I'll concede that I might be way off base; but my perception is that the way businesses think about and use the term "branding" is different now than how it would have been in say, 2002. E.g., how Kim Kardashian is a "brand."
But I digress...
Trek does better in a serial format. But TV is a bad place to be a serial format and be in the ratings war. Going through Netflix or Hulu is an easier way to get to the people who want it.
I don't understand how any of these high paid executives don't themselves see that there is a audience for the show.
And you know, the more I think about it, the stupider the original comment gets. How could a TV show "dilute" the brand when Trek started on TV?
If, in the execs' minds, the "brand" is a "film brand," then yeah, adding a TV dimension to it dilutes it. Basically, if you approach a given franchise/brand as a kind of big-event/blockbuster movie franchise, then doing weekly stories about Data's cat or whatever will dilute that. If your "brand" is a big-deal must-be-seen-in-theaters one, then having a weekly show or two or three makes that "big event" of a new movie coming out much less special because you can get your "new Trek" (as opposed to reruns) fix any old time on TV.
On the flipside, the show will be the victim of invidious comparison to the films because it'll necessarily be lower budget. People could look at it and say "Why bother? I don't need to see cheap, wobbly sets and crappy CGI when I can get 3D top-of-the-line CGI battles in the next film." So, having both ends up hurting both (arguably).
That's my best guess as to what the execs are thinking. They want Trek to be a big movie event franchise, like, say, Jurassic Park. If you had "Jurassic Park: the Series" running WHILE you were trying to promote, say, Jurassic Park 5, the film would arguably be less "special" because, whatever, if you miss it, you can just go watch the show next week. The only distinction would be the FX budget. And that would cut against the show, because the dinos would look way better in the films than on the show. So, in a way, you'd end up splitting your fan base or relegating the fan base to a much smaller core of fans who'll go for ANYTHING Jurassic Park, while the casual fans either skip the film or the series, or both.
Now, personally, I think the mistake is treating Trek as a film brand. It's never REALLY been a film brand. Not as effectively as it was a TV brand, in my opinion. the films are really hit-or-miss, and seem to alternate between bigbigbig spectacle and "This probably should've just been a single episode or at most a 2-parter." It's rare that the films feel like they connect on a human level while also maintaining a sufficient level of spectacle to justify the fact that it's a film instead of just another TV episode. In my mind, only WOK really manages that, and perhaps The Undiscovered Country. The rest are far more uneven. And at their absolute worst, they're empty, crappy spectacle, like Nemesis, or plodding and dull "too-long TV episodes" like TMP.
On TV, the occasional off episode is easily brushed aside because you've got another one coming next week.
