The Best Star Trek Show Too Many Aren’t Watching

But it's not too late.

I host a Star Trek podcast, The Secrets of Star Trek, with my co-hosts Jimmy Akin and Fr. Jason Tyler (who recently replaced Fr. Cory Sticha), and I’ve been a Star Trek fan nearly my whole life. Certainly, my Trekkie fandom began before Star Wars even existed. I spent plenty of Saturdays as a child, sitting with my dad on the couch, watching Star Trek reruns featuring Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

When Paramount announced in the mid-2010s that Star Trek would be coming back to the small screen, I was ecstatic. While we’ve had Trek movies, Star Trek has always been fundamentally a TV show at heart and we hadn’t seen Trek on TV since Enterprise ended in 2005. And not only were we getting a Star Trek show, we were getting multiple!

Without getting into the weeds of it, the first show we got, Discovery, wasn’t great. It had its moments, especially in Season 2 when Captain Pike showed up. And, in fact, he was so well received, they gave him his own show, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. But we also got Star Trek: Picard and two animated series: Lower Decks and Prodigy. Lower Decks is a kind of Simpsons take on Star Trek, full of inside jokes and farce and it is definitely aimed at an adult audience (some of the humor is inappropriate for kids). The fans love Lower Decks, and I’m among them. (Both Discovery and Lower Decks have ended after 5-season runs. The latter’s final season begins streaming this month.)

Prodigy, on the other hand, was definitely billed as a kids' show, even airing on Nickelodeon alongside its release on streaming services (Paramount+ for season 1 and Netflix for season 2). Prodigy tells the story of a group of alien kids from a distant part of the galaxy who stumble upon a lost Starfleet ship and fly it back to the Federation. At first, I was unsure if I’d like a kids' animated Star Trek, but like a lot of animated science fiction, there’s a surprising depth to the storytelling. Yes, sometimes they rely on easy jokes or simple plot devices, but often the show can go deep and become compelling, especially in season 2.

In fact, I think Star Trek: Prodigy is the best Star Trek show that people aren’t watching.

To be clear, I’m not saying it’s the best Star Trek. in my opinion, the best Trek series ever was Deep Space 9, and the best Trek series currently in production is Strange New Worlds. Heck, the best animated Trek is Lower Decks. But don’t get me wrong: Prodigy is very good, but not enough people seem to realize that. Or at least, not enough to keep it in production.

After Prodigy’s first season wrapped up, Paramount+ announced that season 2 would be the end and that they wouldn’t even bother keeping it on their service, but would let it go to Netflix, which already has the rights to stream both old and new Star Trek internationally.

But having just finished watching season 2, I really think Prodigy has the legs to continue. And I’m not alone, as there’s been a huge push by fans to pressure Paramount to continue the show, which is ironic because it mirrors a similar effort by fans back in the 1960s to pressure studio execs to continue producing The Original Series after two seasons and a threatened cancellation.

Why do I think Prodigy is so good? The first reason is more an observation than an argument. Each of the new Trek shows have been best when they are in some way continuations of classic Trek shows. Picard season 3 (the best season) was a kind of The Next Generation season 8, bringing back nearly the whole cast. Strange New Worlds is the series most like The Original Series, including bringing back the Enterprise and giving us truly episodic stories. And Prodigy is a continuation of Voyager, featuring Janeway, Chakotay, and the Doctor.

(Lower Decks is a special case as an animated pan-Trek romp, and Discovery is, well, it’s own thing, which is to its detriment, and feels the least like Star Trek overall. Note, that we do not (yet?) have successors/continuations of Enterprise or Deep Space 9.)

In fact, Prodigy really hits its stride in season 2 when we get the real Kathryn Janeway, rather than a hologram version of her, as well as Chakotay and the Doctor and a new Voyager ship. But let’s not sell the new characters short either. The kids of Season 1 have matured in Season 2 and have gone through real growth as they aspire to become Starfleet officers and to save the galaxy. We even get the best version of Wesley Crusher yet, who, as one of the mysterious Travelers of TNG and Season 2 of Picard, becomes a fantastic homage of Doctor Who. Kudos to the writers and Wil Wheaton for making a character once mocked by fans and making him one that fans embraced with joy in Prodigy.

Meanwhile the secondary characters add much to Prodigy as well, with a surprisingly talented cast of voice characters with the like of John Noble, Jason Alexander, Ronny Cox, Daveed Diggs, and Jameela Jamil showing up. Jamil and Noble are particularly good as their characters undergo significant personality changes between seasons.

The stories themselves were well-written, by and large, mostly avoiding the clichés and tropes that would be so easy to fall back on when writing a show aimed at kids. They gave us plot lines and resolutions that felt satisfying and sometimes unexpected.

And even though each episode of Prodigy clocks in at a brief 20 minutes or so (including a surprisingly lengthy opening credits), we got 20 episodes per season, which is practically unheard of on streaming platforms.

So if it’s so good, why has Prodigy been cancelled? I believe it’s because of marketing and economics. I think it was a mistake to market the show as a kids' show. Yes, it’s kid-friendly and there’s nothing inappropriate about it, but it’s complex and entertaining enough for all ages. Similarly, Star Wars may have seen the potential issue for their future show Skeleton Crew, because they were careful to announce it as a show with many children in the cast, but not a kids' show and then let it be compared to Stranger Things, which is definitely not a kids' show. If Prodigy had been packaged as an animated show for all ages, it might have garnered a bigger audience in the beginning.

Even that might not have been enough in the age of streaming, however. In the old days, it was simpler. TV shows survived on advertising. The more popular the show, the more advertisers would pay to be in front of all those viewers. But in streaming, the money is up front and for the whole service. The executives must decide whether a particular show or group of shows will bring in more paying subscribers and keep those subscribers around. Whether any particular show is more or less popular among the current crop of subscribers is less relevant.

The executives have to decide whether Prodigy will bring in even more viewers than Paramount+ has with its current line-up of Star Trek shows. They clearly decided it doesn’t but I don’t know if that’s right. Yes, in 2023, when they made their decision to cancel Prodigy, there were four other active Star Trek series on Paramount+, but since then Discovery and Picard have ended and Lower Decks is about to stream its last season. That leaves Strange New World, plus the future Section 31 movie that was originally a series. SNW is great, but is it enough. In 2023, you had new Star Trek to watch nearly every month, meaning Trekkies kept their Paramount+ subscriptions active. But starting next year, once the next season of SNW is done streaming, what’s to keep them around?

It’s known that Paramount+ is struggling, but Star Trek, like Star Wars, is a fantastic multi-generational franchise. But will Paramount, like Disney, mishandle the franchise and start to erode the fanbase?

I hope that the Paramount+ corporate woes end soon and the fan campaign to bring back Prodigy bears fruit to bring it back for a 3rd season. (And that we get the much-demanded Picard-successor series Star Trek: Legacy, but that’s for another discussion.)

In the meantime, I hope you head over to Netflix to check out Prodigy’s two seasons and maybe bump up its streaming numbers so we can all benefit from a third season of the best Star Trek show you’re not watching. Yet.