Google Trends Charts Hint CBS’ Star Trek: Discovery Might Be A Complete Failure
Jorge Arenas
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A number of Google Trends charts hint that CBS’ Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access might be a complete failure.
CBS did claim that it reached 8 million subscribers back in February of 2019 indicating they had reached that goal two years ahead of schedule. However, they haven’t released viewer numbers of their shows including Star Trek: Discovery. (Related: Klingons To Get a New Look in Season Two of Star Trek: Discovery!)
Fans have had to rely on reports from CBS owned ComicBook.com which claimed in Decemeber 2018 Star Trek: Discovery is “one of the five most in-demand digital original series in the world.” The claim was based off data provided by Parrot Analytics. (Related: Star Trek: Discovery Sued by Creator of Tardigrades Anas Abdin for Stealing Plotlines and Character)
However, YouTuber Doomcock calls that praise into question and he uses Google Trends to do so.
As you can see in the video above, the Google Trends show Star Trek: Discovery has way less search traffic than Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show that has been off the air since 1994. In fact, Star Trek: The Next Generation had greater search interest than Star Trek: Discovery throughout Discovery’s life. (Related: Is Star Trek: Discovery Using the Ghostbusters Strategy to Deflect Valid Criticism?)
Doomcock would go on to compare Discovery to Spongebob Squarepants and The Orville. Discovery performed way worse than both of those shows. He would even compare it to a bag of moldy cheese, which performed better than Discovery.
I did my own experiment to see if in fact there is a problem with Star Trek: Discovery and I found some very interesting things. First, Doomcock is on point. As you will see below, Star Trek: Discovery is losing in trends to both older shows and the current comedic take on the franchise, The Orville. (Related: Star Trek: Discovery Renewed For A Third Season – Adds New Showrunner Michelle Paradise)
As Doomcock pointed out The Next Generation and The Orville crush Discovery.
Discovery has been flat-lined since last year. It only got close to the trends of Star Trek: The Next Generation once back at the end of 2018. As noted previously, TNG has been off the air since 1994.
But I wasn’t done, I wanted to go a bit further to get a clear picture.
I removed The Orville and instead added in two other older Star Trek shows for reference. First Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I also expanded the search to two years instead of one to give Star Trek: Discovery a better shot and for clarity of course. Full disclosure our editor, John Trent, mistakenly believes DS9 to be the better series in the franchise, but we can all forgive him for being wrong.
Now on to the results:
We can see the results aren’t all that wonderful for Discovery. Obviously TNG is still performing way higher than Discovery. But so is Voyager. At points Deep Space Nine had slightly higher search interest!
Only at one point, this past June, was Discovery able to overtake Voyager in Google Trends.
I then decided to compare Star Trek: Enterprise to Star Trek: Discovery.
As we can see, Discovery with its $8 million an episode budget cannot even hold off a UPN produced Star Trek: Enterprise.
CBS might have renewed Star Trek: Discovery for a third season, but it definitely looks like the show has a lot of work cut out for it if it plans to win back traditional Star Trek fans who definitely appear more interested in the older shows than Star Trek: Discovery.
What do you think of all of this? Is there a problem with Discovery? Do you think these Google Trend charts indicate Discovery doesn’t have the eyes certain reports indicate it does? I’d love to hear from you all!
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