In introducing what he calls "a comprehensive review of every episode of every live-action Star Trek TV show and film" (i knew he was a nerd but i had no idea he was such a geek), Matthew Yglesias briefly discusses the tension between trying to recapture the mainstream success of Next Generation and the cult popularity of the franchise more generally.

...compared to a modern-day cable television show, Enterprise was extremely popular: "The highest-rated Mad Men episode ever, the Season 5 premiere, drew 3.5 million viewers--a mark that even the failed Enterprise series beat in the majority of its episodes."

Which is just to say that if you think of Enterprise as representing the hard core of Trek fandom then it's clear that there's a very healthy audience out there for a Star Trek cable show. Of course you could make a Star Trek show on cable that everyone hates and it would fail. But to succeed, all you would need to do is make a show that hard-core Star Trek fans like. The tension between trying to make something that appeals to the fanbase and trying to make something that recaptures the mainstream success of The Next Generation would be alleviated.

I'm not a Star Trek fan, but that sure sounds like a familiar argument to someone who's been saying that Marvel Comics needs to drop their love-hate relationship with their existing fanbase and turn it into pure love. What's interesting is that the recent successful movies, and, i suspect, the upcoming SHIELD tv show, are embracing the fanbase and staying truer to the source material than any comic book movies in the past. But Marvel Comics seems to be taking the wrong lesson from that and trying to make the comics more like the movies instead of also embracing the fanbase.