​My name is Jack Beers and I'm a Sim on The Sims 4. I live in the creepy old mansion in Forgotten Hollow that used to be owned by Vladislaus Straud, now called "Beers Manor" after my last name. How am I able to afford such a large residence? I'm a prominent writer who has written screenplays for every Dracula and Batman film that was greenlit in the 20th century. I'm also the author of the Official Vampire Encyclopedia and have composed hit music dedicated to my late cat, Munchie. It all makes good money in royalties and my place makes a great vampire layer, but royalties can only last so far.

​Recently, I decided to sell my writings directly to consumers by opening a shop in Magnolia Promenade called "Jack's Bookstore" to avoid the middlemen of publishers. My plan was to mainly sell all of my screenplays in book form, but also an occasional painting, as I had recently taken up the hobby and learned that the best paintings become expensive. 

​The store is small: a two-story building with a showroom on the bottom floor and the top floor set up as a small apartment. It used to sell random odds and ends but I made it a bookstore and gave it a creepy theme as appropriate for consumers of vampirism and Batman. 

I had decided that I would only run the store on weekends, Thursdays to Sundays, to avoid burnout and opened the store with a small celebration that was attended by a tiny gathering of people, mostly fans, when tragedy struck: One of the older attendees, a woman named June Vatore, just keeled over and died in the middle of the store. To our shock, we then watched as the Grim Reaper arrived to take her away, leaving nothing but an urn in her wake. 

I remember trying to do something... it was my store after all. I was in charge and I wanted to kick Death out of the shop or at least plead for the life of the woman I had just met, but I was frozen in terror. I just stood there and cried as the Grim Reaper carried out the death and then attempted to dance to the spooky music playing on the jukebox I had set up in the store, before he vanished into nothing. 

​I felt so bad. I felt hot - physically hot. I needed water and remembered going to the sink several times to drink an oddly large amount of water that day. The urn Death had left in my store was just sitting there and had to be removed to prevent further mourning from my customers, so I temporarily hid it in the upstairs apartment. That Monday, I took the urn and brought it home, since it otherwise would have been left unclaimed at Magnolia Promenade. I then tried to offer the urn some Sugar Skulls and put all of that behind me, but it became impossible when the following weekend, another customer died. 

Cameron was the first of two Landgraabs to die at the store. It was the same scenario as it was with Vatore: They keeled over, the Grim Reaper took them, the customers were traumatized, and I was left drinking more water and trying to figure out how to properly handle these deaths while managing a business. I dutifully took the urn home and gave it the same treatment I gave June's. At first, I summed it all up as a grim coincidence that would eventually stop, until the tragedy of the next weekend occurred. 

On my third weekend working the bookstore, two more customers died, Arjun Lothario and the second of the Landgraabs, Lindsay. Arjune died on a Friday and Lindsay died on a Saturday. It was shortly after bringing their urns back to my home when I began to believe that my little shop of horror-books was somehow cursed.

​When the fifth person, Roman Alley, died the weekend after that, I considered closing the store because it was then that I learned that it was the scorching heat of Magnolia Promenade that was causing elders to die of heat exhaustion in my store, as well as causing me to constantly reach for water to drink: That weekend was so hot that I realized that I needed a thermostat, but at the time, I concluded that I couldn't afford it, so I carried on without one, which I will forever regret. Then, for the next three weekends, nobody died at my store. I hoped that it meant the curse that I believed inhabited my store had somehow been lifted, but I was then presented with a whole new problem.

During those three weeks, it became clear that the spirits of the people that the urns had belonged to, had come back with me to Beers Manor and had since taken residency. At first, I was shocked and scared, but that seemed to pass quickly. I then made quick friends with some of those spirits and began documenting their existence. The first picture I snapped was a depressing selfie between myself and Arjun Lothario. The first painting was of Roman Alley when he didn't realize it. I was then able to take selfies of Cameron Landgraab and Roman Alley interacting with each other. I began to get along with the ghosts as well, and in return I was able to document them and sell the work at my shop to great success. 

When the sixth and seventh customers died, I once again considered closing the store. However, it had since made so much money off of the deaths and ghost hype that I changed my mind. Instead, I had learned to capture the ghosts on camera and in paintings and made the decision to sell them in the same store the ghosts had died in. While the spirits weren't happy... even embarrassed to be snapped on camera, the subsequent sales went through the roof, which is why I'm now writing a book on it. 

​This book is about the lives of the men and woman who died of heat exhaustion in a small gothic bookstore, only to live again as spirits in a very welcoming creepy vampire mansion. The lives of June Vatore, Cameron and Lindsay Landgraab, Arjun Lothario, Roman Alley, Cory Handy and Darrius Kim-Lewis not only live on in Beers Manor, but in this very book. 

​I never knew her. She just died in my store the first weekend it was opened. June Vatore was a retired schoolteacher, and she was very sweet, but shy. Before she died, she told me she was a fan of my work and was planning to make my store a "daily destination". I managed to find out from her family member, Lilith Vatore, that she also enjoyed family, television and the study of vampirism, which is what brought her to my work. 

The Vatores aren't well known but I hear they used to get along with the Strauds, a family whose patriarch built the home I now reside in - A home where June's spirit will now reside in forever. 

Cameron Landgraab was the second elder to die of heat exhaustion as she was reading a book in Jack's Bookstore (and Sauna). She died the second week of the store's existence, and her cousin, Lindsay, would join her the following weekend. Before she passed, Cameron approached me in my store and gushed about my later Batman screenplays and was interested in picking up some of my earlier Batman screenplays. 

Cameron has been described as a "cheerful", but "lazy" individual who "likes to practice" and "loves the color gray". Lindsay was a goofball who enjoyed, cold weather, borrowing things from friends and not liking the color green, making her an overall genius. Lindsay arrived at my store the week following her cousin's death originally to tell me off, but then we started to get along as we shared interests and mourned together... that is until she dropped dead at my feet. Once again, the Reaper came and left an urn. Once again, I was helpless to stop it. 

Unfortunately, that's all we can really give on Cameron and Lindsay, as we are currently in a feud with Cameron that I will write about in another book. Needless to say, that with all those deaths, I thought my store was somehow cursed.

​When we did get along though, I know Cameron was rooting for me, even if she once jokingly masqueraded as a "great, great, great, great" grandfather of mine. She was the one who made Lindsay understand that her death the week before was not my fault and I appreciated that.

As time passed, I was exposed to more of Cameron and Linsday as I took in more pictures and paintings and really began to wish that I gotten to know them better when they were still alive.

They have a large family out in Oasis Springs that has a deep history starting with Gregory Landgraab, who became a wealthy landowner. Yet their history dates back even further to the time of the great Admiral Landgraab. Their family holds a lot of respect in my eyes, and I just wanted to take this time to apologize to them and to let them know that I'm taking care of their urns in my home and their ghosts have been seen wandering my halls. 

​Poor Arjun Lothario dropped dead on the third week of my store along with Lindsay Landgraab. It was actually the first time I began to question if there was something wrong with the store. The only thing I learned about him before and after his death was that he had been interested in interviewing me. Though he doesn't seem to communicate much, he has been seen in ghost form at Beers Manor. Roman Alley, who died the following weekend, liked the color gray and disliked the color yellow. He was family oriented, a vegetarian and loved being around children. He came to the store out of curiosity, but unfortunately left in an urn.

After three weeks, Cory Handy "the Mohawk Guy", died right after arriving at the Thursday opening. He had described himself as a "romantic" and "erratic perfectionist" who hated the colors black and yellow. When asked about being dead, he said he was very sad about it and has conflicting feelings. 

The final death, Darrius Kim-Lewis was the son of Sun Young Kim and Bradley Lewis, with the Kim Family having emigrated from China. He's described himself as an "clumsy art lover" who also loved the outdoors and the color, while hating purple. He died just hours after Cory and was actually good friends with him. He had come to mourn and had died the same way as the others. The following week, I installed a thermostat. 

​To the memory of these seven souls and the families that raised them. While their ghosts roam the halls of my home for the time being, once they pass on, may they find peace in their deaths. Their urns will be forever enshrined in the basement of Beers Manor as a monument to them and their lives.

-Jack Beers, Author

With Discovery's final season days away, let's take a dive into the sordid journey of Paramount Global and how they've handled the Star Trek franchise. 

It starts with a simple concept: While Netflix made $5.5 billion in revenue in 2014, CBS All Access, the CBS streaming service which was launched that same year, wasn't making a profit and was costing CBS money. CBS executives decided that streaming was going to be the future of media and that they should focus on revamping CBS All Access to make it profitable. That meant exclusive content would be created to attract a strong subscriber base. The more new subscribers they could gain, the closer they can get to making CBS All Access as profitable as Netflix (insert laugh emojies). 

In late 2015, Bryan Fuller pitched a Star Trek prequel series. It was a golden opportunity for CBS to inject new life into their streaming service, and they eagerly greenlit the project for a 2017 release. There was one caviat: Executives decided to pair him up with a man named Alex Kurtzman and together they would co-executive produce the show. Fuller had worked as a writer for Deep Space Nine and Voyager while Kurtzman was a writer for the 2009 Star Trek film. This pairing up was seen as a way to ensure that Discovery would appeal to both fans of the classics and new audiences. 

While Fuller brought a wealth of Trek knowledge to the table, clashes with CBS executives over the show's creative direction soon emerged. This caused Fuller's team to eventually fall behind schedule and by October of 2016, executives at CBS asked Fuller to step down. Kurtzman then became the executive producer in charge, where it is believed he played a "yes" man to the new direction the executives wanted to go. 

​This is where I believe CBS made their first error. CBS made the critical mistake of assuming that the mere presence of the Star Trek brand would be enough to lure in fans, regardless of the quality of the content. They didn't understand the importance of continuity or of Federation values in the Trek universe and decided to treat the visuals and the crew as if the show took place in the Kelvin timeline, an alternet universe created by JJ Abrams that started off well before fizzling out after three films. This forced change in who was in charge of Trek could be seen symbolically as the moment where CBS executives chose to appeal to newer audiences and ignore the wishes of classic Trekkies. 

As the the writing progressed, executives and the production team took moronic risks with the show, such as redesigning the Klingons into Klingorcs (a decision seemingly backed by Fuller, but I doubt he would have backed THAT design) and centering the narrative around a mutineer named Michael Burnham. Pre-Production and Production was rumored to be a bit hostile. They would try to throw money at the problems as these initial episodes cost millions to make. The first part of the first season was so bad, it spawned it's greatest critic - Doomcock - into existance. He was so outraged, he started a YouTube channel which became pretty successful with over three hundred thousand current subscribers in the seven years it's been around. When the inevitable backlash occurred, they ever so slightly changed direction to introduce Pike's Enterprise in the end of the first season. 

In an attempt to protect the CBS brand, articles were soon produced claiming that Discovery's first season hadbroken records and was universally loved. More divisively they also claimed that anyone who didn't like it had some sort of issue with ablack woman lead or a gay couple as part of the crew. They overemphasized the diversity of the cast while ignoring the problems with the writing and aesthetics, believing the criticism would blow over. 

​Over the years, ignoring or belittling the critics resulted in missed opportunities for the show to truly grow and innovate. Instead, they doubled down and announced three new Trek shows. Picard was annouced in August 2018, Section 31 was announced in January of 2019 and Lower Decks was announced in July of 2019. That same year, CBS remerged with Viacom to create ViacomCBS. The merging allowed both companies, who had initially split back in 2006, to lower overhead costs and pool resources to invest more in CBS All Access. Still, it didn't make the streaming service profitable.

As a side note, while the merger was going on, articles accusing Discovery critics of being alt-right trolls and racists were being released at a pace similar to a political campaign. This would produce a number of consumers who would consume the newer Trek shows purely out of political spite, painting anyone who had criticisms of the show as bigots and believing that the continued "success" of the show was a way to "own" the alt-right. They would accuse critics of being "toxic fans", creating blocklists for them and their followers and booting critics from fan pages while accusing them of "gatekeeping". 

​I befriended a few of these people who were considered toxic fans, many of which were life long fans of science fiction. I found that these people just wanted better entertainment. Even if we didn't agree on everything, we could agree that this version of Trek was not canon and was purely not in conjuction with the original vision created by Gene Roddenberry. Sadly even certain members of the cast and crew would jump in and throw out similar accusations against these fans. By January of 2020, the same month Picard season one premiered, a new show called Prodigy was announced, bumping the show count to four. (Section 31 stayed in development hell until it was downgraded to a streaming movie in April of 2023)

​As for Star Trek Picard, the first season failed to resonate with audiences as expected. One issue was the questionable premise of Dahj and Soji being played off as Data's "daughters", contradicted his creation of Lal in TNG who Data actually built. 

The writing and dialogue suffered immensely, diminishing the once authoritative but eloquent speeches Jean-Luc used to give. The worst part was that they killed Jean-Luc off, only to turn him into an old android. (BTW, is anybody else tired of seeing Patrick Stewart's characters die? I swear when Wanda snapped his neck in Multiverse of Madness, I was like "oh come on, not this shit again!") Despite efforts to portray the Picard show as a success, various indicators suggested otherwise.

As for Discovery season two, the advertising was so disruptive to my social media scrolling that I myself had decided to enter the chat. Not through YouTube, just through social media and this website. At the time, I didn't understand that millions were on the line and so the creators and consumers would push back hard. I figured "it's just a TV show. The world is going to shit, nobody's going to care if I trash a TV show". Yet when a lot of money and creative clout is at stake, it seems to turn grown men and women into highschool drama queens. 

Out of all the criticisms about the second season, the casting of Anson Mount as Captain Pike seemed to be the most well received. Fans of Discovery wanted a Pike show and they got their wish on May of 2020, when they announed Strange New Worlds. So now with five Trek shows on CBS All Access including season three of Discovery which premiered October 2020, it was hard to argue that this new vision for Trek was unsucessfull. ​

​Despite the "success" of NuTrek, the merger, the annoucements and the response to criticism of Discovery, it all did little to make CBS All Access profitable so by 2021, they decided to rebrand again. This time renaming the streaming service to Paramount+. They also decided to sell props and costumes from Discovery seasons one and two that September. In 2022, ViacomCBS was rebranded to Paramount Global. They even started making Superbowl ads where Michael Burnham and Captain Pike teamed up with the likes of Bevis and Butthead and Snooki on an expedition up a fictional "Paramount Mountain" to meet up with Patrick Stewart and Stephen Colbert so they could watch a musical performance by Spongebob. It ended with Stewart narrating, "and so they lived happily ever after on this mountain of entertainment... which is also a streaming service!" 

This would have been the part where Morgan Freeman would have butted in to say, "No. They did not live happily ever after".

​No amount of rebranding was going to bring in potential subscribers when the twitter account for Paramount+ was blocking those same potential subscribers. Stuff like that and the way people involved in the creative process treated critics of the shows led to an alienation of their viewers and damaged Paramount's reputation, resulting in a loss of trust from the once built in Star Trek fanbase who eventually decided to walk away. 

By 2022, Netflix was making thirty one billion dollars in revenue while Paramount was fifteen billion dollars in debt. Strange New Worlds premiered that May and proved to be more of a reboot than a prequel series. In a possible effort to make some sort of a profit off the Picard show, an auction of props from Picard seasons one and two were sold off in November. ​

2023 saw Paramount's debt rise to almost seventeen billion dollars. February of 2023 would mark the premiere of the final season of Picard, where I somehow found myself in a strange fued with the show runner. By March of 2023, it was announced that the former flagship show Star Trek Discovery would be cancelled, with it's final season airing in April of 2024. Finally, on June of 2023, Prodigy was abruptly cancelled, despite the second season being in production and was pulled from Paramount+. It would later move to Netflix, but after three cancelled shows in a year, the kink's in the armor of what was once called the "second golden age of Star Trek" began to show. 

In the end, there was no second golden age. Discovery didn't resurrect Trek like people try to claim. All these shows were simply content for a streaming service that has been bleeding money for almost a decade. They would have made them regardless of whether anybody liked them or not. Classic Trek was art. Modern Trek is content. 

It would further be revealed that in the decade it has existed, Paramount+ has yet to make a profit. The billions of dollars Paramount threw into the infulstructure and exclusive content for Paramount+ and none of that content, Star Trek or otherwise, was enough to put Paramount+ in the green. Paramount went as far as to sell Simon and Schuster for $1.62 billion dollars and were still in debt. 

Another thing happened that may be relevant to this conversation. In November it was reported that HBO network executives directed employees to create fake Twitter accounts to combat criticism of HBO shows. The claim arose from a wrongful termination suit with an ex-employee and highlights a strategy of using fake accounts to undermine critics posting negative reviews on social media, raising serious ethical concerns. While I wont go so far as to accuse Paramount of the same thing, I will say that the possibility of Paramount manipulating the conversation to deflect criticism can be implied. 

​By the end of 2023, there was a meeting between Paramount CEO Bob Bakish and Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav and the topic of the discussion was about a potential merger. In January of 2024, there were reports that Skydance Media founder David Ellison was thinking about buying Paramount's parent company, National Amusements. 

It seems as though Shari Redstone currently wants to sell Paramount. I'm not saying that Star Trek's decline is the sole reason that Paramount is in decline, they were obviously mismanaging other franchises around this time too. They gave the South Park people almost a billion dollars to make new seasons and specials and not only did it not make Paramount+ a profit, but it lost money in legal fees when it was sued by Warner Brothers over who was supposed to stream the new seasons and specials. Paramount seems to have a habbit of mismanaging their properties. ​

It was reported in February of 2024 that Paramount had laid off some of it's workers and was in talks to possibly merge streaming services with Peacock. Most recently, Warner Bros. Discovery halted talks of a merger, but it's now rumored that they quietly made a bid to buy the Star Trek franchise. ​

Will Parmount be sold off as a whole or in parts? Redstone seems to want to sell it as a whole, so we'll see. Will Paramount+ ever make a profit? I'm sure it will. Let's just hope they learn their lessons about alienating their audiences by then. 

There is a feeling of vindication, knowing that we were right all along about the success of the new Trek shows. We knew it wasn't gaining enough subscribers and that things like Google Trends showed waning interest. We even pushed heavily on the idea of them releasing viewing numbers to prove this, but the real indication of the success of the shows was there all along: Were the shows making Paramount+ any money? The answer was an astounding "No, please buy us out". 

As an experiment, I asked AI to take my previous NuTrek articles and to combine them into a narrative summary. This is the result:

If you'd like to read my previous NuTrek articles, click here.