One of the problems with today’s streaming-dominated television landscape is that no show gets the chance to, as Star Trek fans would say, “grow the beard,” a reference to a show signaling the conquest of its teething problems by having a main character debut facial hair. There are too many shows demanding too much of our time for us to be patient with a series for multiple seasons, so the era of prestige TV has conditioned us to expect stellar quality right out of the gate. Take recent Trek shows Discovery and Picard — many fans weren’t won back by their Season 3 upticks because they’d so readily abandoned them in their early episodes.
