Star Trek: Picard is a love letter to the back in the day 22…24…even 26 episodes per television season.

A fascinating aspect of Picard’s return jubilation is it is partially because he was in 178 Next Generation episodes (and 4 movies.).

From September 28, 1987 to May 23, 1994 we had quality time together every September to May. Not like these newfangled lazy 10 episode seasons where the characters don’t breath and the worlds they inhabit are barely mapped.

(Granted as a mini-series slash Next Gen appendix Star Trek: Picard functions well; especially at Patrick Stewart’s age. We just witnessed this in The Irishman: they’re able to de-age De Niro’s face but not his knees (you can see that in certain scenes he’s got old man knees with that young man face.).

This is not an old man get off my lawn rant this is buyer’s remorse.

The commonality of the biggest shows…the TV shows that launched industries and careers, improved our imaginations and injected popular phrases into our English language all cranked out hours and hours and hours of work around a core group of characters.

We know these characters: Star Trek: Next Generation is roughly 531 hours. Stranger Things? 20 hours…that’s not even a full day with the kids.

Most of it (not all of it) was excellent: X-Files, Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, The Simpsons, Buffy, Supernatural etc. have a deep impact on our pop culture and on our lives; the way we relate and connect with each other.

The Stranger Things kids eh…they might do something 20 years from now; I mean it doesn’t really matter. X-Files showed us a far more stranger scarier world with monsters in the sewers one week and the next week monsters in the White House. Thanks kids; let the FBI handle this.

We’re slowly moving away from binging (Apple TV and Disney Plus release episodes weekly) which is great. I’m grateful for that.

I just didn’t fully realize until I saw Picard how much we’d all lost. I dunno if “quality time” will return where we stare into each other’s eyes but at least for now we have Date Night every week.

-28-

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