All The TV In 2020 You’ll Ignore Because You’re Rewatching ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’

It’s a new year, the planet is still on fire and television is basically all we have to look forward to! Get excited, get pumped!

2020 brings a wealth of promising new shows to get yourself hooked on, which you’ll definitely hover-over fleetingly, as you move into the tender, pacifying embrace of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Do not be tempted by the allure of new experiences, the siren’s call of narrative complexity and award-winning ensemble casts. All of that can simply be experienced on a holodeck episode.

If you’re new to the series, you have the most blessed, inexplicable 7,832 minutes ahead of you. Perhaps a little less, given you’ll be regularly skipping the unfathomably loud intro and any Wesley-heavy episodes.

Some people will tell you to skip the first season. Those people are weak, and will not survive the winter. Leave them behind.

It’s 2020. Make space your final, and only, frontier.

Locke and Key

Early February will see the arrival of this supernatural adaptation based on graphic novels by Joe Hill, son of our horror daddy Stephen King.

What you could watch right now, though, is all 7 seasons of Star Trek – The Next Generation.

If mystery and reality-bending is what you’re after, you’ll have it in spades when you deny all social invitations and work obligations in favour of watching episodes like ‘Schisms’, where the crew experience a little casual overnight alien abduction and (probably internal) experimentation!

Suspend disbelief and embrace a spooky world in which Riker’s arm has been severed and reattached and it’s totally chill and we all forget about it by the next episode.

Avenue 5

Armando Iannuci, satirical television legend and writer of the unbelievably good Death of Stalin will give us the gift of Avenue 5, following captain Hugh Laurie and the crew of a luxury space cruise ship.

Add this to your must-watch list right after 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation! The only luxury space ship you need is the USS Enterprise, armed with 12 type-X phaser arrays and 3 photon torpedo launchers as well as an elegant cocktail bar, a holodeck where everyone almost certainly jacks off, and that depressingly barren room where Data recites his moving poetry.

Outmatched

What sounds better than an irreverent parenting sitcom starring American Pie’s Jason Biggs? Star Trek: The Next Generation, and absolutely anything else.

If you’re looking for a man who would fuck a pie if it were vaguely sentient, look no further than Commander Will Riker. Draw a bubble bath, pour a crisp chardonnay and enjoy the “romantic” trials and tribulations of our beloved Riker, standing on a new chair and falling maddeningly in love with a new attractive woman or non-binary alien who crosses his path, every single day.

You’ll never get bored — they’ll have been forgotten immediately by the next episode, much like Riker’s holographic-scenario son Barash was beamed to the Enterprise and never spoken of again. You’ll always be Jean-Luc to me.

High Fidelity

Rebooting a widely-beloved story is a risky move, but this upcoming Zoe Kravitz-led series based on the Nick Hornby classic looks like a promising modern take on love, music and popular culture.

Reboots like this, of COURSE, would not be possible without the trailblazing success of Star Trek: The Next Generation reviving the legacy of the original Star Trek series. TNG takes all the charming absurdity of the original series and brings thought-provoking, philosophical storylines led by engaging, multifaceted characters, and also Wesley.

The New Pope

Imagine the Pope, except he’s hot. This is what I believe the plot to be of this HBO sequel to The Young Pope, a series that is real and not something from a fever dream, apparently.

Well, you know who else is hot? Every single person on the Enterprise, including the one-episode extras with one spoken line who are inexplicably all chiseled 90s hunks. Prepare for plenty of implied space polyamory, improbably attractive ship crew and weirdly sensual alien life forms.

The Gilded Age

Who needs a charming British period drama, like this one by Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes, when all of human history can be recreated and experienced on the holodeck?

Venture into the Wild West with Worf and his son Alexander (who he definitely does not hate) in the iconic ‘A Fistful of Datas,’ an episode that will become profoundly stupider and more incredible every time you watch it.

Star Trek: Picard

You can probably make time for this one, if you’re “bored” of “watching the same thing over and over again for the bulk of your adult life”???

---