Strange New Worlds has been my favorite Trek since Next Generation, and if the quality continues, could easily be my favorite Trek ever. But with the e.p. wishing for more episodes per season, there’s a danger of diluting the show by adding weak episodes that would have never made it in a 10 episode season.
One of the things I’ve long admired with BBC shows is their normally low-episode seasons, which kept out a lot of filler that normally made it in to the broadcast shows from the states. But streaming (and before that, cable) changed things. Finally US based shows were able to create much lower episode seasons, allowing the creators to tell more of the story they wanted to tell, without stretching things out (too much), or being forced to add stories they weren’t thrilled with in order to fill the season. (Though, even with shorter runs, shows are still doing this. Picard season 2, for example, could have used some trimming. So, yeah, show runners are still being forced to fill seasons where X number of episodes were ordered before the story was fleshed out. Maybe it just seems more evident in serialized shows.)
I can’t help but think a longer season of SNW would be a “more is less” scenario. I’d much rather see Paramount create another Trek show that’s mainly episodic, that’s been shown the same attention to quality that SNW has received.
I don’t understand this idea that fewer episodes is better. Basically my only complaint about SNW season 2 is how rushed it felt.
How did it feel rushed? We had a new adventure every week that was largely unrelated to the previous one, and character development was distributed all throughout the season. The only thing I felt was rushed were some of the episodes like the one with the tower (Among the Lotus Eaters) where the resolution to the conflict came very surprisingly and abruptly, but longer seasons wouldn’t have changed that.
The big one is Chapel and Spock. She goes straight from pursuing him to leaving him without much of any actual relationship in between. Pelia doesn’t get to do much as the chief engineer, and Ortegas barely gets any screen time at all.