While Patrick Stewart and the rest of the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation won the Saturn Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Emmys for the show have only been limited to the technical category. Only in 1994, for its final season, the sci-fi show was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series.
However, Stewart reportedly disagreed with the treatment of the show by the Emmys and specified a co-star who deserved some love from TV’s biggest award show. The actor cited Brent Spiner’s performance as Data in many episodes, including season 3’s ‘The Offspring’ as award-worthy.
Patrick Stewart Wished For An Emmy To Be Given To Brent Spiner
For a character who does not feel real human emotions and is essentially a robot, Brent Spiner’s Data has often been considered to be the most beloved performance in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The actor played Data as well as other variants such as his evil twin Lore and his creator Dr. Noonien Soong among others.
His co-star Patrick Stewart reportedly loved his performance so much that he actually felt that the Emmys did a huge disservice by not honoring Spiner with the award. He wrote in his memoir Making it So: A Memoir that Spiner’s performance as the Soong family characters was one for history books.
Talking about Spiner’s performance as the Soong family members and Data’s character arc as an android in search of being human, he said (via Slash Film),
Brent Spiner’s performance is staggeringly good — he found new depths to his character’s Pinocchio-like predicament of being a human invention who wishes to become human. It’s a major injustice to me that Brent has never won an Emmy for playing Data, not to mention the androids Lore and B-4 and the bizarre Soong family of mad scientists.
Though he loved playing Data, Spinner has often said how he related more to Lore Data’s evil twin and that he loved playing him more (via Trek Movie).
Patrick Stewart Deems One Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode To Be Data’s Best
Despite a seven-season run and global success, Star Trek: The Next Generation did not receive much love from the Primetime Emmys in the acting and writing categories. The show usually won prestigious awards in sound editing, costume, and makeup categories, while it received its sole Outstanding Drama Series nomination in its final season.
However, Patrick Stewart reportedly believed that one performance from Brent Spiner as Data in Star Trek: TNG deserved an Emmy. Talking about the episode ‘The Offspring’ from the third season of the show, Stewart appreciated Spiner’s performance as he grapples with the death of his robot daughter Lal. He said in his memoir (via Slash Film),
As I get to the third season, though, I see ‘TNG’ finding its own footing. In ‘The Offspring,’ the first episode that Jonathan Frakes ever directed, Data creates an android child whom he names Lal. She assumes the form of a teenage girl, movingly played by Hallie Todd, but she is literally not built to last, and Data musters something close to genuine human emotions as he watches the life drain out of her.
According to Spiner, the one description that creator Gene Roddenberry gave about Data was that he was an android who almost became a human by the end of the show (via Trek Movie). This episode seemed to have tested Data’s non-emotional side to its limits.
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available to stream on Paramount+.
