Star Trek: The Next Generation Could Have Run 10 Seasons: Braga

Posted in: Star Trek, TV | Tagged: star trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation Could Have Run 10 Seasons: Braga

Before Paramount canceled the series, writer/producer Brannon Braga believes Star Trek: The Next Generation could have run 10 seasons.

Published Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:37:08 -0500
by Tom Chang
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Article Summary

• Brannon Braga says Star Trek: The Next Generation could have run 10 seasons and ended at peak popularity.
• Paramount reportedly ended Star Trek: TNG after seven seasons to boost films like 1994’s Generations.
• Jonathan Frakes and others hoped Star Trek: The Next Generation might get a last-minute reprieve from cancelation.
• The decision reflects Star Trek’s long history of studio pressure, shifting from TV success to big-screen plans.

In this day and age, you have to wonder how hamstrung a franchise like Star Trek has been since its inception, as the dream has survived for 60 years despite corporate mishandling at the network and studio level, but as they say, "You work with what they give you." If NBC had its way, we wouldn't have had a third season of The Original Series, since a fan campaign saved the show until the network, only to delay the inevitable of further slashed production calls and moving the sci-fi series to Fridays, which likely caused the final nail in its network run. As Star Wars became successful, Paramount saw gold in a sci-fi renaissance and why not bring their biggest IP to the big screen in 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

As syndication afforded new opportunities, traditional broadcast television wouldn't, The Next Generation became the next maiden voyage for the franchise, set 75 years into the future, premiering in 1987 and running for seven seasons, which became the staple of all future spinoffs even as the franchise made it back to broadcast TV under the upstart UPN, until Enterprise fell well short at four seasons with its cancellation in 2005 and a new Star Trek series wouldn't be seen again until the streaming era with Paramount+'s Star Trek: Discovery in 2017. Why seven? Well, executive producer and writer Brannon Braga provided some insight to The 7th Rule podcast in August as Paramount pressured creatives, who were still hitting their creative stride, to pick up the momentum after the sixth and final TOS film The Undiscovered Country in 1991 to keep the franchise's presence in theaters with TNG that would be 1994's Generations, the final TOS-TNG crossover project that would see TOS stars William Shatner, James Doohan and Walter Koenig make their final physical live-action appearances in the franchise.

Star Trek: The Next Generation EP Rick Berman on Reluctance to Show's Cancellation at 7 Seasons with Paramount's Push to Films

"In my mind, 'TNG' never ended," Braga said. "It was taken off the air at the height of its popularity. It had another three years, easy." To elaborate on Paramount's decision to pull the plug on the TV side, "It seemed the thinking was, after seven years, you've accumulated enough episodes to have an incredible syndicated life. And things start to get more expensive by that point." He elaborated that the studio didn't think the box office would yield as much of a return if the show was still actively running with new episodes, as TNG ended in 1994. Not that the TV void was empty, with Deep Space Nine already airing and Voyager that would premiere in 1995, making its return to network TV for the new UPN. "I don't know why the movie had to be made this year," Jonathan Frakes, who played Cmdr/Capt. William Riker to Entertainment Weekly in 1994. "Some of us kept hoping there would be an eleventh-hour reprieve, that Paramount would realize how much money the show has made for them and change their minds."

It seems like the franchise was always a victim of the spendthrift ways of the studio. Following TOS run from 1969 to 1971, hopes for the franchise were few and far between with Filmation's The Animated Series that also ran on NBC from 1973-1947 for only two seasons that featured all the original cast except for Koenig, who wrote season one's "The Infinite Vulcan," due to, again, budget. As the TOS films saw periodic releases with TMP, originally conceived as a Phase II TV series, we still didn't get a dedicated TV series until TNG premiered in 1987, and by that time, we already had four TOS films, with the most commercially successful being 1986's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Even following Enterprise, there was a four-year gap until we saw J. J. Abrams Kelvin Universe soft reboot of the TOS characters in Star Trek in 2009, the franchise's return to cinemas since the disastrous TNG fourth and final film, Nemesis in 2002, that didn't exactly translate to a direct series. It wasn't until the third and final Kelvin film in 2016's Beyond that the focus would shift back to TV.

Braga, who left the franchise after Enterprise, has since worked with Seth MacFarlane (who also appeared on the UPN show) on his own Star Trek-inspired show in Fox/Hulu's The Orville, still in limbo since Disney has never officially announced its cancellation. At the very least for TNG fans, they had a "season 8" of sorts with the third and final season of Picard to properly close that chapter of the franchise. For now, with Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy running their final seasons of TV and no new active TV production, it goes back to the cinema again with the reboot from John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, tasked to sell the franchise to be mainstream enough to break the financial ceiling Paramount tends to have.

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