With Star Trek Into Darkness hitting DVD this month and a third film in the rebooted series roughly slated for 2016, it’s pretty safe to say the Star Trek movie franchise is in the best shape it’s been in years, possibly all the way back to the days of The Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home. Prior to these recent J.J. Abrams movies, there were never even two great Star Trek movies released back-to-back, and Paramount is obviously thrilled by the box office results.

But the success has come at a cost. The new movies completely destroyed any chance of more Star Trek: The Next Generation films. Granted, they have only themselves to blame after releasing the horrid Insurrection in 1998 and the even more horrid Nemesis in 2002. Those two bombs ensured that Star Trek was out of the multiplex for seven years, and J.J. Abrams was forced to reboot the entire Star Trek universe in order to get things flowing again.

Unfortunately, no Abrams-like figure came around to save the Star Trek TV franchise. It’s been off the air ever since Star Trek: Enterprise got yanked in May of 2005 after just four seasons. Audiences never warmed to Scott Bakula’s Captain Archer, and the idea of a show taking place 100 years before the original Star Trek was better in theory than actual practice.

In the last eight years there hasn’t even been any serious attempts to put Star Trek back on the air, and everyone seems entirely focused on the movies. This is a horrible mistake. At its core, Star Trek is a television series. There are countless of hours of amazing Star Trek TV episodes, and only six or seven great movies. (We’re on the fence about The Search for Spock.) Gene Roddenberry created a vast universe, and a movie every three or four years just isn’t cutting it for the fans, especially since those movies essentially take place in an alternate universe.