>>81824925>ENT's marginally better than TOS.Maybe purely racially, but TOS did a much better job at putting non-whites in the spotlight. For fuck's sake, I'm watching the one with Dr. Daystrom right now. You know, the black computer scientist who is a main character in the episode? I don't recall ENT ever doing that. Mayweather barely got any lines at all, though that might be because the actor playing him is shitty, and literally every other black person to show up onscreen in ENT would have done a better job. I'm pretty partial to RoboCop's aide. That dude had a lot of screen presence.
And I have to say, the Terra Prime arc is the only time I felt like ENT approached TOS in diversity. They took good care to make the space racists racially diverse within human standards, and the actors really sold their roles, however small they were.
ENT also has a problem that TOS also took care to approach: Not everyone in TOS is American. Kirk and McCoy are American, and maybe Sulu (but given that his first name is Japanese, I'd wager not). But the rest is from all over the planet. Russian, Scottish, African. That was unprecedented for the time, and Roddenberry did it on purpose to sell his hippie future vision. People like to shit on him nowadays, as OP points out, but Roddenberry managed to get kumbaya, all races united, sex-positive hippie stuff on TV in America in the 60's, and turned it into a pop culture hit that changed the world. That's a feat.
The other shows do OK with Roddenberry's vision. They have more aliens among the main characters, so there's less room for national diversity, but that's OK. VOY kind of drops the ball by making everyone who matters American. DS9 did especially well with racial commentary, with the outstanding Far Beyond The Stars, where they even drop "nigger", and we find out Micheal Dorn has lighter skin than Worf. Too bad they still colourcoded Sisko's lovelife.
