Patrick Stewart Let Us Take TV Seriously

His gravitas allowed viewers to see the goofiest, most easily disregarded medium as a work of art.

The first thing to notice about Patrick Stewart was always his voice. Clear and round, it had a depth and weight to it without rumbling or growling, and it was so rich and full that it seemed to be mysteriously amplified even when he whispered or murmured. It was a voice made for giving speeches, for rallying the troops, and for inspiration; it was a voice designed to project across theaters and deliver bracing soliloquies. It was not a voice designed for television, or at least not the kind of science-fiction franchise television that existed in 1987 when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered. The Star Trek sets were small, especially compared with TV several decades later. Despite its sweeping celestial setting, the whole series was constrained, relying on face-to-face conversations in tiny offices to convey plot, and action scenes that often looked like scuffles in a blocky, dark, half-convincing cave. Stewart’s voice was too big and plummy for strolling along those repetitive beige corridors or for arguing with an alien baddie over a video screen.

The magic of Patrick Stewart, who died this week at 86, was that his voice and presence as a performer never felt uncomfortably shoehorned into the little stage of the Starship Enterprise’s bridge set or out of place in a chintzy space-themed conference room. His performances never felt like he was dialing himself down to TV size. It was the other way around: The Enterprise felt bigger, grander, and more intrepid because it existed on the same scale as Stewart’s remarkable, clarion voice. His presence was transformative; Stewart made the goofiest, most easily disregarded TV franchise for nerds and nobodies into a work full of warmth and gravitas. He took it seriously, and by extension, he made it possible to take TV seriously, too.

Stewart, who was born in Yorkshire in 1940, was trained as a Shakespearean actor from his adolescence, working his way through school and becoming a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966. He was offered the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation after being scouted during a Shakespeare acting workshop at UCLA, and he was uncertain about taking the job, which might pay better than the theater but would take him away from the career he’d been building for decades. His colleague and later close friend Ian McKellen famously advised him against accepting the role. “When I told him I was going to sign the contract, he almost bodily prevented me from doing so,” Stewart wrote in his 2023 memoir. “‘You can’t throw that away to do TV!’” he recalls McKellen saying.

Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry was just as concerned as McKellen. Roddenberry’s preferred Picard would’ve been a reiteration of William Shatner’s James T. Kirk in the original series, a captain who was younger and more swashbuckling, with more swagger and bravado. TNG’s producers Robert Justman and Rick Berman were convinced that Stewart was the right choice, but Roddenberry conceded only after, as Justman put it, they had “exhausted the supply of available captains” in Hollywood. But it’s not hard to imagine why casting Stewart would’ve felt so against the grain. If Shatner’s Kirk was the ideal, Stewart was operating in an entirely different key. He was older, more restrained, and more sincere. Shatner’s Star Trek captain was your slightly drunk uncle, always deciding the rules never applied to him and winking rapaciously at the nearest sexy alien. The fear had to be that Stewart’s Star Trek captain, by comparison, would feel like your stern and authoritarian father had finally come home to shut down the party and tell everyone they were grounded.

There are hints of that in Stewart’s performance. His Picard is authoritative, with none of the friendly push and pull with his underlings that Kirk had. There’s also no close partnership to mirror the one in TOS, where Spock is there to constantly yank Kirk back in line. Picard is the implacable leader who says “Engage!” whenever he wants the ship to fly away somewhere, but his more telling catchphrase is “Make it so,” which he says whenever he issues an order. That phrase shapes reality to match the picture he’s already envisioned. He’s heard the arguments from his crew, Riker and Data and Dr. Crusher and Worf; he’s listened to the points and counterpoints, and he’s decided what the future should become. There’s an implied next phrase sitting right underneath the surface of “Make it so”: Don’t fuck around. 

But Stewart’s commanding approach to Picard never made him feel pinched, small-minded, or like he wasn’t interested in being playful. Especially as TNG developed, Stewart’s Picard grew more flexible and paternal, able to hold that same firmness while vying with the series’ puckish space trickster Q who’s perpetually trying to get under his skin, or telling the story of the epic of Gilgamesh while sitting next to the fire with an enemy alien, or getting stuck in the ship’s Holodeck in the character of a noir detective. The mere fact of his presence grounded the series, allowing it to grow stranger and more experimental without betraying its fundamental earnestness. In one of the most remarkable episodes, season five’s “The Inner Light,” Picard is struck by an inexplicable energy beam that forces him to live out four decades of life while the rest of the crew only experiences twenty-five minutes of time. The concept should be absurd. Instead, as Picard realizes he’s lived and now lost an entire lifetime, Stewart gives that episode an almost excruciating sense of tragedy and exhaustion. In the moments after he wakes up again on the Enterprise, just before he pulls back in relief, there’s a long moment where he stares at his crewmates, horrified and shocked. “Twenty-five minutes?” he whispers. The shock of his diminished voice alone conveys so much fear and awe.

“Make it so” is a directive to follow an order, but it’s also a phrase with an inherently theatrical turn. Standing on a stage and convincing a theater full of people that they’re witnessing a battle scene, death, or fairy turning a man into a donkey requires willing an audience to believe something silly and fake is actually real. As a Shakespearean actor, Stewart’s voice was trained to project out into a theater and persuade a crowd that they were looking at guards shivering on a castle wall or a general standing in the middle of a shipwreck. In the context of television, Stewart’s catchphrase also meant that viewers at home, staring at a tiny cathode-ray-tube-sized screen in 1987, could look past the low-resolution images, onesie-style uniforms, and “Beam me up” SFX that were just glitter in a tube and see it all as as a real and believable universe. More than that, they could see Picard’s world, and TV itself, as something worth valuing. Stewart made it so.