Series I actually like it
I get it's popular to call this series utter crap, but call me a contrarian, I liked it. Yeah, there were stories that needed a lot of rewriting (sorry, Dear Doctor and Carpenter Street) and that a lot of characters were thrust out of focus, but that's true of every series (mostly). That doesn't change the fact that the aesthetics are fantastic, that the actors are great, that the direction of individual episodes was pretty good, and that there are a bunch of GOOD stories written.
Yes, overall, the first two seasons were kind of bland. That kind of happens when the series can't take risks like it once did. However, they were still on the good side of bland: I didn't really regret killing time with them. I even liked a bunch of the episodes, like Broken Bow, Sleeping Dogs, Singularity, Judgment, and Cogenitor. Not to mention it was nice to see the Andorians and Tellarites finally brought back after so long.
Then season three came and I thought it was pretty good. I could see why the characters were changing as they were and I could appreciate the stakes. The crew's decision in "Damage" was actually pretty dark, no two ways about it, but understandable. Furthermore, the action in Countdown and Zero Hour? Pretty top notch.
Finally, season four. I liked the mini-arc structure here setting things up, but I'm a worldbuilding freak like that. It helps that most of the stories were actually really good. It went out on kind of a weak note, but I'm not personally offended by it. I got a lot of good stuff before then anyways.
So, overall, not so bad. You've got good ingredients that get used in a few bad ways, a greater number of good ways, and... honestly a lot more mediocre ways. But that doesn't make the series itself bad. Just not all it could be. Which is still pretty good to me.
P.S. I liked "Where My Heart Will Take Me." Unconventional, but I think it really captures the upbeat side of Star Trek, and when watching it along Deep Space Nine, I appreciate that.
Series By far the worst Trek series.
The 1st episode established that Archer got his job through nepotism and runs off into space without making sure that he has all the things needed to, y'know, go off into space. The 2nd episode establishes that the transporters work better than the communicators. The 4th episode is an extended joke about Tucker being raped, Tucker getting high, and Tucker being mocked for getting raped, being impregnated thanks to the rape, having his biology being rewritten thanks to the rape, becoming a sexist stereotype of a pregnant mother due to the rape, and finally being forced to publicly discuss the rape with Klingons.
By the time "Dear Doctor" rolls around and Phlox advocates letting an entire species die in agony because of his Nazi ideology about the Valakians "evolving" into extinction (evolution doesn't work that way) and the Menk being allegedly superior, it was obvious that the show was doomed. To catalog the sheer number of failures of writing, directing, special effects, and even acting on this show would take more space than this review, but to put it bluntly: The writing was so bad that Jolene Blalock, a Trekkie, knew how to write and play a Vulcan better than the showrunners who were writing Star Trek, but was forced to play the insulting sexist stereotype of T'Pol anyway. The worst episode of Trek, "A Night In Sickbay" is from ENT season 2.
Season 3 is marginally better, but still suffers from flat characters and Archer being an asshole. Season 4, when they finally kicked out Berman and Braga, is actually moderately half-decent, thanks to Manny Coto's heroic efforts to salvage the mess, but by that point the show's 3 seasons of bad had surpassed the power of its brand name, and the rating had dropped enough that it was cut, but not before Berman and Braga shat on the franchise one last time with "These are the Voyages".
Do not use this to introduce someone to Trek. If you MUST watch it, watch ONLY season 4, and maybe season 3 if you can tolerate Protagonist-Centered Morality.
1/10 would not watch Archer be a whiny racist narcissistic brat again.
Series Eeeeyyyyggh
ENT's never going to be anyone's pick for a Star Trek gateway drug. Unlike VOY, which despite what the internet would have you believe, was drawing huge numbers to very end, ENT stumbled right out of the gate. In fact, the show was so unanimously hated that it eventually became cool to not hate it, settling into cult status.
Proponents might (or at least, they should) point out that it is the most challenging and politically-charged Trek series. This was almost a matter of necessity. Debuting after the 9-11 attacks, in which many and crew members lost loved ones, the show is more ambivalent about cultural exchange and pacifism. Every single species on the show is hostile; they spy on one another, use trade agreements as pretext to undermine each other, and promote their own hegemony. The Federation did not magically appear. ENT would remind you that it was a slow, messy process that took over a hundred years to forge trust between its members.
The issue at hand should not be whether ENT was true to Trek, but whether or not it manages to convey ideas well. That's where the writing falls short. Our window into these greatest of events is Jonathan Archer, a man who is not all that interesting. ENT features what is easily the blandest crew in all of Trek; by S.4, T'Pol ended up becoming my favorite. Considering how stiff and monotone Jolene Blalock is as an actor, my preference is more an indictment of ENT than actual praise. Her and Trip are the only characters with any sort of arc. Archer is gradually made to be more hawkish and bitter , but then, he always was sort of hawkish and bitter underneath the Saturday Morning Special morals he trots out every now and then. Archer is the albatross around Enterprise's neck, and it is no surprise that fandom preferred Trip as the gateway character. Connor Trineer's easy on the eyes, and has charisma enough to make you buy into him as an heir to Kirk. Only Gary Sinese rivals Archer as a more boring hero and the fantastic John Billingsley is mostly here as childish comic relief. Jeffrey Combs is rather irritating as a Cagney wannabe — imagine that? Jeffrey Combs? irritating?
No matter how big your ideas (and frankly, ENT mined its ideas much less as it could have), a show lives or die by its cast, and ENT had a serious deficit of people I gave a crap about.
Series For want of a "Nail"
I don't bedgruge Enterprise (except the awful intro). On one hand, it tried to veer the series into a new direction, trying to explain how the federation came to be. A show without the tech that the viewers knew too well, with awkward phaser pistols and no photon torpedoes. It was actually a joy to see the characters coming up with stuff that would be iconic to the series, such as the Yellow/Red alert protocols.
On the other hand, they didn't just have every single problem that Voyager had, but also lacked the only aspect that made Voyager survive: A good cast with good chemistry in good roles. I really like Scott Bakula, but he is seriously one of the most ill-fitting actors for a captain's role. It's quite hard to be serious, or violent, or firm-handed when you're the human personification of a puppy. I actually bursted into laughter whenever he tried to be 'serious', for example, when he yells at his dog while Archer is having a psychotic crisis from a virus, he looks more hurt than angry. When he tries to be intimidating with Aliens, he looks more like a kid that has the ball in a dodgeball game. If that had been actually worked in the script, a captain that is skilled but is burdened by a huge sense of ethics with overly humanitarian tendencies to the point it endangers the crew, it could be good, but they always tried to play him on par with the other captains of the franchise. Other reviews and the YMMV page will give more info on the other characters. (Poor T'Pol, was supposed to be the Spock of the group, ended up like the Bitc*)
The rest of the cast doesn't fare better, and not due to their own fault, more of the script. And speaking of, while there were good ideas, they felt generally aimless and desperate. Whenever they worked an interesting setup, it often backfired (looking at you, 'this species needs to die' or 'Our engineer was raped, its funny' or 'we will allow ourselves to be killed to not reveal that we are aliens, even if an autopsy of our bodies would confirm it') due lackluster or incompetent writing, and then, they'd try an old formula of the series, only to make it feel spent or result in breaking the canon. The characters were supposedly experienced space farers that were trying for the first time to dive deep into space, but they behaved as if they were newcomers in everything at best, and bumbling idiots with awful, awful choices and awful consequences at worst. The result was, sadly, a boring set of episodes with a crew that could barely cooperate without appearing akward.
In the end, you can enjoy this series if you feel you have nothing better to do and wanna spend some time with a bucket of popcorn, and enjoy the eager attempts at going somewhere new with the franchise. But to me, it ended as a sadly boring and overly long affair. For want of a good casting, it ended the whole franchise.