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Originally Posted by cimt
From what i've read though, the reason it is so different is because of who owned what rights to the shows and movies. Shows have to be 25% different or something along them lines. Blame the splitting and merging of CBS/Paramount/Viacom.
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The careless splitting of rights between CBS Paramount and Viacom certainly made Discovery an exceptionally difficult project to take on. Not only did they have to contend with a well-explored shared writers’ universe, but they had to remain mindful of which aspects of it they simply weren’t allowed to reuse. None of which excuses the dog’s breakfast they made of the early episodes, which were only partly rectified later on.
However, in Picard they have been able to shift into the future in real time, Picard having aged by the same amount that Pat Stewart has, and have distanced themselves sufficiently from the original time period that any changes they make simply look like reasonable technological progress or political change.
It also helps that the modern fashion, driven by the needs of streaming service providers, is for big screen cinematography and an overriding story arc told across about 8-12 episodes, rather than two dozen standalone episodes intended to fill an American broadcast season and make rapid progress towards the magic 100 that sees the property safely into eternal syndication. People won’t put up with wafer thin plotlines, Spartan sets, pedestrian camera work or a quota of episodes that barely use the main cast or stick to one or two permanent sets because all the money’s been spent on one set-piece FX shot in episode 9. It looked great in 1990 but time has passed.