Did viewers take to Next Generation immediately or did it take a few series for it to become popular?

Viewers were so loyal to Kirk and Spock and McCoy and the rest of that original cast that it took a while for people to warm up to The Next Generation. For the first few weeks that it was on the air, Paramount was flooded with complaint letters about Patrick Stewart. People felt that you couldn�t have a bald Captain of the Enterprise.

The characters were so different from the original series that I think there was a lot of suspicion. People thought, well, this isn�t really Star Trek. To complicate matters some of the early scripts for The Next Generation weren�t really top notch.

It really wasn�t until the final handful of episodes in the first season that you started to sit back and say, "You know, this is real Star Trek here, they�re actually doing a good product here. But it�s taken them a while to get going on it."