Do You Miss Watching Free 'Star Trek'?
With 'Strange New Worlds' Coming As Yet Another Pay To View Star Trek, We Long For The Days of Syndicated Free Sci-Fi
Remember when so many things in our life were FREE? TV shows. Feature films. Music on the radio. Yes, we suffered irritating ads - we still do - but our wallets didn’t suffer as much. Today it’s all about that digital paywall. The pay as you go or you don’t get in.
Even Starfleet now charges you to hitch a ride to explore strange new worlds.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is coming and it’s one of the most anticipated new shows. Polls say only the Disney + show Obi-Wan has more buzz orbiting around it. This new Trek promises to return original series creator Gene Roddenberry’s beloved, legendary science fiction franchise back to its foundational roots.
Critics are already hailing it as a win - far more celebrated than any of the previous CBS All Access or Paramount + incarnations of Roddenberry’s Wagon Train To The Stars. Going out there in a big, grand starship searching for new lifeforms and new civilizations. Honestly, I can’t wait to indulge in the 10 episode spanning first season.
But there’s that cash catch: We’re all gonna have to pay for the prime privilege of seeing starships warp into the final frontier.
Yes, streaming has changed everything in the media landscape. I rarely even buy movies and TV shows on disc anymore. I prefer buying the far faster - getting my choice title in seconds - and usually slightly or significantly cheaper. And then we have all those streaming exclusives.
Netflix came along to shake our viewing habits up and basically all of how Hollywood makes and distributes content. Then HULU, HBO-Max, Disney Plus and now Paramount +. joined the watch party and it’s simply a streaming world. If you don’t stream now - I can’t imagine how or why - you will eventually.
I use Roku. I love the little magical box. The Roku Express is a device a bit smaller than a cigarette lighter. Boy does it light my fire. OK. Amazon uses the Fire TV Stick which, I suppose, is more apropos of a fire analogy, but whatever you choose - Apple TV, Chromecast - you pay for the tech.
It’s not to say there isn’t great FREE content available on these platforms. Indeed, freebies on Roku, called The Roku Channel, boasts a buffet of classics and new cutting edge stuff, all at no cost. They’re even now producing their own stuff - one of the first is Swimming With Sharks - starring Diane Kruger (Orange Is The New Black) and Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men), which I thoroughly enjoyed. The ad interruptions are minimal - in fact during a few episodes, they didn’t break once for a commercial.
With SNW coming, I’m wondering about my streaming choices. I don’t subscribe to Paramount + now, and I have no intention of doing so, but I do want to see the show. I’m considering simply buying the first season - since even the most expensive charge for one television series is cheaper than several months of a streamer which I’m probably not going to use all that much.
Go broke from so much boob tube watching? Why not just go back to the pricey cable days? Why cut the cord?
There’s a way around everything in life. Here’s the name of the game these days: Subscribe to a streamer, watch your selection and cancel. It’s like renting a movie with no other commitment than the time it takes to finish your viewing.
So as I look forward to enjoying a new (old as in retro) TV show with beloved characters such as Spock, Uhura, Nurse Chapel and Number One, everything old seems new again. The only big difference is we’re paying to watch the old new stuff. We’ll pay to watch first run and then once more to own them for our library. We can’t tape them and then blast through the ads. We can’t catch them on a return - at least not yet. Ultimately if all these studios think that fans are going to pay each month for just one or two titles, I think they’re giving us a Kobayashi Maru. We’ll all have to strategize like our legendary Captain James T. Kirk to circumvent their shameless gold pressed latinum grab.