As a kid i loved watching the next generation and deep space 9 with my dad. Ive always liked sci fi, more of a (stargate fan) and wanted to get back into star trek, but Im just so lost on timelines and whats going on. There are like 6 kirks and I have no idea how/where to get started with watching this again.
This seems like a crazy suggestion to me. Kirk, Spock and McCoy’s onscreen chemistry is half of what makes TOS work.
The other half being… Uhura?
Fair enough. Too many times I’ve tried to watch a TOS episode and just found segments drawn out and boring - at least some of the podcasts reviewing think it was to reach 52 minutes and they just didn’t have the budget for that much content per episode or something. It was just OBVIOUS filler. The Corbomite Maneuver being one where they just keep cutting back to a counter over and over. The trouble with Tribbles had that 10 minute long bar fight - that’s how they fit Trials and Tribulations into it so well.
And a lot of the negative of TOS was the budget / tech of the 1960s for a sci fi show. Or places where the production or execution just failed badly. I never thought The Alternative Factor was a bad story in the novelization, but once I heard Mission Log and others pan it as “not even a TV show” and I tried to watch it - I saw what they were talking about. The thing just didn’t work IMO. Devil in the Dark worked amazing in a novel form, the Horta on TV was… I see where the jokes came from.
Kirk, Spock and McCoy worked really well on the show, that’s true, but I think a lot of the other parts make it a difficult place to start.