It’s dead, Jim.
Paramount+ just pulled the plug on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, and frankly, the only question I have is what took so long. I attempted to watch this monstrosity of a series and was bored after the first five minutes, and I’m pretty sure I fell asleep toward the end.
The cancellation came down on Monday, with the network confirming the show’s second and final season (which has already been filmed) will still air.
Paramount+ made a big bet on Starfleet Academy, hoping younger, more woke Star Trek audiences would make it a success. The idea was to hook Gen Z with a coming-of-age academy setting, fresh faces, lesbians, gay Klingons, and not-so-subtle anti-Trump messaging.
Obviously, critics ate it up. Because they’re critics, and they care more about “the narrative” than good storytelling.
Rotten Tomatoes has the show getting an 87% critic score. Viewers, however, weren’t so amused, and it received a 51% audience score. That 36-point gap tells you everything about who this show was actually made for — and it wasn’t for the fans of the franchise. More damning than the Rotten Tomatoes split: Starfleet Academy never once cracked Nielsen’s weekly top 10 streaming charts.
Not once.
For a flagship franchise title on a major streaming platform, that’s a quiet catastrophe.
“A gay immigrant Klingon in a dress is what really killed the show,” conservative science fiction writer Jon Del Arroz told PJ Media. “No one wants to watch an honorable warrior race become emasculated and humiliated.”
CBS Studios and Paramount+ released a standard goodbye statement, praising “the ambition, passion, and creativity that went into bringing Star Trek: Starfleet Academy to life.”
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“Whether you’re working on Star Trek or part of the marvel that is Star Trek fandom — its very heart, soul, and conscience — the joy comes from adventuring across boundaries of time, space, and the humanly possible in service to Roddenberry’s transformative vision of the future,” the statement continued. “That incomparable vision was fueled by an inexhaustible optimism. Star Trek places its bet on the best in human nature. It dares to imagine a society of ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations,’ free of war, hate, poverty, disease, and repression, and dedicated to the spirit of scientific inquiry and respect for all life, whether carbon or silicon-based, green-skinned or blue. “
Can you hear my eyes rolling?
Now, I’m hardly what you would call a “Trekkie.” The only Star Trek series I’ve even seen in its entirety is Star Trek: The Next Generation. I wanted to like the Paramount+ series Picard (mostly for nostalgia reasons), but the first season was so underwhelming that I don’t remember much about it, and I didn’t even bother with the second.
And there weren’t any gay Klingons in it.
Audiences keep sending Hollywood the same message, and that message keeps getting ignored. Critics can champion woke storytelling all they want. But the public has spoken. There may not be a Star Trek series in production at the moment, but I’m sure they’ll try again eventually, and they’ll fail to learn the lessons the viewers keep telling them.
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