The first season or two are rough. The Kazon stuff is just… Blah, imo. After that it picks up. The character development, I think, is the best part. Mostly the Doctor, if I’m being honest. Later when Seven joins, her character arc is great, too, and while she was definitely supposed to be sex appeal, her actress, Jeri Ryan, crushes it as a character and not just a sex symbol.
I’m guessing the whole Neelix thing is throwing you? He’s definitely incredibly grating, but he’ll weirdly grow on you as the show progresses.
In my opinion, it’s definitely the weakest of the three you mention, but it still has its merits. Even after we leave the Kazon stuff behind, you’ll get a one off episode here or there that just falls flat.
I’d suggest trying to power through a bit longer to see if you can pick up anything you start enjoying. And if not, there’s no shame in not finishing. Not every series hits for everyone and that’s okay.
I can get behind most that.
The Ferengi episodes of DS9 are some of my favorites mostly because Shimerman liked to get all the Ferengi actors together at his place for rehearsals all the time (What We Left Behind documentary is great ifb you haven’t watched it) and their interactions were tight and they played off each other beautifully.
Brooks is just a strange dude all around. Some of his scenes are iconic (think recording his log in In the Pale Moon Light) but his punctuated speaking style definitely isn’t for everyone.
For the rest of the DS9 cast I mostly agree. I think some of the guest stars vastly overshadowed the main cast. Think Combs, O’Reilly (yes, I liked Gowron), Hertzler, Tony Todd. But anything Combs touches is gold, IMO.
TNG was far rougher than VOY at first, I think. There’s not a lot of character development that went on with the show at all, likely due to the episodic nature of the show. Have your one or two part adventure, reset, and do it again doesn’t leave a lot of room for character growth, but definitely makes it easy for someone to jump in anywhere and not feel like you need to understand 60 previous episodes to know whats happening. As for their acting, Stewart is obviously the standout. But the parasites.Yeah, could have been a great villain. Similar to Species 8472 in you’d never know who wasn’t actually them anymore. It was nice seeing the parasites return in Star Trek Online, albeit briefly.
DS9 actually was fairly hated when it came out both because it was set on a space station and because it was a serialized show and not episodic like TOS and TNG. The tone was also far, far darker. Probably why its my favorite - it’s a more “realistic” take on humanity in space, the shit show wars are, and everything doesn’t just work out all the time (wormhole aliens vanishing Dominion fleets aside.)
Now let’s talk about Enterprise haha. Let’s not.