I like Star Trek: Discovery.

But… I don’t love it. I really want to love it.

As with many other pieces of entertainment I’ve consumed lately, it’s taking real work to engage with the show on its own terms. Specifically, I’m having trouble with the long-format storytelling. I want my TV episodes to end. That doesn’t mean I only want happy endings and simplistic morals and the bridge crew telling jokes before the credits roll. It means I want each episode to feel like a story, not a sequence of events with no beginning or end.

My wife and niece have been watching some of the early-ish seasons of Supernatural and I’m really impressed with how many of those episodes feel like self-contained monster-of-the-week stories with emotionally satisfying endings, and move the whole-season arc along.

But.. I don’t get the impression Discovery is going for that approach. Most episodes just feel like… chapters in a book.

Which is ok I suppose, if the season as a whole ends up being a satisfying story when viewed as a whole. I’ve never felt like a whole-season-story arc was any more satisfying or interesting than my favorite self-contained tv episodes (A Series of Unfortunate Events and the one season of American Horror Story came close)… but I’m willing to entertain the possibility that if any show is going to sell me on long-form storytelling, it’s going to be Star Trek.