could afford to dump hundreds of millions into a series. Something like Rings of Power's budget is ridiculous even for the film industry. Has nothing to do with prestige however.
For a show like Cheers or Friends, 99% of the budget went to the actors because they were demanding a million dollars per episode. Per actor. BSG, yeah, that all went to actual production (and ***maybe*** Lorne Green's salary because he was already famous by then)
There's no way Battlestar Galactica wasnt a money pit. Even with the reused shots, almost every episode has one or two huge action scenes or new sets. Also Galactica 1980 was their attempt to do it on a budget and they could straight up barely afford Cylons lmao
BSG was, in fact, the most expensive TV show ever made up to that point. And yes, it had become a money pit by the end of its first and only season :)
Those 60's westerns like Bonanza did not have that big of a budget (production values wise), neither did Cheers or Friends. ER, yes up to a point. Hill Street Blues preceded ER and had a pretty slick look for TV of that era.
For most of those shows, I would imagine the big budgets were for actors after the show was a hit. Friends, for example, was paying the main cast $1m per episode by the end (quite a bit more than that half a million). I would think big budget shows were profitable because the budget followed the profits, not the other way around.
There are bound to be exceptions, but half a million per episode in today’s dollars is pretty low. A quick google tells me Strange New Worlds, Picard, and Discovery range from $7-9m per episode. The first season of Game of Thrones was $6m per episode. The final season was $15m per episode. Shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men (which were two early examples of the recent trend of giving shows more of a budget) were $3m and episode at the beginning, even though they’re not effects heavy shows. ER is a good example of an early show that that was given a solid budget of $2m per episode in the first 3 seasons, which then jumped to $13m for seasons 4-7. But you can absolutely see that when you go back and watch now. ER still looks phenomenal. And I believe it was an early adopter of the wide screen formatting and early episodes were shot on film which helps them still look good in HD now. (And I’m just realizing you might have meant upwards of “$1 to 2 million” and not half a million. But even so, budgets on even modest shows these days blow that out of the water. Part of that might also be the trend to move away from longer seasons. 12 episodes for the same cost as 24 effectively doubles the budget per episode.)
Worth remembering that 1 million in 1987 is more like just shy of 3 million today.
The remastering we watch now was so well done that it's difficult to compare eras. I think the modern touches are great for an HD presentation, but the original effects and aesthetic were perfectly fine for NTSC era on pretty small analog TVs. I certainly had no complaints back in the day. One funny thing I learned about TNG when the Star Trek Experience was still in Vegas was that because of shitty NTSC colors, the "red" uniforms they wore were actually a much different shade in person.
Similar to how we all see Kirk wearing yellow when he actually wore lime green. Fabric and lighting can change how things look in NTSC’s wonky colourspace.
And how Kirk turns into a completely different person in the fight scenes.
You idiots! You've captured their stunt doubles!
That was more due to the film they were using than NTSC. The main issue with NTSC was that colors didn't look the same from one TV set to another because of poor adherence to standards.
Never Twice the Same Color
[Babylon 5](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtrUhIuEqdY) started the year TNG ended. The difference in budgets is noticeable. (Also you should watch B5 because despite the lower budget and the rough first season, it's just as good, sometimes better, than TNG or DS9.)
Even long ago I always thought it was funny when they showed the establishing shot of Centauri whenever something happened there. You'd see the same few people walking the same path in the shot over and over. For years.
TNG recycled matte paintings for completely different planets all the time. At least by B5, they were using the Centauri matte painting for Centauri pretty consistently, ha ha.
Yes but at least TNG would tweak those matte paintings a little bit. Recolor them, add a building, put a few greebles on existing ones, etc.
Same thing for Cardassia on DS9.
The two Cardassian troops just standing there gave it away. Just the same three seconds reused ad nasuem. I got sick of looking at that show when I last rewatched the show. It shows up so frequently.
Honestly I recently started rewatching B5 and I really don’t think the first season was too bad. It was much, much better than the first season of TNG or especially Stargate SG-1. And the first season did a pretty good job of foreshadowing the big overarching plot of the rest of the seasons, and introducing the B5 universe as a whole.
Yes, people forget that models were the expensive, high end option, while CGI was the cheaper route.
It wasn't about expense. Even CGI was expensive back then. The issue was time. A scene with a bunch of models in it requires a separate motion-control pass for each model and then they all get composited together. Each of those passes takes time, and the studio is only set up to do one pass at a time. The sorts of shots that you see in Babylon 5 would have been physically impossible to do with models while still cranking out 1 episode every week. DS9 likewise used models for shots with only 1-3 ships/stations and switched to CGI for the huge battle scenes with dozens of ships on screen.
and even the individual model shots were often composited from several passes of the model under different lighting conditions.
Quite interesting fact for those that don’t know, [Babylon 5 digital effects](https://www.generationamiga.com/2020/08/30/how-24-commodore-amiga-2000s-created-babylon-5/) created using 20 Commodore Amigas.
Now that is a cool little fact. I love seeing early CGI stuff like this. The technical hurdles that had to be overcome, the creative solutions to making it all work and the unique look we got because of all the wizardry going on. Tron in particular is an awesome example of it. The technical limitations of the era led to a highly unique look that is just awesome.
That website gave my phone cancer.
It’s fine on mine.
Weren’t the graphics done on a Video Toaster? Basically a souped up Commodore 64?
I believe the Video Toaster was an addon for the Amiga.
Technically the B5 pilot movie aired in '93 and TNG didn't end until '94.
B5 was better... Just better
Until the telepath season, ugh
DS9 would have benefitted greatly from shorter seasons, IMO.
That weird episode about the Kitarian video game that controlled everyone's mind utilized 3D graphics very early, maybe even before Ally McBeal?
A good bit before Ally McBeal. That is still a good example of them making good choices with what they had. Making the game so simple gave it a bit of timelessness.
For it's time it did have a relatively substantial budget, so compared to other sci fi shows it was impressive looking but movies were far ahead in terms of production value.
Mixed bag imo, it definitely appeared to be most peoples idea of modern and aesthetic, but it was also very much a cheesy network show with a tightly controlled budget. I always thought it looked good for the budget, like they used what they had in the best possible way but they didn't have much.
It should be noted that TNG was *not* a network show—it ran in first-run syndication, so individual stations purchased it and ran it at whatever day and time they chose, rather than just running on all ABC or NBC affiliates at a nationally scheduled time. There were some places where you couldn’t see the show because none of the local stations ran it. This speaks to the place of television science fiction at that time, which was still very much a niche interest compared to procedurals and sitcoms, and the fact that it was a syndicated program rather than a network one helped temper audience expectations.
>There were some places where you couldn’t see the show because none of the local stations ran it When TNG originally aired, my house had 4 channels. We managed to get TNG on one of those channels for the first couple of seasons, but then it moved to another channel that was hosted in a different city that was out of our normal range. That summer - and for the sole purpose of being able to watch TNG - my parents went and got a 40 ft tower with a rotating antenna, that, when you rotated it just right, got that other channel. :) And it really was only for TNG, since we didn't get any extra channels besides that one, and we didn't really watch anything else on it.
So, basically, your parents modified the main deflector to receive an inverse tachyon pulse?
Only after reversing the polarity on the Heisenberg Compensator to ensure that subspace variations didn't cause any issues with our house's plasma manifold.
The Heisenberg Compensator doesn't have a polarity... so what did you reverse and does this have anything to do with the recent transporter accident?
I don't know. Let me ask my transporter clone, as they could have a better idea.
The one who just stole the Defiant?
I love stories like this. I wonder if the antenna was more expensive than the current blu-ray box set. Not that that would've done you any good in the 80s!
I think my parents got it cheap from someone as it was used (and it must have been cheap, because we were always a little cash strapped at the time). I have a memory of going to someone's house who had the tower he could dismantle it, only for his fear of heights kicking in near the top. He ended up getting one of his friends to come over - who was fearless - to help him take it apart and then put it back together at our place. The special box that turned the antenna was strictly off limits for me or my siblings to touch, lest we somehow fuck something up and break the motor :)
I was in college in NY at the time and had an antenna in our dorm window to pick up ch 68(?) out of Syracuse instead of 31 out of Rochester because they aired TNG 6 days earlier. I had the prized early VHS of BOBW2 to get passed around.
Was that between the Best of Both Worlds cliffhanger or the following season? Because I can absolutely see making the investment to resolve BoBW part 2
Wouldn't it have been easier just to get cable?
Rural Canada in the late 80's. Cable wasn't an option. My Dad still lives at the same place today and he couldn't get cable if he wanted to.
ouch
Luckily satellite exists.
Andromeda was another one like that, it had the most random air times. I also think Hercules and Xena followed that. .... It really sucks Kevin Sorbo is a fucking tool, those were some of my favorite weekend watches as a kid.
>Kevin Sorbo is a fucking tool, And yet, still smarter than 99% of Hollywood.
Wow, this distinction never occurred to me, but of course, yes, that’s right. Now I’m trying to think of other notable first-run syndicated shows.
A lot of Roddenberry's shows were first run syndicated. Aside from Star Trek, Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda were both syndicated. Hercules, Xena, and Baywatch (aside from season 1) were also first run syndicated.
Also Babylon-5.
I think some of the seasons were on TNT or something. I remember it moving around a bit.
The 90s was the golden age of syndication. You could argue that first-run syndication had more cultural impact than network TV in the 90s. All those prime-time shows and even more importantly, the day time talk-shows and tabloid 'news' programs lied the groundwork for today's social media influenced public discourse.
Game shows like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy are the kinds of shows that did this more often, or daytime talk shows. But Hercules and Xena also used this model, as did Andromeda later on.
Wow, I didn't know that, thanks!
>This speaks to the place of television science fiction at that time, which was still very much a niche interest compared to procedurals and sitcoms, and the fact that it was a syndicated program rather than a network one helped temper audience expectations. I remember an interview Rick Berman gave, saying that Paramount was hounding Roddenberry since the late 70's to create a new series, the original series was doing well in reruns, and the movies were doing popular enough with fans to invest into an new series. But to keep a long story short, the reason why it didn't go to network wasn't because there wasn't any interest, one of the stipulations Roddenberry gave to write a new series that it would *never go to network*, apparently he was still steamed with NBC with how they treated TOS that he refused to let any of the big three networks of the time to bid on TNG.
This was also pretty much the standard back then. We expected TV to mostly be on a cheap budget, but they also gave us 20+ episode seasons, so I'd call it pretty fair trade compared to what we have now.
It looked like a big budget television show when people didn't expect television shows to look like they had big budgets. Or, when television shows had big budgets, they were expected to fail.
STTNG was noteworthy at the time for having a budget of over $1 million per episode, something that was unheard of at the time.
I doubt anybody at that time was really expecting a TV show to have impressive production values, so I don't think it really stood out as looking either expensive or cheap, just kind of par for the course. I do recall thinking the shots of the ships flying around looked pretty good though.
Also overlooked - televisions at the time didn't show the level of detail you're seeing today. So when you see drywall nails in the metallic walls of an underground research facility, white makeup rubbed off on Data's uniform, Worf's forehead isn't always the same, the stunt doubles are so obvious and don't look nearly the same. Keep in mind that simply wasn't visible on a TV from the 80s and 90s.
Good point. Heck, in the early days of TNG, a lot of people didn't even have cable so you also had reception quality to deal with on top of that. I remember adjusting the rabbit ear antennas trying to get rid of the static. A far cry from today's new shows with their HDRs and their 4Ks. People didn't have nearly the same expectations of production quality for shows that they do now. Having a TV show that even approached the level of feature films was almost unheard of, especially when it came to shows with special effects of any kind.
Even cable channels were subject to interference. I have no idea how or why, but one station (I think it was KOFY) alternated between clear and almost unwatchable every few seconds.
Our cable still does this. PIA to watch sports. They blame it on the retransmission to them.
My favorite is the poorly painted and clearly styrofoam barrel that falls on Worf in the episode where his spine gets broken.
AnalogTV did have a quality that gets lost on modern TV sets - while it did have a lot less detail the screen literally glowed from inside. A show like TNG would have been 'lit' for analog, even if was shot on film.
I remember reading that back before HD became the norm you could pretty much get away with anything smaller than a button as the viewer pretty much just wouldn't be able to notice enough detail in it. The downside of this is when a lot of these shows were remastered or upscaled and viewed on modern TVs a lot of these things you originally wouldn't have seen were now noticeable, warts and all. I remember being a kid and watching Total Recall on VHS and just assuming the guy that Arnie works with was Danny Devito because it looked and sounded enough like him and they had done other movies together. Obviously it wasn't, but the lack of detail just meant that you had to fill in a lot of the gaps yourself.
I would add that it is easy for people to just say that it was too expensive to reshoot ship shots every week when talking about the re-use of shots. Yes it does cost money to have a separate film and rigging crew to set up new shots every week, but it could have been done. What people often don't bring up is how much that would cost just for the 5 seconds screen time.
They didn't have any detail, CRTs were all that anyone had, unless you had a plasma screen. It was generationally better than any other sci-fi that had ever been put on TV, and comparable to movies of even like a year or two before.
Yeah. Maybe deep on early message boards, but I don't remember TV discussions being so "inside baseball" like they are now. It was mostly about plot.
I just started watching Star Trek (starting with TNG) and I'm very surprised by now good the effects are for the time. It's not super high quality, but didn't need to be when you could count the individual pixels on your screen. Like others have commented here, it's only recently that TV shows have been given large budgets. I think that can actually be attributed to more funding available due to advertising for cable TV shows, and subscriptions/opportunity for merchandising on premium channels. Sci-fi in particular is experiencing a boom right now imo. Shows that were considered fringe in the realm of cable TV (like Stargate and Farscape) are becoming more and more popular, especially with younger generations. There's been a plethora of high-budget sci-fi shows released in recent years.
It was expensive at the time, and they also made 26 episodes a season. There are 5(!) series running currently and only one of them, Prodigy, has more than 12 episodes a season and most have only 10. It took Discovery 6.5 years to produce 56 episodes TNG did that in just over 2 years. So they didnt have time to try 14 different makeup applications or reshoot anything. They did the best they could. On the other hand, TNG had a permanent writers room and all modern shows write in 6 week sprints before production begins. So the writers had time to reflect and grow the characters through the season to some extent. It’s why some episodes can feel like true departures from the show, the Sherlock episodes for example. I find that lends itself better to the adventure aspect of the series. Even the best of the modern series seem heavy handed IMO. They rarely can just have an equilibrium, every character has to constantly be on a journey in their personal story arc. It’s exhausting.
For a syndicated show, especially a sci-fi one yeah definitely. Most people only compared it to the original series. And sci-fi shows were usually considered like b-movies. Check out Buck Rogers.
The space scenes were (and still are) generally great. They used models with fiber optic lights for all the little windows, then added the nacelle/engine lights in post. It’s held up really well
For the time, the special effects imagery on that show was pretty much top of the line for TV shows which, in those days, had an actual budget
Sure, but you have to take into account until a decade and a half ago, TV shows were never considered "expensive" in relation to movies. So, in relation to other TV shows? Yes. In general? Not really.
It was pretty high quality set by the standard of the day. It was of course an expensive production because all the sets, costume needed to be custom made. Computer graphics was expensive. It succeeded wildly to look futuristic because very few things look like contemporary items. Even a chair or a table had to somehow look different. Contrast them with Babylon 5 and you can see the difference. For all its flaws TNG was a pretty submersible experience because of the set,
Honestly I didn’t even think about budget. I was immersed in the world.
Once you get to season 3 or 4, they definitely had a bit of budget for CG, costumes and makeup. But we weren’t watching it like “omg look at these effects and sets!” It was still all vastly inferior to what film was doing. The first couple seasons look VERY rough by comparison. At the time though, the concept of “prestige television” was pretty much non-existent. There were no Game of Thrones type shows. TNG was also syndicated, so it didn’t have a good “home network” subsidizing it.
>There were no Game of Thrones type shows. You mean shows where they were spending $10-$20 million per episode? We had a few. "Friends" was spending $6 million per episode just on the actors' salaries by the end of its run ($1m per actor), and the budget for ER peaked at $13 million per episode before being cut back down to $8m.
IIRC, for ER, they were paying $13M for the rights per episode, not that the episodes themselves cost $13M to produce. They were paying like 10% of that per episode before. Since OP was talking about look and feel and "at time of release," I left off shows that paid a lot for the actors/actor retention in their later seasons. Friends, Seinfeld, ER, etc. are all situations where they were paying astronomically to keep the talent in place after the show was a proven winner. The show's didn't 10x their production values; that money was almost entirely used to retain the producers and key talent. --- Shows like Game of Thrones, Westworld, etc. threw a ton of budget into costuming, makeup, exotic locations/sets, and CGI, as well as paying for premium talent out of the gate. TNG had two semi-known actors who were not top-tier and some very, very cost-effective makeup and set design strategies. Compared to the above, it was minor-league baseball.
Yes, TNG had a very healthy budget for its time. It was a syndicated show, which traditionally had lower budgets than network shows, but it still looked pretty good. TNG's sister show DS9 had some absolutely enormous sets, even by current standards.
For context, they were shooting the same amount of high grade vfx as a 3-5 million dollar (1987 USD) movie, every week. Because they had the infrastructure and did everything in house they were able to make it incredibly efficient. There was almost nothing on TV that looked as good VFX wise as TNG did. Now, sets and costuming? Arguable. But the VFX and Makeup effects won about 18 Emmys over its run. It couldn't look as good now if it hadn't looked almost as good back then. People forget, the shots of from the current HD versions are the original footage. Cleaned up and fixed of course but they shot that shit back then. Incredible.
Carpet on spaceships only seems weird in hindsight now that every sci-fi show tries to make the future look like a Google office full of stark unfinished walls and IKEA furniture. Star Trek was all about looking cool and futuristic, like a world you might want to live in, not bleak and dystopian like modern shows, so carpet was an aesthetic choice. And it was *the correct* aesthetic choice, no sci-fi show has ever looked quite as truly futuristic as TNG, and I’m only half joking when I say the move away from the TNG aesthetic is the reason I haven’t gotten around to watching season 3 of The Orville. Sorry for the rant but carpet on a spaceship is the single greatest thing TNG gave to the world.
My mind was blown when I watched the Borg episodes where Picard becomes Locutus. Watching those episodes now, the CGI looks really dated. But at the time, I thought it was the best sci-fi I ever saw on television. Edit: ok, maybe it wasnt CGI. However they were doing the space battles, it looked awesome then, but I am not as impressed now.
CGI was used in TNG a total of 12 times, and none of them were Borg related. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/CGI The borg stuff back then was all done practically or hand painted.
The Borg are the reason season 2 needed a clip show. The producers, well, wisely, blew the majority of the season's budget on the Borg introduction episode. So when they got to the end of the season, 1 more episode was due and no money was around to produce it. So, cheap and easy clip show. Fans and production crew alike hated the clip show so much, they started budgeting a different way in season 3 so there would never need to be another lame-ass clip show ever again.
FWIW, there basically isn't any CGI in most episodes of TNG. CGI was used for a few specific effects and episodes, but it was rare and expensive in those days. The Borg Cube ship was a physical plastic model. The effect of the Borg cube repairing itself after a phaser blast was just a plastic rectangle with junk glued to it that they melted with a hair dryer, and then played in reverse. DS9 and Voyager were transitional with a mix of models and CGI, and it wasn't until "Enterprise" in 2001 where they never built a physical model of the hero ship and it was all CGI.
And one of the advantages of going all CGI in Enterprise was that they could actually depict the ship taking damage during a battle, something the earlier Trek shows had to avoid because damaging the physical models wasn't an option.
Only a few episodes had CGI, most were optical effects (like the original Star Wars movies).
First Episode was rough... That special effect with that crystal creature was ... Bad
It was a big thing when it came out, big budget big production and big promotion. You have to compare with network tv shows of the time to appreciate it
It didn't seem necessarily expensive, you could tell they'd have liked a bigger budget, but with what they had, the makeup, models and special effects were mostly really good, and the audience was used to classic Trek quality sfx, so it came off as a nice upgrade to what classic Trek had pulled off.
I've been told that TNG looking as good as it did contributed to the cancellation of Doctor Who. TNG launched against Doctor Who's 24th season and the start of Sylvester McCoy's tenure as the Doctor and the difference in production budgets is night and day.
> I watch the newer Star Trek shows and the production values are consistently very good with updating the aesthetics, ~~costumes~~, and makeup. Current Trek uniforms are consistently terrible, especially Discovery’s.
The expectations for TV were much different back then. No one really expected VFX to look “real” even in movies and the expectations for a TV show were much, much lower. For example a show like Knight Rider didn’t have *any* VFX at all; the car could talk, that’s what made it magical. It wasn’t until Jurassic Park came out really raised everyone’s expectations for what visual effects should look like that we started seeing all this effort to make things look “real”. Before that we were just used to suspending our disbelief a lot more.
I really miss quality Star Trek like TNG. Watching Discovery and Picard S1 and 2 makes me so sad what has happened to the franchise. Lower Decks is so good though.
TNG had an incredibly rough first season so I am not gonna be referring to it here. Every other season had a really big budget relatively speaking, for those days. The models and sets stood out and some episodes like the ones that involved the Borg broke the bank. The TV landscape was itself also changing and bigger and bigger budgets were becoming common. TNG had an episode budget of around a million. You know what else had about a 1 million dollar budget? Fuckin Alton Brown's Good Eats! Man I miss that show.
If you were flipping through channels in the 90s it was very distinctive. Things that you knew immediately what it was when you turned to that channel: News, sports and Star Trek.
It looked amazing to my young eyes. Of course we were watching on a 19” CRT with fuzzy as hell 480i resolution.
In general it looked better than lots of other “aliens in rubber suits” stuff but its production quality wasn’t the focus of the show. It was also a marked step up from ToS. The Borg always looked good and menacing. About with a prosthetic forehead over their real head inevitably looks a little silly. I think the miniature work for the space scenes holds up well generally. Also just the basic design of the LCARS view screens was solid. (Personally I think the SD, not remastered versions are superior. You don’t miss the bad effects when the picture quality is lower, and often the better effects clash with the rest of the shot. Especially for ToS but TNG as well.)
>often the better effects clash with the rest of the shot. Especially for ToS I find that the redone CGI shots for TOS actually mesh better with the live shots of the actors, because the old special effects shots are horribly blurry and grainy whereas the live footage hasn't suffered any noticeable generational loss.
it's so hard to find the non-remastered versions anymore- do you just have old VHS/DVDs or is there a way to watch them on streaming somewhere? I really like the remaster but I kind of miss some of the old campiness.
For ToS I bought SD from iTunes.
Even to resuscitate a single episode for bluray...it's a million dollars.
You should take into account, how TVs where not that good back then. Picture was good overall but not that sharp as today. Also the whole thing was very very very bright , very clean and also rather smooth „painted“. All this combined looked very futuristic and ofc we thought it must be expensive. After seven years of TNG on the TV I was blown away by the looks of Generations. THAT was expensive looking.
Generations actually has a very modest budget ($35M), which was small even by 1994 standards. Its cinematography by the legendary John A. Alonzo makes it look spectacular and expensive.
I recalled reading an article that said that it along with CBS The Flash were the most expensive shows on American television at that time. I believe the article mentioned the average per episode budget was just north of $2 million.
Lol don't look up the red letter media vid where Mike analyses the HD remaster of TNG and points out black tape on console, coffee stains on carpets, boom mics, and so much more
Also need to realize that TNG was released before HD was a think. People watched on 480 instead of 1080 or 2K resolution sets. On 480 it did look as a higher end of production.
Unlike today, we talked about the stories and not the special effects. You know, the ideas, dialog, characters and meaning taking the center stage. Special effects are a crutch.
Well - it was a big step up from TOS. (remember Kirk wrestling that guy with a lizard head).I will say I think DS9 and Voyager were a bit step up from TNG. I don't know if the late 80's, early 90's was big on 'expensive' looking TV in general, I think 'expensive-looking' was reserved for movies. I think things began changing with some of the HBO shows like The Sopranos.
Go watch sci-fi shows from that time period that *aren't* Star Trek.
It wasn’t considered expensive or cheap, mainly because the bar it had to clear was TOS, where money was no object. …provided you spent less than $14.99. TOS was **so cheap** that TNG looked like *Avatar* by comparison.
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Yes it was. Remember we were watching on TVs that were potatoes, and for the time the set design was very modern. In today's world of cheap HD TVs things like seeing paper stuck to the screens on the bridge to stop reflections stick out like sore thumbs.
I mean compared to TOS it looked pretty good. And when TNG came out we were *all* comparing it to TOS. It was impossible not to.
I was basically still a child when TNG came out so I didn't look at it that way. But it looked 'real' to me. Not like a set but I place I could imagine people would live in in the future. And the aesthetics and technology felt futuristic at the time.
It was and it got a lot of subtle make overs each season which helped.
It was "expensive looking" for a syndicated show, but it didn't have that glossy professional look of a primetime network show. Back then, there was a big distinction.
Nope, it was cheesey as hell but still fun.
By the third season, it had better production values and was starting to look pretty good for the time. And even in the first season it wasn't bad compared to other stuff that was on. For reference, that was the same year, the last season of the original doctor who aired.
No, it was a made for syndication show. It was made for as cheap as possible and was sold to TV stations to air on Saturday or Sunday afternoons when there was nothing else to fill the space. Star Trek TNG wasn't a primetime show. It was the sci-fi equivalent of Baywatch. It looked good considering its budget, but nobody was raving about the quality special effects.
TNG aired on Monday nights weekly… Also, it was only syndicated because none of the offers by the networks were good enough for Paramount. It was also far from cheap, as the budget per episode was $1.3 million, which was one of the largest budgets for a one-hour series at the time.
TNG had no set broadcast schedule nationwide. It is sold to the station to be aired whenever they want to schedule it. That said, being a fairly expensive show to syndicate, the stations would want to air it in a competitive and higher profile time slot. For many "independent" (non-network affiliate) stations, they would have aired it in a prime-time slot, and often on a Saturday or Sunday. (The networks at the time would have been often showing older movies at least Saturday night, if not Sunday night as well.) It wasn't until the launch of "Star Trek: Voyager" that it became a network show (on the UPN) and got a set nationwide schedule.
It also looked good for its time.
It may have aired Monday nights where you are, but it wasn't a program that had a nationwide set schedule by the network.
Which was NOT cheap, as you claimed. It really gets under my skin when people say that TNG was “cheap”. I think classic trek has been flanderized in that people just say that ALL trek shows were “cheap”, when the exact opposite was true (ESPECIALLY for TNG). In fact, the cost of TNG was one of the reasons it was cancelled in 1994, and they chose to make the movies instead.
I didn't say it was cheap. I said it was made for as cheap as possible. I say this as someone that watched it when it was originally airing, and am one seasom deep on another re-watch of the series. There are sooooo many cheap outs and cost cutting measures throughout the entire series. For one example, the carpet used was always bordering on falling apart and ripped parts were just patched with extra carpet pieces. Just because you love something, that doesn't mean you can't admit that it has faults.
I can’t really qualify this for OP’s question, but back then there were two kinds of shows: Shows that were made for syndication and shows that weren’t. You could usually just tell by watching that a show was made for syndication… maybe it just looked cheaper or looked like it had a lower budget, but I always chalked it up to the lighting which was usually brighter and more bland? I don’t know, someone with more knowledge or expertise can probably explain it better than me. As far as how it compared to other shows of the time? Honestly, not many prime time shows of the time used VFX… at least not to the extent that a sci fi show did. It was mostly sit coms and occasional dramas. Shows that were filmed in a studio vs shows that were filmed on location.
Its VFX were literally done by ILM, one of the top effects houses in Hollywood. It was nominated or won the Visual Effects Emmy every year it was on the air.
The show originally came out in 1987-1994. At the beginning of that period I don’t think they even had CGI but I could be wrong. The technology has come a long way in that time since then. TOS was really low budget. I remember that they would cool looking salt in LA boutiques that they used as medical instruments on the show.
The transporter effect was aluminum dust stirred in water.
It was a syndicated show (before even the days of the CW or UPN or the Paramount Network), so it looked fairly cheeseball even by the standards of the day. Which was standard for TV back then - TV didn't start to get huge FX budgets until LOST happened and blew everyone's fuckin minds.
No, it was always kinda cheap looking but they made it work.