You’re assuming that the only story line is Bashir’s.
I would look at Sisko. At Odo. At the genocide attempt. Bashir is one element in a larger story.
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I want a prequel where they spend entire episodes talking about Romulan cooking and taking Number One to see the vet
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Needs more bunnycorn sausage?
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only if the theme song can be blondie’s version of the tide is high
The tide is high but I’m holdin’ on
I’m gonna be your number one
I’m not the kind-a girl who gives up just like that, oh no oh oh oh
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One thing that was both a strength and weakness of Deep Space Nine was that it was written around longer story arcs and recurring characters in contrast to Next Generation or the original series where most episodes were largely self-contained.
These days that’s the norm for most dramatic series, but in the era before streaming-on-demand that meant that I had a harder time getting into the later seasons of DS9 because if I wasn’t able to watch it regularly then I constantly felt like I was missing crucial elements of the plot. I almost wish I hadn’t tried watching it until Netflix was a thing, or maybe if I’d caught it on DVD instead of broadcast.
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Don’t forget Babylon 5 which was around the same time, and also had long story arcs as opposed to purely episodic storytelling.
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I’m not a big fan of DS9 because it was an example of that tedious 1990s trend of “grimdarking” everything. The appeal of Star Trek was that it was an utopian vision of the future. Yes, reality shows utopian experiments like cults and communes and idealistic revolutionaries often turn dark and that we should be skeptical of them, but the idea of Star Trek is that it really was supposed to be a utopia.
That said, I don’t think it is out of character for the Federation to dislike genetic engineering. Remember that in their history they had genetically engineered people like Khan who became powerful dictators. They probably overcompensated to prevent a recurrence, much as the Dune universe banned computers after an AI uprising.
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Babylon 5 was conceived as a 5 year arc with spots for single episode stories peppered in between.
But it faced problems with unforeseen cast changes early on and being cancelled 1 season earlier than expected only to be revived on another network.
Frankly I like its ending a lot more than DS9’s (spread across 3 episodes) But Babylon 5’s last season was a hot mess leading up to it.
Plus the setting lent itself better to its wartime narratives and “going dark”. It was a far from utopian future and fairly relatable to today. Even prescient with how Earthicans were willing to go xenophobic and fascist with little prompting.
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I always felt that DS9 was the first 1-1 1/2 seasons of B5 re-written for the Star Trek universe.
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I said upthread how nice it is to watch these older shows that have hundreds of episodes. The flip side of that is there’s a lot of filler crap like this. Usually at least one “clip show” per season, a couple of bottle episodes, and a few that clearly didn’t get the time they needed.
It’s a clear sign that the crews are overworked trying to hit those 90s TV schedules, so it’s probably for the best that modern streaming shows have less content.
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And Twin Peaks predates them both, as do soap operas that had been on the air for 50 years by that point.
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at first i was like “bottle episode”? there aren’t that many star trek episodes that make me want to drink…
interestingly, that page has this to say about one of ds9’s bottle episodes
The phenomenon has persisted to a lesser extent in later incarnations, with “Duet” ( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ) being celebrated as "[a]rguably one of the best episodes of Deep Space Nine and a jewel in the entire cannon
i definitely wish streaming shows had more episodes on average ( hello disney! ) i agree there’s definitely a trade off between quality and quantity though
i thank the streaming gods that netflix has (mostly) gotten over it’s walking montages. for a while it seemed most episodes were required to have at least 10 minutes of the protagonist traveling from place to place 
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The first B5 episode I saw was written by longtime Trek writer David Gerrold. It started out very Trek-like. The doctor struggling with restrictive religious beliefs of the parents of a dying child. It ended very very differently from what would have been expected.
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Yah, this pendulum swung a little too far the other way. These days a “season” is 13 episodes if we’re lucky, and they are often released half a “season” at a time. For some shows (looking at you, Walking Dead), the “seasons” are as much as two years apart in some cases. There are a lot of modern shows that I genuinely thought were cancelled until suddenly “new episodes!” appears in the UI, at least a year after I assumed it was long gone. This was all pre-COVID, too.
It’s at the point now where I have to look up a show in Wikipedia to see if it has been canceled before I delete it from my queues, just in case it comes back.
COVID, of course, made all this ten times worse. A lot of stuff got canceled and a lot of stuff didn’t, but we all lost two years so it’s hard to tell what, if anything, is coming back even if officially it isn’t cancelled. There’s also that weird “long COVID tail” on many shows (Walking Dead is another good example) where it’s clear they were trying to produce content around quarantine limits by doing an entire episode with just one or two characters in it. Also, once again, a lot of bottle episodes suddenly happened.
(I learned that term “bottle episode” from Abed in Community 
)
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I just started watching The Fugitive series, and realized that I’d seen a few of the sets before on other productions…
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I think this is very astute. Like many said upthread, I was just so-so on DS9 when it aired. My memory of it was “endless rambling about Bajoran politics yawn”. However, rewatching it on streaming when you can binge it is a totally different experience. You can keep all the subplots and machinations in your head and not lose track of things. Plus it solves the pacing issues. When you only got 44 minutes of a show every week (or every other week sometimes) with long breaks in the summer, it felt like a waste to spend a precious episode talking about the geopolitical implications of building a religion around aliens that live next door.
Watching DS9 on modern streaming or DVD with a choose-your-own-consumption rate is a totally different experience, and I think the show really shines that way. IMHO, it was mature modern writing that was perhaps a few years too far ahead of its format.
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I agree, although the one that really did it for me was Confessions and Lamentations with the plague attacking the Markab, because Star Trek absolutely would have found the cure in time. Watching it mentally I was still set up for that, and the story beats are familiar. You’ve got the escalating danger; the spiritual vs scientific conflict; Franklin struggling to make sense of the disease; compassion form Delenn and the implication that faith will find a way; Franklin finding the cure and rushing to save them and…they’re all dead.
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JMS feels that’s no coincidence, as he pitched B5 to Paramount before they came out with their own Star Trek version of a space station next to a wormhole
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Seems like some sour grapes from him there, but he shouldn’t care, really. People don’t watch a show because of one detail of the premise (“station next to wormhole”). They watch it because it has consistently good writing and characters. DS9 and B5 both did and both shows were great 
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There’s definitely some sour grapes, but I’m not sure they’re undeserved - it’s been a long time since I read the argument, but JMS considered the station to be a key differentiator from TNG as it was wrapping up. It enabled and required differences in storytelling that he planned to use to make it not seem like a Trek knock-off. Having to compete with the larger studio that just passed on your pitch only to, from your point of view, use the same premise had to be frustrating. B5 did great work on a comparative shoestring budget, but JMS always seemed to regret that he didn’t have Star Trek money to spend on production.
As scifi fans, you’re absolutely right - we got two great series instead of one, and the staff and storytellers for both should be proud of what they accomplished.
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