Was The Next Generation ground breaking and in what way?

The Next Generation was the show that everyone said couldn�t be done. There�d been a lot of attempts to bring Star Trek back to television and there�d been work on a feature film that took a long time to come to fruition, until they made the Robert Wise film.

To bring it back to TV was something that they weren�t quite sure was going to work. What was great about The Next Generation was it proved that it could be done.

If you distil it down to the most important aspect, it�s the cast, and those characters. Gene Roddenberry did it again, he created a second series, using the original Star Trek template, but re-designed it in a way that was fresh and went in a different direction.

In the original Star Trek they would travel more, they�d go down to planets but if you notice, they go to the back street planet a lot, they�d go down to the Western town or they�d go down to the 1920s Chicago town because that�s what was on the back lot of Paramount.

By the time The Next Generation came along, the audiences were a lot more sophisticated, so you couldn�t quite do that same sort of thing. Roddenberry was able to create a show that had a very different captain, a very different character and production dynamic in terms of not going down to planets as often and pulled it off. And it made the transition very well into feature films, as well.