Over the last couple of months, I watched the entire run of Star Trek, The Next Generation, completing the task over the weekend. The original series is a top 5 all time show for me, and I remember being excited and then eventually disappointed when The Next Generation originally aired, and gave up on it after three or four episodes. So I revisited as I'd often heard it got better as the seasons progressed. I'd say that's an accurate assessment, but I can't say that I think it was a great show. I'm not sure it was even a good show overall, though there were some standout episodes. It definitely wasn't better than the original series, Spock's Brain and space hippies not withstanding. At heart, I just don't think the writing was in the ballpark of the original series quality wise.
Patrick Stewart and LeVar Burton turned in really good acting performances. Brent Spiner was great when he was playing nominal Data, o.k. as Dr. Soong and Lore, and pretty bad playing anything else. The rest of the main cast wasn't so hot acting wise, painfully bad in the early seasons, to the point of distraction. I say this fully granting Shatner's hamming it up in the original.
Years back I kept running into the sentiment about how great Deep Space 9 was, also not having watching it during it's original run due to my ambivalence about the Next Generation. I ended up watching all of DS9 as a result, and thought it was a pretty good series (not without its own flaws), but didn't get the love for it some were exhibiting at the time. After watching TNG, I think I get it - compared to TNG, DS9 was a marked improvement.
I also started and quit Voyager when it came out, finding it to be even worse than TNG in just about all ways. I bailed on it prior to Seven of 9 being introduced, so I probably missed the main attraction there. I'm contemplating taking in Voyager next, but I started up the initial episode last night and am really struggling with motivation to stick with it. I'm tempted to just rewatch DS9 instead and skip ahead to Enterprise (which I also watch an episode or two of and then quit when it came out).
Any Trekkers here to recommend a continue/abort with Voyager?