Background and Cancellation
"Broken Bow", Enterprise's 2001 premiere episode, attracted 12.5 million viewers in its first broadcast, but ratings quickly dropped to a low of 5.9 million viewers. Enterprise was threatened with cancellation by the third season. The show survived by slashing its budget amid broadcaster UPN's schedule revamp. The show was moved to Fridays in 2004, while the rest of UPN's programming became more female-friendly, in part due to the success of America's Next Top Model. The third season introduced a season-long story arc, to some of the best reviews of the entire series. In the fourth season, Manny Coto became executive producer after writing and co-producing the show since 2003. While Coto's episodes were hailed by critics and fans as equaling the quality of previous Star Trek television series, the average viewership dropped to 2.9 million, with a series-low showing of 2.5 million in January 2005.
On February 3, 2005 UPN and Paramount announced that the fourth season of the show would be its last. The network waited until the series had been sold to syndication before making the announcement. The cancellation marked the first time new Star Trek episodes would not appear on television in eighteen years, since Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered. The fourth season continued production so that Paramount could sell an attractive 98 episodes to syndicates.
Actress Jolene Blalock (T'Pol) criticized the early stories as boring and lacking intriguing content. She felt that early Enterprise scripts ignored basic tenets of Star Trek chronology, and offered "revealing costumes instead of character development". UPN executives stated that the male-oriented episodes of Enterprise did not mesh with the viewership of its other top shows, such as Top Model and Veronica Mars. Brannon Braga suggested that the reason for the cancellation was viewer fatigue, noting that "after 18 years and 624 hours of Star Trek, the audience began to have a little bit of overkill." Fans, meanwhile, criticized Berman and Braga for ignoring Star Trek canon and refusing to fix their shows. Michael Hinman, news coordinator for SyFy Portal, stated that in addition to the oversaturation of Star Trek, there "also is an oversaturation of Braga and Berman. They couldn't sit back and say, 'You know, we just can't keep this fresh.' No, it was more about their stupid egos, and their nonsensical 'Even if it's broke, don't fix it' attitude." Braga defended the series, noting that The Next Generation faced little competition from other science fiction shows, while Enterprise had to contend with a plethora of shows such as Battlestar Galactica.
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“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)