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Yes, Paramount has fallen into the same hole Disney did once Walt was gone: Keeping the place running for the stockholders. Of course, I think it was doubly tragic with Disney, because they had a true entertainment visionary as its guiding force. I think Paramount hasn't had that kind of visionary approach to the business since movies went color... they were in the hole before Disney fell in.
Paramount's answer to keep Trek going turned out to be plenty of cheesecake, battle after battle, rehashing old material and reviving familiar (popular) characters, and hitting that reset button every hour on the hour. That hasn't worked with any SF show on TV, so Paramount was fooling itself when it assumed that it would work for the mighty Trek. Just putting their efforts into good storytelling would have done the trick... but Paramount doesn't seem to understand SF at all, so they could never see how the story was at all important.
Firefly remains a perfect example of the state of American TV today: It was commissioned, sight unseen, because Joss Whedon had just come off of the successful Buffy series. But being so original, Firefly was canned by those same executives for being too far outside the formula box. You can count the number of shows outside of standard formula that successfully run on TV on one hand... you'd need hundreds of hands to count those non-standard shows that were never given the chance to run. And this, despite the quality of writing, the depth of the characters, or the overall quality of the production.
Instead, we get Terminator turned into a TV show, and a remade Bionic Woman and Night Rider. Old ideas, all (so far) badly written, but if it fits a successful formula... who cares?
All of this is why I've recently taken to buying DVDs of the material I like (TV and movies), and ignoring most broadcast TV for the most part.
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