ST:Discovery and ST:Picard are bad Trek shows.
The whole point of Trek was future oriented and hopeful, that we could evolve past our current social limitations and build truly inclusive civilization were everyone is judged on the content of their character not the color of their skin (or other skin-deep issues like what where you preferred to stick your outie dangly bits or innie bits).
It is an ideal, and to get there Roddenberry and his fellow writers (and the cast of the series) came up with some hand waving to explain how we get there global wars that break the old orders + first contact, resulting in only one strong socially held identity human. And that further evolves to "sapient beings" matter despite their unique nature.
At the same time magic tech (Food Synthesizers in TOS and then Replicators in TNG) moves us to a post-scarcity economy that largely obsoletes all the age old motivations and social constructs we've held for 300,000 years. At the same time, the writers still kept all our hardwired emotions and flaws intact the same passions, drives, needs, amazing capacity for good and the capacity for evil inherent in all of us.
So Roddenberry and others used Trek as a way to explore social commentary without beating you over the head with their point or virtue signal. To show what a post-racialism society could look like, TOS just presented us with Lt. Uhura a black woman officer on a military-type ship. She was more than the signals officer, she was given command of the whole ship when Kirk and crew beam down, and who was in command of away team missions. And he just presented us with Lt. Sulu to break another stereotype, and even a Russian character to show that in the future we needn't be enemies because of political struggles and differences.
They didn't preach, they presented.
Even clumsy episodes like "The Way to Eden" addressed the idea that society didn't have a right to tell you how to live (Kirk vs the Space Hippies) or where to seek your utopia…but then also that there is no utopia since the Eden-like planet the Space Hippies want to settle is deadly to human life.
So all the prior Trek shows followed this formula, more or less, and used intelligent SciFi to make social commentary without getting too preachy. Watch ST:TNG, you'll see little things like an extra walking across the background wearing a skirt. No scene with a guy declaring it's his right to wear a dress just a dude walking around in one and nobody reacting. No big deal what you wear as long as you do your job, right?
And they also kept to the formula, more or less, that we could build a future that was better than our present that was hopeful, and in which people were motivated by more than petty things like revenge, greed, lust, etc. So in the shows, when someone does act that way the rest of the cast react negatively rather than matter-of-factly or with understanding.
This idea of addiction was explored in a series of TNG episodes with Lt. Barclay, a socially awkward character who lacked self confidence and escaped from reality into his Holodeck Addiction. After reacting negatively, the crew initially motivated by self-centered need not to lose skilled crewmember -- ultimately treat him with compassion and help him overcome his addiction.
So all prior shows have done this. And then ST:D and ST:P chucked 50 years of content, writing, theme and direction out the window to create a dark and hopeless dystopian Trek. The producer and writers just magically altered Federation society without explanation, and boringly hollows it out and overlays the nihilism of Hollywood's writers and their audiences onto the prior-hopeful, future-oriented Trek verse.
All the characters in ST:D and ST:P act mostly like the worst archetypes of today's society, with barely any connection to prior Trek except for stage props and the way some tech looks (not all tech since they make little attempt to maintain a semblance of science realism in the show). In short they sucked out all the past Trek, leaving a hollow branding shell into which they placed all their dark angsty nihilism in an attempt to create an "edgy" Game of Thrones in Space show to try and expand their audience.
And why does "edgy" always mean the same predictable dark angsty emo characters getting drunk throwing up, having sex, being catty and nasty, and killing people in graphic ways like angry toddlers in a physically mature body?? And it's not shocking to drop f-bombs ya know it's lazy…the word is 1500 years old after all, so it's hardly new. So there is no subtlety or craft to the stories rather than social commentary there is preachiness.
Rather than a hopeful future we have a dystopian future in which people very much act on their own worst impulses, are given false depth by making them all drug addicts or alcoholics cause of "the dark past what broke them," (more lazy writing).
There's nothing about any of the shallow characters to like or connect with, there's no character evolution, it's just all so…boring…
As a kid I grew up bombarded by fear and angst -- nuke war, eco-geddon, over population we saw families torn apart by substance abuse, divorce, many of us were the latch key kids you saw portrayed in Stranger Things. Get yourself to school, get yourself back from school to an empty home since the parents were both working (or worse), get yourself and siblings dinner, etc. The generation or writers and producers who started Trek? Heck, they survived far worse than me -- the Great Depression, WW2, etc.
So why did they write of a hopeful future when the current crop of writers grew up in much more affluence and safety yet embrace nihilism and destruction? When did they think it was a good idea to use a show to preach and people and beat em on the head with your views instead of leading the audience into a conversation??
So that's what I like TOS, ST:TNG, ST:VOY, DS9 and even Enterprise -- because all of them largely embraced the idea that we could be and do better than we are now. That we could build a better society. So why do I want to watch ST:D and ST:P, shows that mirrors the dysfunction I see around me today? If you want to see the stuff Picard portrays -- just watch the news!! Want to grapple with the issue of slavery (synths a theme explored multiple times in past Trek shows btw, so it's not even a new plot device or theme) it's real right now in Sudan and other countries.
Lazy writers of ST:D and ST:P Picard could have just done a DS9 type thing and created a frontier area or someplace that rejected the Federation and its ideals, and then you can do all the Mass Effect/HALO/BSG/Star Wars rip offs you want with a new Faux Solo edgy smuggler dude, sword swinging Romu-las and all that stuff. Create someplace (not a prequel) into which you place your Game of Thrones in Space show with ST:D. Or hell, be bold and creative and do a whole new show instead of hollowing out Trek as a branding tool and pissing on the whole franchise.
OK…I'll step off my soapbox now…
rides to the rescue.
