Just finished watching season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation. As I previously wrote, the first bunch of episodes were impressively bad, but by the second half of the season, it had gotten quite good. I’m looking forward to season two, once Netflix sends it to me.

It has got me wondering whether the show’s growing pains might be tolerated in today’s TV market. The other day, I was thinking about the American version of Coupling, which was canceled after only four episodes. I think, generally, television series were given more of a chance to find an audience in 1987, although it helped that TNG was syndicated rather than sold to a network, and that it had a large built-in audience of Star Trek fans.