Babylon 5 and Firefly.
'nuff said.

I like Star Trek, but it never stood a chance against those.

I think Trek is way better than Firefly (at least TOS, TNG and DS9, though with only one season of Firefly it's a bit hard to even compare), but I do agree absolutely about Babylon 5. There's also Doctor Who, though it's impossible to make any generalised judgment on that show- over the many, many years it hit some phenomenal highs and terrible lows.

Babylon 5 has low production values (from the few episodes I've seen), and Firefly has got a single season and a silly premise as far as I can tell (space western...).

I am actually (kind of) excited about this. I am not crazy about the idea of a prequel (inquel?), but Discovery deserves a chance. That's better than no Trek at all. And who knows... It could be the beginning of a new era of Star Trek shows.

If only we could see the aftermath of the Dominion war...

Yeah... I usually don't. We don't even have that full season. It's not even two thirds of one. I love the shit out of Firefly, but even in its fairly short run there's been an episode with an abysmal premise and resolution. We've been proudly told of two further planned scripts that sound even more abysmal. And then there's the ughhhh movie with its mechanical and stale emotional orchestration, a reintroduction into the universe that could not possibly be more heavy handed. After a good long most rabid fan ever freakout, I became quite convinced that Firefly would have fucked itself up entirely in Season 2 at the latest.

TNG had its fair share of abysmal episodes, but still managed to maintain and build greatness through seven Seasons. Firefly wouldn't have. :|

Whatever they do with Discovery please, please let them stay away from time traveling.
We already had way too much of it and I'm not a fan of the bad scripts that mostly go along with it.

Agreed. They should let this era of Trek stand for itself first, before they complicate things with time travel. >_>

At least in the first season, yes. If it survives longer than that and finds it's footing, then I wouldn't mind a time travel episode or two.

But if they somehow bring in Guardian of Forever I'll goddamn lose it.

Yet if it's a strong overarching narrative structure and really more or less 10 hours of a continuous Star Trek adventure – and that's how it was announced in the Fuller era – a "time travel episode" would really fuck up the arc, don't you think?

Most likely, unless it's actually an integral part of it and written really well. Anyway, if it survives to get another season, I hope we get a more classic 20+ episodes of separate stories. Having continous story is all well and good, in fact it can result in something superb like Babylon 5, but I find myself missing the days when shows like Star Trek and X-Files were just doing a story of the week. Nowadays such episodes either don't happen at all, or are just throw away filler in between the story-arc episodes. And while DS9 had a great Dominon War story arc, Star Trek always shined brightest with how it could tell a fascinating, thought provoking story in a single episode, and then move on next week to a new, very different story, different subject with new ideas. It really was a journey into the unknown every week- you genuinely had no idea what the crew would encounter this time. It could be literally anything, from a giant space amoeba to ancient greek gods.

I agree about the standalone episodes. I love serialized storytelling (I think the Dominion war was the best part of any Star Trek), but there are a lot of memorable memories from episodes that weren't part of a bigger arc. One of my favourite episodes of TNG, the one where Data is on trial to determine whether he is a person or a possession of the Federation, would be considered "filler" by today's standards.

Interestigly enough this episode was actually a part of a long series of the Data becoming more human storyline. I dont' know if that could be consider an arc, but still this episode was actually a part of the lager picture.

Well, it's part of a character arc, not a story arc. It fit's into a bigger picture of the character's life, but as a story it's entirely standalone and self-contained.

I don't expect the fundamental concept to change, particularly not if the series fared really well [financially] with this new concept. But I'm definitely hoping with you, regardless of how much I will possibly like the 10-hour-story concept.

The new show's called "Discovery", which is really paradoxical, because one of the things the self-contained episodes did really well was to bring the discoveries of space travel to the center, with one new experience and mystery every week.

Well, after the success of the X-Files return (at least in terms of ratings) the next season they're working on now is getting more episodes, I think 10 instead of 6, so there is a chance Discovery could get a similiar extension and fit at least one or two standalones in there.