Quoting
Irish (view post)
I wouldn't say one captain is better than another because they're both so different, and the two shows were both so different.
Here's my pet theory on why the original show worked in ways that the subsequent shows don't: The cast and character chemistry.
There's something good and fun connecting Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and the actors who played them. The producers were smart enough to differentiate the character's personalities, separating them into the rough silos of id, ego, and super-ego. (Or: mind, body, and spirit). Kirk is all body, action based and randy; Spock attempts to be, of course, purely rational; McCoy is their collective moral center. There's a focus on Kirk but he's not meant to be a standalone character. One of the others is always in tow. (If you think about it, "Star Wars" did something similar with Luke, Leia, and Han).
That sort of dynamic doesn't exist on the subsequent "Star Trek" shows. They kinda sorta tried to emulate it here and there. (Worf, Data, Odo, Quark, Seven of Nine, and The Doctor all inherited various traits from Spock.) But it also never really jelled, and it's noticeably awkward when the writers forced it (consider the father-son dynamic between Wesley and Picard, or the romantic relationship between Worf and Troi). When people talk about "TNG" now, or its best episodes, the familiar call outs are almost always around Patrick Stewart and episodes that featured his character exclusively. That doesn't happen with the original show, and it couldn't have happened because "Star Trek" was built around a holy space trinity of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
This lack of dynamic is also why I think JJ Abrams' movies don't work on a fundamental level: The chemistry is non-existent and the interplay is forced, with some of those actors not doing much more than a imitation of the original cast's performances. They also thought, for some reason, that people wanted a "Next Generation" bloat in an original-show movie, and without that id-ego-super-ego electricity to move things along.