Gratitude

Dear CBS Television:

I write to express my enormous gratitude at your recent kind gesture regarding your new televsion series, Star Trek: Discovery. You aired the premiere episode on your broadcast station and are airing the remaining episodes on your subscription streaming outlet, "CBS All Access."

I do not know how you knew I was a devoted Star Trek fan, but you did, and you realized that I might have some residual feelings of guilt about not subscribing to the service. I had previously suggested that the return of the show to an episodic television format brought it back to its strongest platform, which meant that my decision not to subscribe could have been seen as mildly hypocritical. If I wanted the show to succeed, should I not take part in making it happen? Wouldn't my support be in name only if I waited around for it to appear on other streaming services or on DVD for rental? Surely the minor inconvenience of having to acquire yet another streaming service was minimal compared with my responsibility to see that Star Trek: Discovery succeeded?

And I will confess I felt a little bit uneasy about my decision -- not enough to change my mind, because I was not going to buy another streaming service for just one show. But still, the concern remained: Were I and the people like me going to take this great opportunity to have real Trek back on TV and screw it all up? And then I watched the episode that was aired over the regular broadcast channel.

You removed all doubt and all concern from my mind that I would screw this up -- I could not do a better job of that than the people involved in the show already have. The writers, the cast, the designers -- it was a group effort. From the ridiculous back story written for our protagonist to the uniform redesign to yet another Klingon redesign -- and this one easily the ugliest and most pointless yet -- to red-shirting Michelle Yeoh and turning Doug Jones into a hoofed mixture of Niles Crane and Miss Cleo...

I could go on, but it would feel like I was just bragging on how much you cared about even the small amount of guilt I felt over not subscribing, and how hard you worked to reassure me that my decision was the right one.

Plus, I figure you have a lot of thank-you notes to read. The estates of Lee Cronin and Edward J. Lakso to Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman for getting them a friend in "worst Trek script ever" jail. William Shatner to David Semel for a compadre in goofiest direction. Wil Wheaton to Jones for making "Wesley" a not-so-automatic object to the phrase "Shut up" on a Starfleet bridge. John Logan to Bryan Fuller for some competition in the "Dumbest classic character retcon/redesign" category.

I'll let you get to it. I figure you'll have a lot of time on your hands soon enough.