Despite having been a Star Trek nerd my whole life, I...didn't really care very much about Discovery after about the halfway mark of the first season. I finally canceled my subscription last week because I realized I wasn't going to actually watch the show anytime soon. It's not that I hate it--there's clearly a lot of effort and money being put into this, and it shows, but it just...doesn't grab me. It was nice for the first couple of episodes to have new Star Trek on TV, but part of the problem is that I don't have a whole lot of time or mental bandwidth to devote to a bunch of TV shows--I have enough time and focus for one show, basically, and for me, it's The Expanse. For Discovery to replace it, it'd have to be better than that, and I think The Expanse is superb. Discovery is...only okay.
They've got a big budget and a very talented cast, but the writing is middling, many of the characters (especially the antagonists) are not very three-dimensional, and while I don't give a wet **** about whether Discovery looks too different from a 52-year-old TV show, the spore drive concept is unbelievably silly and fundamental to the first season. I can handle a certain amount of silliness--not everything needs to be diamond-hard sci-fi, but when it's a fundamental part of the story arc, I think there needs to be a certain acknowledgement of "yeah, this doesn't make one damn bit of sense." That was something I liked about some of the worldbuilding for Star Trek Online, of all things--while that game's storyline has many problems, the way it handled the 2387 supernova that wiped out Romulus was basically "yeah, stars should not be doing that, something screwy happened." For me, The Expanse has not only the budget (for polish) and the talent, but also much tighter writing, depth to spare for all its characters (even the literal sociopaths), and when it decides to throw something bonkers at the audience, it leans into the "wait, what the ****," reaction, rather than trying to ignore it. Again, it's not that I think Discovery's bad, but the constraints of real life force me to be extremely selective, and Discovery, at the moment, is unfortunately just not good enough.
Maybe if there's a big blu-ray box set or amazon release or something way down the line I'll pick it up when I have the bandwitdth to spare. I hope that the show does well this season, and that the cast and crew learn from their mistakes. What I saw of season 1 was certainly a damn sight better than TNG, Voyager, or Enterprise's first seasons, and that suggests potential. I didn't see flashes of brilliance like what DS9's first season had, nor the consistent high quality (given the era) of TOS's first season (arguably its best), but it seemed a decent start.