My wife recently started to show an interest in watching Star Trek. Previously she had seen The Wrath of Khan when she was single digits in age and not much else.
So far we have watched some of the first season of TOS and some other key episodes (still need to show her Mirror Mirror and The Trouble with Tribbles for sure, and probably episodes with Pike, which I think is starting to come up for us soon).
We watched a few episodes of TNG, for some reason Paramount through Amazon started us in the middle of season 3 instead of the season 1. She did not like how Wesley is treated on the show (she is a huge fan of Wil).
From there we moved to Voyager and are about half way through the second season. She is liking it, but not a fan of Neelix (I cannot wait to tell her he improves after Kes is gone) because of his jealousy towards anything that interacts with Kes. I have never finished watching all of Voyager myself, I think I am in season 6 or 7.
I watched all of Discovery (I think I finished anyway), the first Season of Picard, most of Strange New Worlds, and some of Lower Decks. Since she has said she wants to watch the new stuff with me I am doing my best to not watch it all so I have some new episodes with her.
At what point would you move from the old stuff to the new stuff to keep someone from being too confused? Or if confusion arises would you go back and watch the old stuff to answer questions? I know we will not watch Picard until we have gotten well into the Borg stuff in Voyager and some episodes of TNG dealing with it.
There’s some guides for the “best” TOS episodes. Go find one of those and cherry pick in order.
Then restart TNG. The way Wesley is treated is character development for everybody.
All of DS9
All of Voyager
Then the newer stuff. I’d leave SNW for last since it’s still releasing episodes. Lower Decks you can do whenever, I feel like it’s easier to pick up and watch than the others.
A lot of LD won’t land as much if you don’t really know all the references. I guess it’ll be the opposite of what most of us experience which is the original content and then the references, it’ll still be fun to have all the references show up in LD and then uncover them in live action.
It really depends on the person.
I wouldn’t assume that it works best in that direction even though that’s great for long time fans like us.
There is an entire new cohort of younger fans for whom Lower Decks was their entry point. It’s successful because you don’t need to get all the Easter eggs and references to still find it an enjoyable show.
In fact, I see a lot of those Lower Decks-first fans talking about how the show gave them enough reference points to really enjoy the classic shows and be open to their slower pacing.
Yeah that’s what I’m saying, save the new stuff for last, LD included.
You can still enjoy LD on its own, you just won’t pick up on all the Easter eggs. SNW and LD are modern shows and what a modern audience more of what they expect these days (DIS too, but it being heavily serialized may be AA turn off to more causla viewers). TOS can be very campy at times, a product of it’s times, which makes it hard for some.
I guess what I’m getting at, is that it’s OK to enjoy the new stuff without knowing the 50+ years of backstory.