A norm just has to be common, not a majority. Voting for a major political party is a norm, regardless of whether your party wins or loses, for example.
I don't support his views, but to call them as 'not a norm' mischaracterises them and doesn't particularly help in finding tactics against them.
I just worked by way through TNG and DS9. TNG took a while to get it's legs...in today's environment it wouldn't have lasted past season 2. But then it became great television for the rest of the run.
DS9 started pretty solid, and became one of the best written pieces of sci-fi TV quickly for a long time.
DS9? Yeah, it starts pretty soap opera-ish. That never really goes away (they're kind of stuck on the station for the most part), but the stakes get higher and higher and the various players and factions involved become pretty interesting. Not quite Game of Thrones, but way out of character for a Trek show.
Also, repeating the same ad over and over is pretty annoying. If you binge watch a series on Hulu Plus, you'll get the same ad at least twice per episode, for every 24 min episode. I can recite some of them by heart, with the same intonation.
