Sorry, but tax cuts don't stimulate the economy

Republicans have predicted that the just passed GOP tax cut bill will work like gangbusters on the economy.  And they are right, but for the wrong reason.  Tax cuts don’t stimulate the economy, but government deficits do, and the GOP tax cut bill promises to increase the federal deficit by around $1.1 trillion.

The same thing happened with the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s.  People forget the bad economy during the first part of the Reagan administration and only remember the strong economy after the 1981 tax cuts were passed without any corresponding spending cuts.  The cuts were supposed to “pay for themselves” but when they didn’t, the deficit soared.  Reagan and the Congress then passed tax increases to control the deficit (no one remembers “Ronald Reagan, tax raiser”), but the initial stimulus created the “Reagan miracle” of an improved economy.

Why doesn’t a tax cut stimulate the economy?  Don’t tax cuts put more money in people’s wallets?  Let’s look at the impact of a state tax cut on a state economy, one where the state has to maintain a balanced budget since states can’t pay for tax cuts by printing money.  Every dollar of tax cuts must be accompanied by a dollar of lower state spending, whether it be on education, social services, or the proverbial waste, fraud and abuse.  So the economy is stimulated by greater private spending, but retarded by less public spending.  The economy can’t tell the difference between a dollar spent by the state or a dollar spent by a private citizen; the net effects cancel out.

But wait, there’s more (as the infomercials say)!  Under standard economic theory, people don’t spend every cent of every dollar they earn.  Most people, especially those who are not in poverty, save some of their income for the proverbial rainy day.  Let’s assume that the typical person saves 5% of their income and puts it under their mattress, or in a nice savings account.  That means that a dollar tax cut only produces 95 cents of actual stimulus.

The government, of course, does not save for a rainy day (at least, not usually; some states, like California, have a “rainy day fund” to help the state during economic downturns. But these funds are usually a small percentage of the budget and are quickly exhausted during an economic downturn).  So when a state cuts taxes, it forgoes spending 100 pennies in order to give a dollar to a taxpayer who will then spend 95 pennies.  Thus state tax cuts do not stimulate the economy, they actually make it less robust.

Federal tax cuts can stimulate the economy, but only when they are accompanied by increased deficits.  It is the deficit that improves the economy, not the tax cut.  Republicans claim they hate the federal deficit, but they love cutting taxes that makes the deficit bigger.

There is one possible rebuttal to this analysis, that tax cuts do increase savings but savings are used by banks to lend capital, and capital is used to build businesses up.  That is factually true, but the mechanism by which increased investment leads to economic growth is not well understood, and the benefit should be delayed by several years.  Also, increasing the deficit by printing money will affect both inflation and interest rates in ways that difficult to anticipate.  That spending (either private of governmental) stimulates the economy is straightforward and incontrovertible.

So the GOP tax bill might stimulate the economy in the short run, but eventually the deficit-hawks are going to start demanding spending cuts (or tax increases) to pay for them and when that happens the economy will dip into another recession.  Yes, Republicans may think that taking food stamps away from hungry children is a lot of fun, but the money in that social program (and others) goes to farmers who support their families by buying consumer goods, and it then is spent by providers of consumer goods on their families, and so on and so on ad infinitem.

The next stage in this pantomime is that after a slight boom the economy will start to lag, Republicans will say it is the deficit’s fault and urge spending cuts in social programs, Democrats will counter with proposals to pare back on the tax cuts, Republicans will accuse the Democrats of wanting to raise taxes yet again, and meanwhile the deficit will grow. 

The irony is that the Republicans are right to worry about the deficit, but will attempt to benefit politically from making the problem worse.  Will voters be smart enough to realize this?  That is what the 2018 midterm elections will show.

Sexual harassment is everywhere!

We are in the middle of a sexual harassment tsunami.  All over the place well-known producers, directors, actors and politicians are being accused of doing things that range from creepy to, well, really creepy, either to members of the opposite sex or, in some cases, members of the same sex. 

It is easy to believe these allegations when they are made against someone who looks like every wanted poster for a child molester ever made (Harvey Weinstein), or there is confirmatory evidence (Matt Lauer and his door that secretly locked), or are confirmed by photographic evidence (Al Franken).  With all these women coming forward under #metoo, what is next?

The next phase is inevitable: women with an axe to grind will start making false accusation against innocent people and hope to ride the coattails of outrage that accompany these revelations.  With all these seemingly credible accusations being made, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that we do live in a nation where the cornerstone of our legal system is innocent until proven guilty.  This is extremely inconvenient in the inevitable situation of “He said/She said.”

People tend to believe what they want to believe.  If you believe that all Hollywood producers have casting couches in their offices, then a wave of accusations vindicates your beliefs.  But the fact that evidence supports your pre-existing belief system does not make it more credible.  Creating a mentality where every woman’s accusation is accepted by a knee-jerk reaction as fact does not get to the truth.

Remember the security guard at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 who found a bomb, and was then accused of planting the bomb?  There was never any evidence against him, but people thought the narrative would make a good movie-of-the-week and so tended to believe the story, even though it was fictional.  We are so accustomed to seeing fictional stories in movies and on TV that we start to evaluate all stories not by their plausibility but by whether the story is entertaining.

To take another example, remember the McMartin pre-school case in the 1980’s, when people were convinced that there was a vast underground conspiracy of Satan worshippers in America, and these cults were systematically abducting very young children and subjecting them to horrific rituals?  People believed it even though it made no sense and there was no evidence, just because it was an entertaining, if disturbing, story.  The folks that ran the McMartin pre-school who were accused of being the ringleaders of these cults were exonerated, but only after a lengthy trial and even then, many people probably dismissed the not guilty verdict as a product of the Devil’s handiwork.

Thus far, the accusations of sexual harassment (and worse) that have been made have at least had the appearance of credibility, and few accusers have categorically denied the allegations.  But at some point (it may already have happened) someone is going to make a false accusation, and when that time comes it is important that the accused be given every o0pportunity to respond, including the presumption of innocence.

You can look at the tidal wave of disclosures about sexual harassment as evidence of just how bad the problem has been in Hollywood and in politics, but at some point, the insatiable maw that is the internet and the news industry will demand more victims, and someone out there will be only too happy to offer up some more examples of male oppression, even if they have to fabricate them.  When that happens, I hope that people can stop surfing the wave of accusations and start to evaluate these claims with a critical eye and a little bit of reason.

TV Review: Crisis on Earth X

TV Review: Crisis on Earth X

There is no more understandable or predictable sin than going back to the well once too often.  If something succeeds, then you do it again, only bigger.  And if THAT succeeds, then wash, rinse, repeat.  If the first Star Wars trilogy was innovative, then another one will be better; if the second trilogy makes a lot of money, then do some more until the people stop buying tickets.

 It’s amazing when someone dodges this bullet and does a sequel or follow up that is better than the original.  The third Mad Max film, Beyond Thunderdome, was better than the second one, which itself was better than the low-budget original (and most critics think the fourth installment, Fury Road, was the best of them all).  But it is hard to come up with other examples where someone tried to do “the same, but better” and actually succeeded.

As of this week there is another example—CW’s second “crossover event,” Crisis on Earth X, is head and shoulders above last year’s Heroes vs. Aliens event.  It’s almost like they learned what mistakes to avoid last year, and then . . . avoided them.  It is a great four hours of television that is greater than the sum of its parts, which are estimable.

There were a couple of obvious problems with Heroes vs. Aliens.  First, the threat was some new species of alien called Dominators that had not been introduced into the CWverse beforehand, meaning that the stakes were not immediately understood as cataclysmic.  Second, the episode of Supergirl dedicated to the event was completely irrelevant, until the crossover aspect was introduced in the last two minutes.  Third, the plan the good guys had seemed sort of lame; if I remember correctly, The Flash wanted Supergirl to do mock attacks, so they could test battle strategies on her because she, like the Dominators, was an alien.

The biggest problem was that each show—Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow—held true to their own casts and production style, which made the overall arc inconsistent and difficult to follow for those who didn’t watch all of them (I follow three of them but gave up on Arrow very quickly).  The plot jerked all over the place as each show tended to their own story arcs and characters and only provisionally attended to the quality of the event.

That is NOT the case with Crisis on Earth X.  It is essentially a 4-part mini-series, with every scene directed to serving the overarching plot and not the characters of whatever series bears the title of the episode.  The episode of Supergirl that started it off was about Barry Allen and Iris West’s wedding; Supergirl (and her sister Alex) were attending, but the opening scene is all about The Flash.  Some of the Legends don’t show up until the Legends’ episode, but the cast is so full that frankly it’s a relief.  The character of Win Schott is not in the Supergirl segment, but does an impressive bit during The Flash episode.

There was truly a lot of “crossover” interaction among the cast, most notably Alex Danvers getting drunk at the rehearsal dinner and hooking up with Legends’ Sara Lance.  The friendship between Barry Allen and Kara Danvers aka Supergirl had already been established, but Grant Gustin and Melissa Benoit have a wonderful chemistry.  Likewise, Barry’s friendship with Oliver Queen had been establish, but their scenes are true interactions and not just Steven Amell “guest starring” on The Flash (well, technically they were on Supergirl, but as I said, it is best to forget the individual show titles and just think of the shows as episodes 1-4 of a mini-series). 

The choice of antagonist was well-considered, as Nazis from another planet are new to the CWverse (I think I should refer to it as the “Arrowverse” but like I said, I don’t watch Arrow) yet familiar.  Any fan of sci-fi (which I am assuming takes up most of the audience for these shows) would have no trouble believing in an alternate universe where Nazis rule Earth, and Nazis as an enemy is a known quantity (just ask Indiana Jones).  It also works as a meta-concept, given that a certain highly placed public figure has said that he thinks Nazis are nice people too, so they can attack Nazis but can claim not to be making any political statement even when the sub-text has become text.

You can quibble with some of the plotting, but on a tale of this magnitude some slack is deserved.  Gaining access to the Nazi facility by having this universe’s Arrow impersonate Earth-X’s Arrow, when they know there is a doppelganger, is just lazy writing.  The sheer number of superheroes demanded crowd control at some point, and the Nazi guards were as accurate with machine guns as Imperial Stormtroopers are with blasters (that is to say, they can’t hit the side of a barn if they were inside the barn).

But the result was a four-hour mini-series that was easily the equal of the Netflix series Jessica Jones or Daredevil season one.  It is also nice to have a science fiction show that has epic CGI battles, but also takes time to develop characters and invests in emotional payoffs (spoiler: someone dies).  The series featured not one but two same sex couples kissing, and definitively staked out a position that Nazis are not good at a time when that message, sadly, needs to be refreshed with a lot of people.

Crisis on Earth X is a sprawling, epic, masterful use of the mini-series format to tell a story that no individual series could tell episodically. The writing, acting and directing were all of the highest order, which is impressive given the logistics of having to produce the mini-series while the four series were simultaneously in production (Supergirl did the most obvious cheat by featuring an episode that was entirely a flashback with teen actors standing in for the regulars).  Crisis on Earth X is as much a sign that we live in the Platinum Age of Television as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad or Mad Men; just a lot more fun.

Marvel vs. DC, movies vs. television

The weekend grosses for DC’s major release Justice League are in, and the results are not good for DC.  Justice League may be the worst DC opening ever, and the first to open below $100 million domestically.  This follows on the heels of the successful opening of the latest Thor movie, Ragnarok.  The primary explanation for Justice League’s failing is that despite some major script doctoring and reshooting by Joss Whedon, Justice League still share the DNA of such dour fare as Superman vs. Batman and Man of Steel, neither of which were laugh fests like Whedon’s The Avengers or its far less superior sequel.

Of course, the whole “Marvel vs. DC” thing goes way back and is bigger than one film.  What I find interesting is that the images of the two comic universes are completely reversed if you switch from the TV universe and the movie franchises.

On TV, DC has The Flash, which was great in its early days precisely because it was a breath of fresh air after the gloomy Batman trilogy and all its angst and gloom.  The series stumbled last season by getting a little too dark, but seems committed to going back to more light-hearted fare this season.  Arrow, despite being pretty angsty, has consistently embraced its inner silliness.  Legends of Tomorrow started off as deadly earnest and was a bore its first season; then the show decided to just go with the silly and has been a rejuvenated show ever since.

Marvel’s TV image is far more glum.  Agents of Shield started out light and breezy, but once it started taking its plot points from the movies (see below) a lot of the humor went away.  Marvel’s newer offering, The Gifted, is nothing but perpetual angst as the forces of the US Government torment and harass mutants on a weekly basis, with the government agents all but cackling with glee. I tried to watch The Gifted mostly out of loyalty to Amy Acker, but I gave up after six episodes.  Another recent Marvel offering, Inhumans, was described by the LA Times as, “tr[ying] for a joke now and again, but it is overall somnolent and solemn.”  I haven’t been watching Inhumans as the first episode was described in one review as the worst thing Marvel ever produced, and other reviews have produced a Metascore of 27.

In movies, the opposite is the case.  DC has been slammed for bleak products like the aforementioned Zack Snyder offerings, while Marvel went with the master of mixing superpowers and humor, Joss Whedon, and reaped the biggest superhero film ever, The Avengers.  The Marvel X-Men franchise started out light and quippy as well, and the franchise tried to sell the heavier ideas it possessed with a spoonful of humor.

I don’t know why both studios should be so schizophrenic about the tone of their products.  There has been some blurring recently; as I said, once Agents of Shield started to incorporate plot points from Winter Soldier it started getting less fun, and DC has tried to lighten the image of its films by bringing Joss Whedon on board for rewrites and reshoots (I would love to bet that every punch line in the Justice League trailer was written by Whedon; each one sounds like something that was an outtake on Buffy).

The Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy demonstrated that comic books (excuse me, “graphic novels”) could be taken seriously; maybe a little too seriously.  I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to watch the first few episodes of The Flash and see a superhero who was happy and liked using his powers to help people.  But things change, and now it seems that audiences want a lighter touch when viewing the activities of their favorite metahuman, or X-man, or whatever.

The fact that Thor: Ragnarok has succeeded as a comedy is the best proof of this.  The first two Thor films were the least amusing of the Marvel entries, and the second one, The Dark World, was, well, dark (the one great moment in that film was a supposedly ad libbed moment by Chris Hemsworth when Thor entered Jane’s apartment and politely hung his hammer on an umbrella hook near the door). Ragnarok’s success, combined with Justice League’s unimpressive first weekend opening under $100 million, would seem to show the writing is on the wall.

It’s a narrow path to tread; be light and carefree, but don’t fail to take your material seriously.  Joss Whedon did this better than anyone for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the fact that he couldn’t quite rescue Justice League indicates to me that it must have been pretty far gone.  Both studios could learn from each other, with Marvel’s TV programs taking a cue from Legends of Tomorrow and the DC movie producers finding writers capable of finding the funny.

In the NFL, the inmates ARE running the asylum

So it’s come to this: I defend Roger Goodell.

A few weeks ago, Houston Texan’s owner Robert McNair made headlines when it was revealed that he said that the NFL should be tougher in dealing with protesters because they couldn’t have “inmates running the prison.”  There was some initial debate if he misspoke and meant to say “inmates running the asylum” because supposedly comparing NFL players to insane people was less insulting than comparing them to convicted criminals. 

I don’t think it really makes a difference, either sentiment displays the attitude of many owners that the team owners don’t just own the teams, they own the players just like slaveholders in the Old South owned their slaves.  The players and the owners are supposed to be partners, but some of the rich White men who own the teams have a contemptuous opinion of their supposed “partners.”

Then last week Dallas Cowboy’s owner Jerry Jones threatened to individually sue any fellow owner who approved a contract extension for Roger Goodell, an obvious response to Goodell finally being allowed to impose a 6-game suspension of Cowboy’s star (pun not intended) running back Ezekiel Elliot.  Jones has been dismissive of the entre process, opining that the penalty was an excessive response to the allegations that Elliot merely physically assaulted his girlfriend.  I guess Jones’ opinion is that if a man can’t smack his girlfriend around, what is this country coming to?

Jones is now saying the NFL penalty mechanism is so unfair he will sue if it is enforced against his team.  Of course, he said nothing against the decision to suspend Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady for four games, so his outrage is selective.

If the other owners are smart they will ignore his threats a go ahead and give Goodell the extension he probably doesn’t deserve.  Al Davis occasionally challenged the NFL, but that was about marketing his team, not on-the-field advantage.  If the owners cave, then Goodell will be loath to impose any future penalties on a Cowboys player, lest he face the wrath of Jerry Jones.

Of course, the other owners could take this as an opportunity to strip the Commissioner’s office of all authority to impose suspensions, but given the public outrage over many of Goodell’s decisions to impose mild penalties for perceived faults (most notably the Ray Rice case, lest Jerry Jones think that no one cares about domestic violence cases) I think the owners would recognize that having some sort of figurehead is a good idea.  Especially since Goodell has proven effective as being a punching bag for public outrage.

Can Jones make good on his threat to sue the other owners?  Sure, in America anyone can sue anybody for anything.  The deal to extend Goodell’s contract was approved unanimously, meaning Jones supported it.  And Jones agreed to participate in the NFL and abide by its rules, including the method of determining Goodell’s salary, so it is a little late in the game for him to decide the rules aren’t fair.  And as noted above, he never had any problem with the NFL’s suspension process until his star player was suspended. Given that he agreed to everything, and has never said anything about how the process has worked in the past, it is hard to see how a lawyer could make a case that Jones’ suit is anything but a self-serving attempt to give his team an on-field advantage by being allowed to play players despite their breaking NFL rules.

I think Goodell has been largely incompetent in the penalty aspect of his job, botching the Ray Rice investigation, the deflate-gate situation (Brady was guilty, but even I think a four-game suspension was too harsh), and also not responding quickly enough to concussion concerns, the anthem situation, and the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick.  The contrary argument is that he’s made a lot of money for the owners (including Jerry Jones), but I am in the camp that believes a trained bonobo as Commissioner could have overseen the economic boom of the NFL.  The American appetite for violence is insatiable, and the NFL is the country’s primary distributor.

By the way, this is why I dismiss any claim that people aren’t watching NFL games because of anthem protests.  The anthem is usually not telecast, and besides, where are these people going to get their weekly dose of violence?  Watch soccer?  NASCAR?  If people aren’t watching the NFL it is because overextension has diluted the product, and because major athletes are getting injured at an increasing level because safety concerns have been ignored for years.

Looking at the disarray among the NFL owners over Roger Goodell’s contract extension, one can only conclude that Robert McNair was correct; the inmates are running the asylum.

The first 2017 cancellation has occurred!

One of the evolving aspects of the new media culture is the reluctance of television networks to decisively “cancel” TV shows.  There used to be an annual deathwatch to identify the first series to be axed, with speculation based on quality, time slot, and the star power associated with the show.  But in recent years, the wait for the first cancellation of the TV season has been attenuated by networks refusing to make a firm irrevocable decision about the fate of all of its series in favor of the more flexible option of simply not ordering more episodes of a show and letting the series die a peaceful death.

The 2017 TV season has apparently claimed its first fatality, as CBS has pulled the plug on Me, Myself, & I, its high concept comedy about a man facing issues at three different stages of his life.  The show wasn’t “cancelled,” but its time slot will be given to another show; the fact that the other show is the critically reviled “Man With a Plan” (Metacritic rating 36; named one of the 10 worst shows of 2016) indicates that the network has lost faith in a show.  Of course, they say the show will return, but if so it is likely to have its episodes burned off during the wasteland of January.

What I find a little odd about this is that Me, Myself & I didn’t look like a candidate for the first cancellation of the year.  The show had an unspectacular but decent Metacritic score of 57, with a respectable User Score of 6.3.  The show starred Bobby Moynihan, a popular alumnus of Saturday Night Live, and John Larroquette, a TV acting legend who won four consecutive Emmies as a Supporting Actor in a Comedy for Night Court.  The first casualty is usually a low brow comedy critics hated (2008’s Do Not Disturb, Metacritic score of 21), or possibly a high concept drama with expensive production values (The Playboy Club, 2011).  This season, for example, ABC’s Ten Days in the Valley hasn’t been cancelled, but being moved to Saturdays is not a sign of support by the network.

I watched the first three episodes of Me, Myself and I, and I enjoyed it while being aware of its limitations.  While the show could have the pilot episode, and first few regular episodes, deal with plots that would engage the main character as a youth, a middle-aged man, and a retiree, I couldn’t see how the show could develop its characters moving forward.  I also felt the show did a bad job of handling the main character’s occupation as an inventor, which seemed to revolve around him coming up with “wacky” props that all seemed silly.

I did stop watching the show, but only because my DVR only permits me to watch one show and record another, and once Supergirl and Lucifer were going head to head during the same time slot, I had no choice.  I could have watched the show on demand, but quite frankly I didn’t care. 

In looking over the list of each season's first show to be cancelled, one stands out.  In 2002 ABC ran a show created by Ben Affleck called Push, Nevada.  The show was reminiscent of Twin Peaks, but with a gimmick; every week there would be a clue, and once all the clues were revealed the first person to figure out the puzzle would win a cash prize.  The show was critically well received, with a Metacritic score of 70, way higher than any other first-to-be-cancelled show since 2000.  I enjoyed it, but for whatever reason ABC pulled the plug after 7 episodes.  However, under federal rules they had to complete the contest, so the actor who played the lead character appeared during a break on Monday Night Football and dumped the rest of the clues all at once.  I liked it.

For reasons that escape my understanding, Me, Myself, and I’s partner in the early Monday time slot for CBS, the incredibly lame-looking 9JKL (Metacritic score 36, User Score of 1.8), has not been relegated to a January burn-off.  In fact, it will take over Me, Myself, and I’s time slot while Man With a Plan will take over its slot.  Me, Myself & I had an initial rating of 1.6 which fell to 0.7 (among viewers between 18-49).  Last week the Monday lineup lost Big Bang Theory as a lead-in as it moved back to Thursdays, which caused the following CBS line-0up to fall in viewership.  9JKL had a rating of 0.8 on October 30, the same week Me, Myself, & I was 0.7, so I guess that extra 0.1 was enough to keep it on the air.

While I wasn’t a fan of Me, Myself, & I, I am sad it was the first casualty of the 2017 TV season.  Larroquette was a joy as always, and the premise was not the usual cookie-cutter product most TV series are (for example, 9JKL is about a son moving in next door to his parents; wasn’t that Everybody Loves Raymond’s plot?).  Buck up, all you unemployed actors; the new TV pilot season is only a few months away!

Divisiveness and Star Trek Discovery

I don’t need to tell you that America is a divided place right now.  Red states vs. blue states; anthem standers vs. kneelers; smooth peanut butter vs. chunky.  But it used to be there was something most of us could agree on, and that is that Star Trek is awesome.

But the Star Trek concept of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) is being strained by the response of fans to the latest incarnation in the Trek oeuvre, Star Trek Discovery.  CBS just announced that it was renewing the show for a second season, so the experiment of only making it available on a streaming platform instead of broadcast television must have worked.  But there is a civil war brewing about the show and the direction of Star Trek into the future.

I cannot comment on the quality of the show because I won’t sign up for CBS All Access just to watch a new Star Trek series.  I can go back and re-watch The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine on Netflix if I want my Trek fix (sorry, Voyager was never my cup of tea), not to mention the movies (at least the good, even numbered ones).  I did watch the first episode that was broadcast, and I thought it was terrible.  Of course, it’s hard for me to make an informed decision because what they showed on CBS was not the first episode, but only the first half of the first two-part episode.  Note to CBS—if you say you are going to show the first episode on broadcast TV, then show the ENTIRE episode and don’t end on a cliffhanger and say, “to be continued” on part 2.

Metacritic gives Star Trek Discovery a respectable critical rating of 72 out of 100.  But then I checked the User Rating and saw it was a measly 4.5 out of 10, worse than mediocre.  Looking at the summary, it was what we in the statistics biz like to call a bimodal distribution—163 negative reviews vs. 82 positive reviews, with all the 10’s and 1’s averaging out to just under 5.  Very few people are on the fence.

I got the sense of the controversy looking at the comments on the AV Club review of the most recent episode.  In my history of reading reviews at AV Club I had never seen so many comments taking issue with the position taken by the reviewer, which pointed out the inconsistencies with the Star Trek universe and questioned the purpose of setting the series in the Star Trek universe then feeling the need to rebrand certain aspects (like largely rebooting the Klingons).  Comments on AV Club reviews sometimes have commenters pose slight disagreements with what other commenters have posted, but rarely have commenters taken the offensive to unilaterally disagree with the approach the reviewer took in critiquing the show itself.

The major reason for the split of opinion could be because we are now into the third generation of Star Trek fandom.  The First Age of Star Trek was the original show and the big screen movie version of Star Trek and its immediate sequels.  These stories were about Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and the rest, and were based on a unifyied concept.

The Second Age of Star Trek was the re-birth and rise of the television franchise, from The Next Generation through Enterprise.  These projects were one step removed from Gene Rodenberry’s original vision, but close enough to avoid any major issues with continuity.  Yes, Klingons now had forehead ridges, but the best explanation for that was contained in the Deep Space Nine episode Trials and Tribble-ations (as Worf explained, Klingons did not discuss the change with outsiders). 

The Third Age began with the movie franchise reboot, where Chris Pine reinterpreted the role of Kirk.  One of the clever things done to avoid the whole consistency “tar baby” was to make everything due to a temporal anomaly, so that the events that followed would NOT be consistent with the events of the original TV series.  This was taken to a somewhat tedious extreme by Star Trek Into Darkness, which (spoilers!) was essentially a remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan but with events slightly altered due to changes in the timeline.

So now there are two, maybe three, groups of fans: those loyal to the original Star Trek series and its characters (these people are pretty old at this point); those raised on The Next Generation and the subsequent TV series which tried hard to toe the corporate line; and those who came aboard with the recent movie reboot who see no reason to drag a 50 year old TV series into imposing limits on a new science fiction TV franchise.  Thus the split in opinion over how dedicated any new incarnation of Star Trek has to be to the details of what has come before.

I’ve written before that my theory for the decline in quality in the Star Trek franchise, starting with Voyager and the later seasons of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, was that they started hiring writers based on their knowledge of Star Trek trivia over having actual writing talent.  The first year of the original series featured scripts by noted science fiction authors like Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Frederic Brown and DC Fontana, mainly because in the mid-1960’s there were few science fiction writers working in television.  More recent writers developed episodes with major plot points based on nuances that were probably not-thought-out details about Klingon physiology or Ferengi psychology; namely, they were Star Trek insiders and not graduates of screenwriting classes.

So, we’ll have to agree to disagree.  I will continue to think that Star Trek Discovery is a major misfire, while I watch City on the Edge of Forever and Our Man Bashir on Netflix.  Trek fans younger than me will eat up Discovery and believe that Star Trek Beyond is the best Star Trek movie yet.  If the Federation and the Klingons can co-exist, I suppose the various schools of Trek fandom can learn to live together.