Enterprise was never very good. I always felt like they made serious mistakes with it, particularly in casting. TNG and DS9 was led by amazingly strong, polished, and versatile actors. VOY had some who were terrific, but some who were simply not good enough. ENT had basically nobody. The guy who played Phlox was solid, but the rest were basically terrible. Bakula of course I am a huge fan of, but he wasn't right for the part. They had the typical Trek series directors and decent writers including Chris Black and Mike Sussman, but the story direction came from Braga, Berman, and worst of all, the buffoons at UPN.
The series quickly became awful, but during season 3 (which stunk too) I began to read these reports on the web about this guy Manny Coto. He was a Trek diehard who they hired, and I began to check out season 3 a bit more. I was hopeful, especially when reading interviews with Manny for Season 4. He pledged to change things up, to go with smaller arcs, many of which would revisit unanswered TOS Trekkie questions. He also hired Trek novelists Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, who I was big fan of. The result I thought, was fabulous. The show came to life, and though not nearly as dark, hit a lot of the angles we eventually saw in Discovery. Some people hated this approach, calling it lazy and recycling, but for me it worked.
Sadly, they moved it to Friday nights, and the ratings didn't drop that much, but damn UPN canceled the show. A huge fan movement resulted, with millions in donations to save the show. Didn't happen. Manny gave up the ideas he had for the fifth season, and it would really have been cool. He was going to hit on more TOS episode back stories, even the Kzinti from The Animated Series. To me it was a great loss for Trek fans.
