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By: 
Travis Fischer

Age of the Geek Column: After a 12 year absence from the airwaves, Star Trek returned to television on Sunday, September 24 with the series premiere of "Star Trek: Discovery."
And then it promptly vanished again.
Viewers hoping to see a new episode last Sunday were out of luck because the broadcast premiere of the show was a one time only deal. In order to see the rest, you need to sign up for CBS All Access, the company's online streaming service.
CBS hasn't been shy about their intentions with "Star Trek: Discovery." This show exists as a lure to draw people into their streaming service and they didn't pull any punches. The first episode of "Star Trek: Discovery" ends on a cliffhanger that leads directly into the second. If any of the 9.5 million people that watched the premiere wanted to see the conclusion, they'd have to sign up.
It's a shrewd tactic to be sure, but an effective one. Sci-fi fans everywhere are now weighing the pros and cons about adding yet another monthly subscription to their budget in order to watch the new show.
For fans of genre television it's getting harder and harder to keep up with all the shows spread across different services. HBO Now exists primarily to get people to pay for "Game of Thrones" instead of pirating it. Netflix keeps producing just enough original content to justify continuing its monthly subscription. Now Hulu has followed suit. Once a free way to keep up with network programming, Hulu has now fallen completely behind the paywall and is developing original content of their own.
It's not stopping either. Disney recently announced they're developing a streaming service of their own, which, depending on how much content they put out, will basically become a must-have for anybody that's had a childhood in the last fifty years.
CBS All Access has some tough competition. One can assume that CBS is hoping that once they've drawn in people with "Star Trek: Discovery," they'll stay on for the rest of the service. It's all too easy to forget to unsubscribe and at $6 a month ($10 if you want to rid yourself of commercials) it's a small amount to miss.
On the other hand, CBS All Access has precious little to convince me that their service is worth keeping once new episodes of Star Trek are off the table. For reasons I can't fathom, the streaming service's library is anemic considering the amount of content that CBS has at their disposal.
Growing up, most of my favorite primetime programs were on CBS, and most of them are nowhere to be found in this service. No "Diagnosis Murder," no "Early Edition," no "Magnificent Seven," and not even a single episode of that cultural touchstone, "Walker: Texas Ranger."
What's worse, the few shows they do have available are incomplete. Upon looking to get a nostalgia fueled Don Johnson fix with old episodes of "Nash Bridges," I was dismayed to discover that only a seemingly random selection of episodes from any given season are available.
The same is true for "JAG," an old favorite of my father. Of the show's 227 episodes, only 83 are available for viewing. I assume there's some sort of copyright issue, probably regarding music, but one has to wonder why they bothered putting up the show at all if they were only going to have a third of the episodes.
Comedies seem to have faired a bit better at least. "Cheers" and "Fraiser" are both intact. As are, oddly enough, the 163 episodes of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch," a show that originally aired on ABC and later The WB, but never CBS.
It's bizarre. CBS has been very aggressive about getting people to sign up for their service but seems to have put remarkably little effort into actually building a service worth keeping.
At this rate it looks like my subscription dollars will be boldly going somewhere else by the end of February.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and is pretty energized about the new Star Trek show.

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