It’s going to be a long road for Paramount, and the Star Trek franchise, to get past it American-centric blinkers.
IDIC seems to be an in-America rather than a global or universal concept for the executives and even most of the EPs.
Defining ‘television history’ as just what was broadcast in the United States is all of a piece of Hollywood’s century-long understanding that it was the global entertainment focal point.
Paramount is strategically moving to emphasize development and production outside the United States, and recently cut its domestic staff significantly. However, Paramount’s own communications team seems to remain quite blindly American-centric as if Paramount+ can survive on the US market alone. Geoblocked embedded video, predominantly American feature article writers and editors on the StarTrek.com official site, are all evidence of the persistent blind spot.
But it’s hurt the franchise. There’s a kind of Federation Exceptionalism baked in that comes across as an expansion of American exceptionalism. When all the hero captains other than Picard, and many of the bridge crew, are identified as coming from what is currently the United States, it says that the US is still the most important place and marginalizes other countries.
Star Trek’s impact outside North America has been constrained by these attitudes going back to the 1960s.
Canadians, used to crossborder transmissions of US networks tend to roll with it, to the point that Star Trek shows are often the most popular dramas, and not just in the sci-fi genre. The UK and Germany got TNG in syndication, which built their base, but in much of the world Star Trek only became broadly accessible through Netflix.
And what we hear in social media platforms like this one is that fans outside the US, who are attracted to and embrace Trek’s aspirational values, find these kinds of persistent markers of inward-looking American attitudes an irritant, at some points like nails on chalkboard, standing out against what Trek aspires to be.
It’s going to be a long road for Paramount, and the Star Trek franchise, to get past it American-centric blinkers.
IDIC seems to be an in-America rather than a global or universal concept for the executives and even most of the EPs.
Defining ‘television history’ as just what was broadcast in the United States is all of a piece of Hollywood’s century-long understanding that it was the global entertainment focal point.
Paramount is strategically moving to emphasize development and production outside the United States, and recently cut its domestic staff significantly. However, Paramount’s own communications team seems to remain quite blindly American-centric as if Paramount+ can survive on the US market alone. Geoblocked embedded video, predominantly American feature article writers and editors on the StarTrek.com official site, are all evidence of the persistent blind spot.
But it’s hurt the franchise. There’s a kind of Federation Exceptionalism baked in that comes across as an expansion of American exceptionalism. When all the hero captains other than Picard, and many of the bridge crew, are identified as coming from what is currently the United States, it says that the US is still the most important place and marginalizes other countries.
Star Trek’s impact outside North America has been constrained by these attitudes going back to the 1960s.
Canadians, used to crossborder transmissions of US networks tend to roll with it, to the point that Star Trek shows are often the most popular dramas, and not just in the sci-fi genre. The UK and Germany got TNG in syndication, which built their base, but in much of the world Star Trek only became broadly accessible through Netflix.
And what we hear in social media platforms like this one is that fans outside the US, who are attracted to and embrace Trek’s aspirational values, find these kinds of persistent markers of inward-looking American attitudes an irritant, at some points like nails on chalkboard, standing out against what Trek aspires to be.