10 TV Shows That Pissed You Off Straight Away
5. It Seemed Like A Lazy Spin-Off - Star Trek: The Next Generation
On the basis of its first season - and its first few episodes in particular - few would've ever guessed that Star Trek: The Next Generation would end up the most popular and iconic of all the Star Trek series.
The issues were myriad, from the uncompelling personalities of the focal crew members to the dull sets, and perhaps most egregiously the fact that most of the first season's scripts were cast-offs from the Original Series reworked to fit these new characters.
All in all it felt like too much of a rehash of prior Trek and failed to truly bring the franchise into the modern day, with many of those early episodes confronting warmed-over themes or, in the case of the universally-loathed fourth episode "Code of Honor," deigning to being actually racist.
But really, the worst thing of all was the absence of Riker's beard, right?
Season two was an incremental improvement, but season three is where TNG truly came into its own, gaining a newfound confidence in its characters and style away from The Original Series.
Even Patrick Stewart himself didn't think the show would last beyond a single season, and the response from Trek fans and critics was considerably more acerbic than that.