Here in Canada, we get all of the Star Trek series through a long-running deal between Paramount and Bell Media, which means that the Star Treks all stream on a Bell product called Crave — which is a pretty good service, especially (like all streamers) if you aren’t paying for it. Last week, the notices started going up on the Crave interface: Picard — available till July 31. Lower Decks – July 31. Strange New Worlds, which just aired its series-best episode last week (“Those Old Scientists”), through September 9, which is also a couple of days after the fourth-season premiere of Lower Decks, which I guess means LD season four ain’t coming to Canada this way, either. Star Trek: Prodigy — already gone, its future uncertain even on Paramount+. Deep Space Nine, removed so quickly and unceremoniously it doesn’t even come up in search results anymore. Everybody go buy a blu-ray.
Down in the States, of course, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are striking, and I seriously considered suspending this blog till the resolution of the strike action. There’s no real CTA from either organization to do so, yet — they have some guidance for influencers and podcasters, of which I am neither — but Picard is a union show, and promoting struck work is not my intention here. Nonetheless, I’m being careful to take no action that the guilds haven’t asked for specifically. (Which means: I haven’t cancelled any streaming subscriptions or engaged in other boycott activities, either.) I’ll do so if and when the time comes, both because I support the guilds wholeheartedly and because the AMPTP is just being lunatic in their unwillingness to address the good-faith concerns of their union partners. The studios aren’t wrong to say that the entire business model has changed around them and that mainstream film and television production is under unprecedented threat; they’re just being wholly unreasonable shitty dickheads around the idea that giving the guilds what they want is anything other than a rounding error in the vast, wholesale renovation the entire industry requires to integrate the (bad) business model that is streaming into the normal flow of operations.
Info and actions on supporting the strike can be found here:
I tried signing up for Paramount+ when Strange New Worlds premiered its second season; I wanted to watch the series in 4K, and (foolishly, as it turned out) assumed that if the Paramount streaming service was for absolutely nothing else, it was probably — at least! — for that. Well, nope: likely due to the aforementioned Crave deal, Paramount+ in Canada was hilariously bare of Star Trek content as a whole, and certainly didn’t carry Strange New Worlds in 4K, though I suppose it might now, after the end of whatever Bell deal is expiring this summer. I still don’t think I’ll subscribe, though. As the streamers are years late realizing, we are well past the point of Peak Streaming Services; I am not going to add another $10/month fee for the privilege of watching various new Star Trek series, of which I like exactly three, when they’ve already cancelled one of them (Prodigy; although, for that matter, they’ve also killed Discovery, although that one’s not one of the three), and I will never watch an episode of Yellowstone in my life. The idea of every studio having its own streamer is so fundamentally ridiculous that, yes, I think we can officially start questioning whether we need studio executives and C-suites at all — whether they can, indeed, be better replaced by artificial intelligence. A thinking machine supercomputer — for example, our dear old friend Lt. Commander Data — would never be dumb enough to think the average consumer was going to subscribe to six or seven different channels at a dozen bucks a month, on top of what they’re already paying for internet, on top of what they’re already paying for music, on top of what they’re already paying for their phone. And yet every single one of the majors, except Universal, ran at that cliff as though there was nothing on the other side of it but ladders to financial heaven.
Me? I’m hoping the announcements on Crave mean the Star Trek franchise is just going back to Netflix, because someone at Paramount woke the fuck up and realized that licensing revenue is stable, lucrative, and doesn’t require you to compete in the tech space, which is about half a step shy of sinking all your resources into crypto. A pyramid scheme, the lot of it.
Blogging the Next Generation: Picard runs Thursdays on tederick.com as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: Picard. The original BTNG did the same for Star Trek: The Next Generation.