The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek

This is a well constructed and presented series in the style of the tous that made us and so it is a good watch.

However like all documentaries it is very one sided in it's view. The best example of this is them talking about the Plagiarism of Babylon 5. Fair play addressing this but they dismissed it as the only similarity was they were on space stations when this was legally proven to be a rip off and knowing both series the stolen material is hard to miss.

Good watch, just don't take it by it's word.

I can't say that I'm happy with my assessment and I'm sure most others won't be as well, but the pace and editing of this first episode are so bad that I'm having trouble finishing it and may not watch the other three I've recorded.

In Philadelphia, there is the Franklin Institute, a center for science, scientific history, science demonstrations, and industrial scientific testing. It's quite a place and I've gone there since I was very young. It's been a while since I visited, but the last time I was there, drinking in the exhibits around me, I watched as schoolchildren too immature to understand what they were seeing absolutely raced from exhibit to exhibit trying to find the button to push to make the display do something. They would rush up to it, frantically hammer away at whatever initiated the demo, and hunted to see what would happen. If it moved, lit up, make a sound or whatever, they watched for five seconds. If pushing the button didn't result in an INSTANT payoff...two seconds, then on to the next exhibit. Nobody stopped to look, wonder, read, or try to understand what was happening.

I am sure that the editor of this series was one of those kids.

Hyper-fast cuts, contributors flashed on the screen for so short a time that you can see what they look like, what their name is, or what they are saying, pick any two, cut-ins of scenes from shows that might well be funny but go by so quickly that they are blips...this bears all the hallmarks of someone too young to know how to edit for an audience who is seeing the material for the first time, not someone who has been spending hours with each scene. It's an absolute mess. No attention span whatsoever. No depth of examination. No desire to discover, just to get to the next bullet point.

I'm going to boldly go back to the TV now. I think there may be 15 painful minutes left of the fist episode. There are other "history of Star Trek" films and videos that are not frenetic and juvenile that tell the same story.

Harlan Ellison; story of how unhappy he was with the rewrite of, "City on the Edge of Forever" is mentioned. I can only imagine how irate he' d be if he was around to see this mess.

It's obvious that the interviewees spoke at some length, but the editors appear to think that the audience has no attention span. So their responses and recollections are clipped to show clips from the various shows. Much is left on the virtual cutting room floor.

Gates McFadden is a great narrator, though.

Star Trek deserves a Ken Burns style documentary, not this.

Overall it had a lot of ground to cover so kudos there. I did not care for the short takes and goofy approach - whoever decided to take that tack I think a bit over used.

One thing that I noticed after the last episode was besides mentioning the music themes was the lack of the music scoring in general - specifically TOS incidental music - name any show you can recall the music during the episodes (maybe outside of Mission Impossible) that you can, years later, recall the music... Klingon theme, Doomsday/Immunity Syndrome theme, 'spore' music, etc.

Other than that not addressed, it was a decent show. Gates did good job narrating.

And yes Enterprise theme stunk - made me not want to watch.

Just when you thought you knew everything, and i was born in 1971 and only just missed the first run, theres this.... a revisit thats manages to unleash new facts you hadnt heard before.

That its wonderfully narrated by Gates McFadden is a bonus

Trek is everything. My childhood was watching Star Trek at midday Saturdays, every week. No binge watching, so you had a sense of anticipation from week to week thats now missing with binge watching...people now will never appreciate tv like we did....

Learning new facts about Trek is more better!