Star Trek: Lower Decks

[BRC]

I've been enjoying the show, but you need to have a pretty specific (but not uncommon) relationship with Star Trek as a franchise to enjoy it. You need to be pretty familiar with Star Trek, but not have much in the way of reverence for it, or be going in expecting to see a Star Trek show. It's a show for people who like Star Trek, but are not particularly looking to watch a Star Trek show right now, and don't mind seeing the setting used for basic comedy.

Because, while it has the trappings of Star Trek (Taking place in the universe), it doesn't scratch the itch that a Star Trek show scratches. It's a comedy. It's primarily about people failing, either trying to do good things and failing, or trying to do the RIGHT thing and failing because they can't get over whatever pettiness blinds them. Seeing as Star Trek has always been, at it's heart, a story about Hypercompetent Space Explorers Doing The Right Thing Correctly, that's pretty antithetical.

I wouldn't call it a Parody of Star Trek, because it's not really making fun of Star Trek beyond the recurring joke of some iconic star trek tropes (Captured by aliens and forced to do Trial By Combat) being considered relatively common situations for starfleet officers, and that's more winking than saying "Wow that is dumb and unrealistic". I would put it in the same category as Archer or The Venture Bros, a mildly absurdist action-adventure sitcom based around a specific Genre, but in this case the Genre happens to be "Star Trek".

However, unlike those shows, Lower Decks has to add most of the comedic absurdity, rather than getting mileage from pointing out inherent absurdities. This is both because 1) Star Trek is deep enough into fantasy that you can't really call Star Trek's tropes absurd, and 2) Because the show doesn't stoop to the lazy answer of "Hey, Look at this STAR TREK THING, isn't that DUMB". The show takes as a starting point that this show and the mainline Star Trek shows like TNG exist in the same universe and follow the same general rules and logic. A thing that happens in TNG is a reasonable thing to happen in Lower Decks. A Good idea on TNG is still a good idea on Lower Decks.

Which means that the pressure is on the characters, rather than the setting, to be comedy fodder, and inject comedy into what the show presents as perfectly reasonable, and occasionally deadly serious, situations. This doesn't help if you don't like absurdist character comedy, or if you dislike watching a bunch of clowns in starfleet uniforms making fools of themselves.

This means that the characters have to do things like bicker over which rock to use when digging through the tunnel in the midst of a catastrophic shipboard crisis, which can make it quite hard to find them sympathetic. Especially if you're coming in from the perspective of "This is a Star Trek show".