Starfleet Academy Needs Your Hatred

Why does Hollywood keep doing it? Why can’t showbiz learn?

Well, the bad news is they have learned. And we’re the ones who taught them.

It doesn’t make sense to a reasonable person. “Isn’t the point of entertainment to entertain?” And the answer is, no.

This is going to take some explaining.

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From Stories to Instruments

During the Golden and Silver ages of Hollywood, the studios would develop screenplays in house, everything was vertically integrated. Stories were the vein of gold in the mine.

During the Bronze age, the studios would buy speculation scripts and develop those. You could get your own original story turned into a movie, and or TV series. You had a support system in the form of creative executives whose job it was to determine shit from shinola. Men like Barry Diller and Michael Eisner would there to be persuaded by your vision and then put it into production. Those executives had been creatives themselves that moved across the street. They still got it.

Now in the Plastic age, it has become impossible for filmmakers to get their own original story onto the screen. The studio executives aren’t creatives, they are risk managers and they view things like Star Trek and Star Wars not as great stories with characters people love but as risk controlled financial instruments.

An original script has no public awareness, no algorithmic prediction model, no merch potential at least not one that can be reliably projected, and pre-selling it internationally won’t happen. That last is pretty big since it’s a vital component of how films get financed now. This is why losing China really hurt Hollywood.

However, a known franchise, (no matter how badly abused it is), solves all of those problems (except China).

So what is a creative with an original story supposed to do? Because there are only two outcomes with the modern risk manager running Hollywood. These days, the creative is either going to hear, “We love your story — Now can you fit it into one of our IPs?” The other is to accept the reality situation from the start, and just wrap a Star Wars setting around your story. Either way your script is being smuggled past the fans wrapped in a brand shell. The good news for you is that it doesn’t matter in the least if your idea trainwrecks the established canon.

Because the studios have no one whose job it is to protect the IPs.

Before 2005 you had producers who rose through the same company who were associated with the IP enough to know what would work and what the fans would reject. There were long term TV showrunners and executives whose careers were tied to a specific property who effectively provided the same protective function.

That’s all gone now. Streaming has destroyed it completely.

I know it seems astonishing but that’s the truth of it. Marvel did for a while have a mechanism for guarding canon, granted, the only reason Ike Perlmutter had established his canon brain trust was to protect toy sales but it also preserved the brand. Feige and Espositio absolutely hated it and it reminded people at Disney of the bad old days of Eisner’s Strat Plan committee. Consequently, when Iger went to war with Ike Perlmutter, the first thing to go was the Marvel canon brain trust, the disasters started showing up shortly thereafter.

But those brand managers were an exception to begin with, granted a staggeringly successful exception, but the lessons to be learned were ones that no one in Hollywood wanted to learn.

The modern Hollywood executive is now more of a portfolio manager than anything else. Certainly being a creative is out, it might even look suspicious these days. And these guys rotate jobs every two to four years, having a project up running is what counts and then move on to your next job before it streams. There is nothing to be gained by holding the hot potato, you use that job to get your next job. Protecting a franchise only matters if you’re going to be there when the damage arrives and they never are.

Why the Dark Herald is a Part of the Problem

Darklings: But somebody at the studio has to object to the brand damage, right?

Dark Herald: They. Want. The. Brand. Damage.

When your only purpose in life is to boost a quarterly report you don’t worry about long term at all, short term is that matters. So in that case, the question becomes, what is being measured? Income? Not if you’re in streaming, that’s somebody else’s job. Besides how do you measure boosted subscriptions? How do you really measure which show did what for the subs, most people don’t subscribe for just one show or at least not verifiably. The pay-pigs sub for a package deal, right? Everybody knows that.

No, the only thing you as modern producer can point to as a any kind of achievement for your individual project is engagement.

That’s where I come in.

Okay, really it’s more like the guys with a way bigger footprint like Critical Drinker and Nerdrotic. But I am indeed part of the equation.

“That show was great!” Equals – “watched once.” Now that can be fantastic if you land something as big as Stranger Things but realistically, you won’t. So why take chances on making something people will like when it’s super easy to make something people will hate?

“That Star Trek show was hot, flaming, pig-vomit!” Equals – watched + clips + discourse + reaction videos. It’s a whole eco-system. And it creates engagement with non-viewers and that was always the real target anyway. Sure the franchise is damaged but you are off to your next job long before then because streaming never lasts more than two or three seasons anyway. And most important, it is measurable.

Take Starfleet Academy.

Notice what the marketing emphasizes: not exploration, not competence, not even the Federation — but reinterpretation. The conversation begins before the show even airs. Interviews, leaks, and casting discourse all frame the series as a debate rather than a story. This is not accidental promotion. It is pre-engagement.

A traditional Star Trek pitch would ask: What problem does the crew solve?

A streaming-era pitch asks: What argument does the audience have?

Because solving a problem ends discussion, that’s bad. But starting an argument multiplies it and that’s good. The structure almost writes itself:

1. Use a powerful legacy brand for instant awareness

2. Introduce tonal or thematic friction with hostile expectations

3. Trigger the fan dispute

4. Generate commentary ecosystems (call the fans fascists and anti-fascist join the conversation. Real fascists do too now that I think about it.

5. Convert discourse into measurable engagement

At that point, whether the show is loved becomes secondary. What matters is that people yelling about it becomes unavoidable.

A quiet, respectful Star Trek series that fans simply enjoyed would produce less data than a controversial one debated across every platform.

So if Starfleet Academy feels designed to provoke reaction rather than immersion, that’s because immersion is no longer the primary KPI.

The show is not merely entertainment.

It is an engagement infrastructure.

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Hollywood used to sell stories.

Now it sells recognition triggers.

The franchise damage is not creative arrogance — it’s a structural byproduct of streaming-era incentives.

Hollywood didn’t fail to learn; it learned the wrong lesson from data. They optimized for the platform’s game, not storytelling’s. Until incentives flip or audience exhaustion forces a reset, expect more “recognition triggers” wrapped in legacy shells, not sincere extensions of what made the IP beloved.

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