Having completed the project of rating and reviewing all 176 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it’s time for some observations about how the show stacks up, as a whole, in terms of episode ratings. Is it, in the end, merely a “dangerous, savage, child TV series” that should be consigned to the dustbin of entertainment history, or do its accomplishments warrant a show of mercy from the court?
To begin with: Since I have loosely referred to any episode that I rate at three stars or above as a “keeper,” the question naturally arises: In all, how many of those 176 episodes qualify as “keepers”? The answer, per my ratings (with which, of course, others are free to disagree!), is 106. This means, of course, that 70 other episodes have not made the cut. This equates to a roughly 60/40 split. One would hope for better…but also, it could have been a lot worse!
Of those 106 keepers, just 16 earned the top rating (five stars). That is not, perhaps, a lot, and naturally, I would love for there to have been more knock-it-out-of-the-park classics…but also, I find myself feeling pretty satisfied with this. I have tried, after all, to set a fairly high bar for what qualifies as a five-star episode; they needed to be not merely really good, but truly remarkable stand-outs of a sort that cannot realistically be expected from an episodic television series on more than a somewhat occasional basis. When I look back over the list of episodes that I awarded this rating to, I see a varied but impressive pantheon of the very best that TNG had to offer, and it feels right. Then, one level down from this collection of all-time classics, we have 36 four-star episodes. These constitute the backbone of the show: the solid core of enjoyable, high-quality stories that kept us all watching from week to week. Collectively, then, these two categories add up to a total of 52 really strong, broadly top-tier episodes. Again, do I wish that more episodes were in this range? Of course I do. Still, 52 really enjoyable episodes of a television show are nothing to sneeze at!
Meanwhile, the 70 “non-keepers” break down into 32 one-star bombs and 38 two-star messes. However, this does look a little different if you consider that fully half of those 32 one-star episodes were in the (terrible) first season. In fact, if we were to exclude season one from the tallies, it turns out that the distribution of my ratings approximates a bell curve pretty closely: 16 one-stars, 30 two-stars, 53 three-stars, 36 four-stars, and 16 five-stars. That’s an equal number of episodes at the top as at the bottom, and actually six more in the second tier from the top than in the corresponding second-from-bottom tier. This approach would also bump the ratio of keepers to non-keepers up to about 70/30. Dammit, season one! You really throw off the curve…! (Also, in terms of one-star episodes: If one were to omit both of the first two seasons, there are only 10 one-star travesties across the remaining five seasons. I can definitely live with that!)
While interesting, though, and somewhat reassuring from the perspective of wanting to be able to evaluate the show positively overall, omitting season one from the analysis is, for sure, cheating. To paraphrase Q: what TNG was, and what it became, are both, irreducibly, part of it. So there we are: a 60% “keeper” rate, consisting of 106 out of 176 episodes, of which about half (54) are at three stars, and the other ~half (52) at four or five (including 16 five-star classics). As I’ve said elsewhere…this was TNG, folks!