This week, Paramount confirmed that it would not renew Starfleet Academy for a third season. It is likely to mark, even as Star Trek celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, the end of an era for the franchise as the studio prepares to pivot Trek from the streaming renaissance that began with Discovery towards movie ambitions once more.
Just as there has been plenty of hope that, despite the fact there is no Star Trek show in active production for the first time in a decade, Star Trek on TV will continue, there have been plenty of theories as to why Starfleet Academy came to an abrupt end. Trade reporting around the cancellation cited low Nielsen ratings. Detractors cited the “woke” elements of a show in a franchise that’s always been woke, from the way women sat in chairs the wrong way or wore glasses the wrong way, to the way people of color or of different sexual identities simply existed within the setting. The specter of an owner navigating the space between two massive, industry-shaking mergers—Skydance’s $8 billion acquisition of Paramount in 2024 and Skydance-Paramount’s attempted $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery this year—with the need to find cost savings where it can as well as project its own vision for its ownership of the franchise, lingers over it all.
There’s some weight to at least some of these arguments (certainly not in anything regarding the show’s perceived “wokeness,” though). It is indeed a fact that Starfleet Academy‘s first season didn’t chart in Nielsen’s streaming top 10 during its run. It’s likewise a fact that the kinds of massive mergers and acquisitions Paramount has faced over the past few years bring with them behind-the-scenes tumult as cuts, changes in direction, and slate cleaning try to catch up with the vast amount of money thrown around in making them. It’s conjecture, but at least noteworthy conjecture, that Paramount’s new leadership has spoken often about wanting to push its content towards the idea of appeasing its vision of middle America and that a Star Trek show with a young, diverse cast already being circled by grifters who sensed the blood in the water, viewing the cancellation of The Acolyte as the next frontier in the culture war, does not fit that perceived vision.
But regardless of what you believe about Starfleet Academy‘s ending, one thing is certainly true: the series wasn’t given the chance to grow that it deserved.
Although it’s become something of a common belief among Star Trek fans that no series has a great first season (they’re often mixed, sure, but there are definitely diamonds even among the seasons assumed to be the roughest), something the vast majority of Star Trek shows have all been given is time to find their footing. It’s arguably only Prodigy that has faced a similarly unfortunate fate, booted from Paramount’s own streaming service to come to an end on Netflix after just two seasons—and that show likewise faced similar challenges of trying to find a new audience and likely was a predecessor to the ramifications of Paramount preparing itself for acquisition. Even Lower Decks, which faced a similar kind of cultural backlash when it first launched, was given the time to grow into one of the strongest series of Trek‘s latest era.
TV has changed since Star Trek‘s ’90s heyday, yes, but when Starfleet Academy wraps up after its second season, it will have just 20 episodes to its name—shorter than the length of a single season in the vast majority of the runs of TNG, DS9, Voyager, or Enterprise. That’s barely time to give its sizable cast of characters time to grow and develop or time for the series to find a footing as it navigates the precarious gap of bridging classic Star Trek ideas with the vibe its young protagonists were bringing to the table (or time to re-pivot that tone—imagine if Picard hadn’t been given the chance to undergo its dramatic shift from its debut season to its last). It’s a rare TV show that comes right out of the gate perfect, but Starfleet Academy was certainly far from unsalvageable and was filled with the potential to become a strong series that we’ll now likely never get to see, developing what worked and tweaking what didn’t as it grew.
It remains to be seen if much, or anything, will be changed about the second season of the show in light of its cancelation—although it had wrapped principal photography just last month, the series still has extensive, ongoing post-production. Time will tell if Starfleet Academy is allowed, at least, the chance to rework its sophomore season’s conclusion into some form of farewell. It deserves that, at the very least, if it’s going to be the victim of such impatient circumstances.
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