Paramount Cancels Star Trek's Best Future By Ignoring Seven Of Nine Spinoff

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Published Oct 1, 2026, 3:01 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While the Star Trek franchise has been in an uncertain place for a while now, failing to make Star Trek: Legacy a reality means the series has no promising future heading into late 2026. It’s incredible how quickly the fortunes of a franchise can turn around sometimes. Even though hit shows like Silo, 3 Body Problem, Severance, Foundation, and the acclaimed video game adaptations Fallout and Arcane all prove that sci-fi TV is enjoying a renaissance, the Star Trek franchise isn’t reaping the benefits of this trend.

Only a few years ago, the Star Trek franchise was enjoying one of its most fruitful eras since the days of Deep Space Nine, when shows like Voyager and The Next Generation and movies like Generations, First Contact, and Insurrection were released alongside that iconic series. While that lineup might sound sizable, it’s worth remembering that Discovery, Short Treks, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, and Starfleet Academy all began in the nine years since 2017, representing one of the show’s most bountiful eras ever.

However, every one of these Star Trek shows has since been canceled, and it is not yet clear what the next series from the franchise will be. Sadly, it is clear what the best future for the franchise would have been. The final episode of Picard heavily implied that a follow-up show, titled Star Trek: Legacy by fans online, would follow Jeri Ryan’s iconic Seven of Nine as she commanded the Enterprise-G.

Star Trek: Legacy Was The Series Star Trek Needed

Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine in Star Trek Picard

While Picard’s closing scene was almost as iconic as The Next Generation’s finale, this doesn’t mean that the series wasn’t setting up a future for the franchise outside of Patrick Stewart’s returning title character. To many viewers, the season 3 finale of Picard felt like a backdoor pilot that was setting up Seven of Nine for a new Star Trek show. Unlike the more serialized story of Picard, Star Trek: Legacy would have returned to the more episodic, standalone storytelling style of The Original Series and The Next Generation.

Viewers have long wished that the franchise would give Seven of Nine the leading role she deserves, but this imagined project was as popular for its proposed format shift as it was for its leading actor. It has been a while since the Star Trek franchise created a show that feels like The Original Series, thanks in large part to the changing narrative norms of TV and streaming shows.

The rise of binge-watching as a phenomenon, combined with the complex, sprawling storytelling preferred by iconic TV dramas like The Wire, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, The Expanse, and many others, had a knock-on effect on the writing styles utilized in network TV. Prequels became more commonplace, as did heavily serialize series that explored side characters from existing shows rather than relying on an ensemble cast in a traditional procedural format.

Paramount Shows No Sign Of Moving Ahead With Star Trek: Legacy

While network procedurals remain fairly commonplace in the police procedural genre specifically, as evidenced by ABC’s The Rookie, the Law & Order shows, and the ever-growing NCIS franchise, the Star Trek franchise responded to changing trends in TV by exploring more cinematic, immersive storytelling in its shows. There was Starfleet Academy, the first show explicitly aimed at a teen audience in the franchise’s history, and Discovery, a prequel-sequel with a complex timeline and serialized plots more akin to Westworld than The Original Series.

Even the best new Star Trek shows, like the prequel Strange New Worlds, still require viewers to have some existing knowledge of the franchise, rather than functioning largely as newbie-friendly case-of-the-week procedurals like The Original Series or The Next Generation. After spending the last decade repeatedly, and arguably unnecessarily, reinventing the proverbial wheel, the Star Trek franchise needed a return to basics, and Star Trek: Legacy could have been that comeback.