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The End of 'Star Trek'? Every Single Series Now Cancelled (screenrant.com) 120

Posted by EditorDavid from the lived-long-and-prospered dept.
"Every single Star Trek series has been canceled..." reports ScreenRant. "There is "no Star Trek in production or greenlit for the first time in nearly a decade."

While there were five active Star Trek series just a few years ago, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds filmed its fifth and final season in the fall of 2025, and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy "wrapped filming its second and final season at the end of February." (Though ironically, both Star Trek series still have seasons yet to premiere, with two season of Strange New Worlds mean it may continue airing through 2027.) TrekCentral reports that the sets for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy are now being torn down... There will be a local online auction for parts of the set on Friday. Additionally, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' sets are also being taken down... Star Trek: Starfleet Academy boasted the largest sets ever built for Star Trek. The demolition of Starfleet Academy's stunning sets includes the loss of the multi-level atrium, which had the Starfleet Wall of Heroes, the USS Athena's bridge, and the classrooms.

The End of 'Star Trek'? Every Single Series Now Cancelled More | Reply

The End of 'Star Trek'? Every Single Series Now Cancelled

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  • Just my opinion (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday April 11, 2026 @10:44AM (#66088654)

    Star Trek went Disney long ago - churn out ill-considered concepts and scripts plastered with nostalgia designed to appeal to the fan base and zeitgeist and certified by a panel ensuring all the right boxes were checked off.

    Strange New Worlds was a nice partial deviation from this - they still made sure to pander to all the current 'sensitivities', but if the writers of the show didn't love the original series and its fundamental qualities, I don't know who does.

    The rest of it has been pablum. Academy sounded great until you read the synopsis. "Let's subvert tropes" followed by "Yeah, the academy is actually just another starship, and we'll give the kids superpowers". Their attempts to drop little Easter eggs for classic fans were just insulting - like having aliens show up with the writers obviously having zero idea that in the original series the whole point of their appearance was to watch them die in an unnecessary final act of self-imposed genocide.

    Throwing Star Fleet uniforms and phasers into a setting doesn't make it good. Let it rest until they figure that out.

    • Re:Just my opinion (Score:5, Insightful)

      by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <megazzt@gma i l . c om> on Saturday April 11, 2026 @10:58AM (#66088686) Homepage

      I think it's the opposite... Star Trek tried to modernize and got rid of some of its strengths. Strange New Worlds returned to the classic formula and did well because of it. Shorter seasons, movie-budget episodes, and favoring season-long story arcs and abandoning individual episodic storytelling all caused problems. Strange New World did enough of a course correction by bringing back episodic storytelling to be good. It also strikes a good balance with original stories vs notalgis bait (we get a couple episodes, like the Lower Decks crossover and the Balance of Terror retelling, and they lean a lot into Pike knowing his own fate which we see in TOS,,, though that plot thread was started in Discovery).

      I do think every modern Trek series has individual good moments but on a whole the abandoning episodic storytelling and shorter seasons (which feeds back into hurting episodic storytelling if you want an overarching story too), really hurt them I think.

      • Strange New Worlds managed to give us a musical episode as well as one about an energy being that likes mucking about with people using its magic reality altering powers... and make those episodes not suck.

        I liked the Nurse Chapel updates. I even liked the Spock stuff, though like any over-analytical fan I have notes. :)

        I hope the writers of that show go on to other successes, because they executed exactly what the premise required while adapting it to a modern production.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by drnb ( 2434720 )

          .... one about an energy being that likes mucking about with people using its magic reality altering powers...

          I think a few TOS episodes fit that description, and TNG had a recurring character that fits that description. Seems like a normal day in the ST universe. :-)

      • Star Trek was a sci-fi product of the 60s just like The Twilight Zone (give or take a few years). What made them great was 1) episodes were independent and 2) the writers were actual experienced sci-fi short story writers.

        When you mess with 1) and 2) you lose the magic.Screen writers are not good at original storylines and series arcs are effectively putting all eggs in a single storyline basket. Either the audience likes it or they don't and the show dies.

        Whereas when you have 1) you can afford to exp

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The new shows were different, but they captured the essence of Trek. Discovery was a bit of a shock to the system for many, but it is still a damn good show overall. SNW is even better, and Prodigy is fantastic. If you haven't seen Prodigy because it's a kids show, I can't recommend it enough. Season 2 in particular does more for one of the Voyager crew in a single episode that 7 seasons of that show ever did.

        Academy is very good too, with a few issues here and there.

        There were weak points. Picard had a few

    • Strange New Worlds is great.
      Prodigy is great.
      Lower Decks.....is fun. Perhaps too self-referential but it embraced it.

      Discovery had its moments but could be a slog.
      Picard couldn't decide what it wanted to be, and was way too eager to kill everyone.

      Haven't tried Academy yet.

      • Picard shit the bed from the beginning. From watching an old man survive a massive explosion, throwing in a trailer-dwelling drug addict and a Romulan ninja, through to wasting Seven and ending on a big Reset Button.

        Oh, and "Main character is dying"? That's inconvenient... let's replace him with an android running a simulation of his brain and keep on going. Jesus, but that was dumb. I'd have called the show "Star Trek: Legacy" and moved on from Picard in season two... maybe passing the baton to Seven. Y

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          The proper precedent for this already exists. You just have the main character wake up, and hear that someone is in the shower. They go into the bathroom and someone who died multiple seasons ago is taking a shower and it turns out the last few seasons were a dream.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Picard shit the bed from the beginning. From watching an old man survive a massive explosion, throwing in a trailer-dwelling drug addict and a Romulan ninja, through to wasting Seven and ending on a big Reset Button.

          This was not a fault of the showrunner or the writers. Picard was hampered by Sir Patrick Stewart. His red line for the show is that it shouldn't be a TNG part 2 and must avoid TNG nostalgia or even bringing back more than a couple of characters.

          He relented for the last season and let the writer

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Beached ( 52204 )

      This is revisionist to Star Trek ToS that "pander to all the current 'sensitivities'" under the eye of people today. It was very progressive at the time and dealt from long standing human issues like racism. It wouldn't be considered, in most circles, to be today, but that's a sign that many of us have progressed

      • This is revisionist to Star Trek ToS that "pander to all the current 'sensitivities'" under the eye of people today. It was very progressive at the time and dealt from long standing human issues like racism. It wouldn't be considered, in most circles, to be today, but that's a sign that many of us have progressed

        The important distinctions were that the issues were handled with (1) greater class and intelligence and (2) audiences reacted more positively. "Good intentions" does not outweigh bad writing.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          You must be joking. Literally half white, half black aliens, who end up destroying their entire homeworld and most of their race, nd even then can't stop being racists? Not exactly subtle. Then you have Planet of the Literal Nazis, swastikas and all, because apparently some people in the 60s were still weighing up the pros and cons of the 3rd Reich.

          It was controversial at the time. Roddenberry had to fight the studio for a lot of it. He couldn't get the to accept a woman as Number One, and the actors had to

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by drnb ( 2434720 )

            You must be joking. Literally half white, half black aliens, who end up destroying their entire homeworld and most of their race, nd even then can't stop being racists? Not exactly subtle.

            Good thing I did not say subtle. I wrote " the issues were handled with greater class and intelligence."

            I criticized bad writing, not bringing up social issues.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              They went with the sledgehammer option. I wouldn't call it class, or particularly intelligent given it was supposed to be obvious to racist morons.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by drnb ( 2434720 )

                They went with the sledgehammer option. I wouldn't call it class, or particularly intelligent given it was supposed to be obvious to racist morons.

                Actually the black/white face makeup was a classy and artistic way to make a point. Totally unlike how Academy went about things. Again, its about bad writing.

      • There's a difference between being inclusive and pandering. TOS didn't pander. Well... maybe a bit. Roddenberry wasn't above it.

        Still, there did seem to be a more genuine (though occasionally ham-fisted) attempt at inclusiveness. I doubt a focus group of the times would have given us the Star Trek we got.

        The new stuff is often hollow. It's checking boxes. It's pandering. That works better in pop music than in science fiction.

    • "Strange New Worlds was a nice partial deviation from this - they still made sure to pander to all the current 'sensitivities', but if the writers of the show didn't love the original series and its fundamental qualities, I don't know who does."

      Have you even seen the original series? Racism, bigotry, classism, human rights, ethics, not to mention nationalism, were all dealt with. TNG went further, particularly with Riker's penchant for rather open sexual interests, and of course DS9 dealt with everything fr

    • Yeah, the last good Trek show was Lower Decks. Animated or not, it had the vibe and the feel of OG Star Trek.
  • Starfleet Academy to Start Trek is what The Rings of Power is to Lord of the Rings. To me, both were unwatchable.

  • At Least a Break is Badly Needed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Saturday April 11, 2026 @10:49AM (#66088666)
    Just like Star Wars, the brand has been so devalued by the last decade+ of entries that no one looks forward to anything that's announced anymore. Giving it a break and getting rid of the current creative team is the bare minimum for anyone to take anything ST seriously.
  • Hopefully after lying fallow for a few years, a back-to-basics series based on hard science fiction stories by actual science fiction authors will be more successful. And of course, back to Roddenberry's original vision of a future in which everyone is at peace with who they are and who everyone else is, in which everyone has enough resources that the lower-level needs of Maslow's hierarchy are covered, so everyone's time and effort can be spent on self-actualizing, fun activities like exploring the galaxy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jddj ( 1085169 )

      I like that idea.

      My take on it (why I didn't bother watching any of these): too many series, too obvious that they're building a big canon they can mine for all kinds of shit, too many humans in big-fucked-up-head makeup.

      In an entirely different series universe, The Twilight Zone distinguished itself from The Outer Limits by declaring that it was "Not a monster show". A bunch of big-fucked-up-head make up doesn't substitute for story and characters. In fact, I think it can impede.

      Yes, Star Trek TOS pilot ha

      • >I'm hugely open to the idea that other life forms might not share our morphology. So why do they all look like humans with big fucked-up heads?

        Two reasons: the more 'alien' your aliens, the more difficult it is for an audience to interpret them, and production costs.

        The goal is to tell a story within a budget, so as Pat Tallman once said, "they sit you down in a chair and put a vagina on your face".

        • Well TOS did the half-black half-white guys (one of whom was Frank Gorshin - the Riddler), and the green dancing girl (who just looked swarthy on my B&W tv) without blowing their heads way TF up.

          The big head. It's excess. It's inflation. It's the same thing that for years made the big boss fight in every single cheap horror flick Satan. Really? Were there no other ideas? Where do you go for an encore?

      • So why do they all look like humans with big fucked-up heads?

        This was addressed in TNG: deliberate panspermia.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Star Trek has never been hard sci-fi. Much of the bread and butter stuff is pure fiction, invented to keep TV budgets down. Warp drive and the transporters are hand-wavy at best, and subspace is entirely made up with no scientific basis at all.

      In fact, one of the worst aspects of older Trek, something which plagued Voyager in particular, was pseudo-scientific technobabble. Far too often an interesting idea would be resolved by some nonsense, instead of in a way that is interesting for the characters.

      Speakin

  • One thing that really struck me about Academy was "Why are they introducing teen angst and bad soft porn?" It just struck me as formulaic and very, very tiresome.

    Star Trek was always about possibilities and the future and hope. It was always about serious ideas and social problems. Delving into teen hormonal drama had nothing to do with that.

    Holly Hunter was a delight, as was Paul Giamatti.

    • Because it was a show written for young adults?

      • Every time I see this argument made, I want to see the Neilson demography for the show.

        I do NOT hear the young people we have at work talk about this show in a way that's good. They talk about the Orville (which is rarely), much more than they ever have about Academy.

  • Cheese fry mentality (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Saturday April 11, 2026 @11:05AM (#66088698)
    The best analogy I can come up with, is the producers think if you like eating a small plate of chili cheese fries, you are going to love eating an entire chafing tray full of them. Sometimes you only want a bit of something. Then maybe a nice salad, or a baked potato. Then you go back to chili cheese fries later.

  • Right-wing nut jobs are taking over Paramount (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday April 11, 2026 @11:21AM (#66088710)
    Star Trek can't survive. Star Trek is a fundamentally progressive and left-wing franchise. It doesn't work if you start injecting culture War bullshit. And under the new ownership anything that's not culture War bullshit is out.

    I haven't seen the very newest stuff but from what I understand they started to try and get away from the good old woke Star Trek plots a little and it went over about as well as you would expect. The ratings were pretty much shit and nobody's going to spend the money to make a science fiction show like that.

    Honestly that's the problem. Sci-Fi is woke. You are looking towards the future and you're doing it for a mass market so nobody is going to want to sit through episode after episode of right-wing dystopia. And I don't think anyone believes in right wing Utopias because you always have to have an out group in any right-wing fiction and it's kind of hard to have a Utopia when you are explicitly excluding minorities of one kind or another.

    Honestly as the Epstein class takes over media more and more it's just going to keep getting worse and worse. Go look up what Ben Shapiro's Media company is going to do and at this rate in 10 years that's what's going to be TV and streaming.

    I do wonder what they're going to do when the ratings collapse but I don't think they really care about money anymore it's just about having control. Back in the '70s gay people took over TV not because the people writing were gay or woke or liberal or whatever but because TV had gotten so censored by the right wing that it was intensely boring. So ratings collapsed. They started putting gay people into sitcoms and other TV shows because it was controversial at the time and it got viewers back.

    You kind of need progressive ideas to make media interesting because otherwise you're basically just looking back to a fake idealized past ala I'll leave it to Beaver.

    Again though when the ratings collapse in the past they would have done something about that to bring viewers back but these days I think they might just let TV suck. Like how Twitter is losing money hand over fist because it's full of Nazis but muskrat doesn't care because it's more useful as a propaganda tool then as a profitable business.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      a fake idealized past ala I'll leave it to Beaver.

      Don't you think you're being a little hard on the beaver?

    • This is consistent with Ellison’s management of Oracle with overbearing bean counters finding everything to bill for or drop it (customers, products, features).
      I’ve watched Star Trek for most of my life, and seen the mix of good to bad with Starfleet Academy growing in its first season to a promising second. I’ve already bought the Blu-ray of the season as I expect a purge after the purchase goes through.
      TOS got four pilots, with major casting and character changes with support from Lucill

    • Clearly you've never seen or read any real sci fi if you believe any of that steaming crap you wrote. Star trek is space opera, its TV big mac. Dystopias are a huge part of the genre, go start with Orwell and work up from there, but if you cant read try these films for starters- Blade Runner, Logans Run, Silent Running.

    • Why am I utterly not shocked that rsilvergun believes it failed because it didn't go woke enough?
      The simpler explanation, that people were tired of having a parade of identity-characters shoved down their throat in lieu of actually-compelling plots, of course can't be the case?

      Setting ENTIRELY aside the woke crap, starfleet academy was awful. 90210 in space storylines and writing were childish. TOS stories faced serious moral dilemma and yes, often solved them with a liberal, positive, idealistic outcome.

  • Maybe they finally squeezed all the juice they could out of 'Trek. My $0.02? A "BSG: Crusade" reboot might work better & be better received now.

  • What we learned from Star Trek Discovery (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Saturday April 11, 2026 @11:30AM (#66088728) Homepage

    Every major character that dies, comes back to life in one way or another.

    Star Trek may be dead now, but eventually it will be too irresistible for Paramount, who will always see it as a cash cow.

    I only hope they go back to Star Trek's roots and scrap the "alternate universe" which is basically a Marvel copycat. We fans always loved Star Trek because it was more than just action, there was substance there too.

  • Anyone with even an ounce of understanding must have known that those scripts were just bad and stupid. It has nothing to donwith "wokeness" or ticking boxes - it's just if your scripts are so bad that it shows that they were written with that in mind, it makes them even worse. Hopefully it's a lesson.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by unami ( 1042872 )
      I mean, it's scifi. Aliens with weird sexes, pansexual cosmic deities, changing genders, non human forms of sexuality, alien matriarchs, sexless (but 'fully functional') androids... you name it, that's one thing that scifi is about. AND it's about reflecting the present. So, there's no reason things like this should not feel at home in Star Trek or even make good scifi. Unless it's written sonbadly that it destroys the "suspension of disbelief" and feels forced.

  • Maybe the modern audience does not have TVs and computers?
    Because catering to the alleged modern audience sure seems to ruin shows and games every single time.

  • Its easy to forget how bad TOS was. Giant space amoebas. Race wards between people with black on the right or left side of their faces. Space Rome. Streaming series have gotten a lot better than in the days when the competition to Star Trek was Lost in Space and Gilligan's Island. Culture has also changed. TOS was extremely progressive...there was a (wait for it) black woman on the bridge. Now the writers are stuck between trying to keep the feeling of the original series which is ultra-reactionary by

    • Let’s not forget space hippies!

    • I'd argue TOS wasn't bad. By today's standards, sure, and there were some episodes where the writing failed to overcome the budget limitations, but it was adult science fiction taken seriously and often based on very good stories in days when that was uncommon.

      It wasn't Lost in Space.

  • After the fruitless discussions about Critical Drinker's criticism I guess one might consider this his final success.

    • Lol, right wingers need instructions on how to feel about something so they watch that channel.

      • I feel especially glad about the fact he has so many millions of views across all his channels, not even counting the usual suspects joining his discussions who get even more views!

        But the absolute cherry on top has got to be seeing you people raging and seething about his success, and how you only resort to desperate ad-hominem because you got absolutely nothing else left.
        We are way, way past peak-woke, the pendulum is shifting.

        You are not going to like the next couple of years and decade lol

  • Star Trek was designed to endure (Score:4, Interesting)

    by forrie ( 695122 ) on Saturday April 11, 2026 @12:46PM (#66088870)

    Star Trek was designed to endure. From the beginning, it was inclusive — not as a marketing strategy, but because that was the whole point of Roddenberry's future. Multiple races, interspecies politics, a Russian on the bridge during the Cold War, a Black woman as a senior officer in 1966. That wasn't "woke," it was the premise. So when people blame inclusivity for Trek's decline, I feel they're misdiagnosing the problem entirely.

    What actually killed it is a lack of vision, poor writing, and management that treated the franchise like IP to be mined rather than a universe to be respected.

    I'll admit — Academy grew on me. The characters developed, the acting was good, and when it hit the warfare arcs it found some real weight. But it needed more time to breathe, and it never fully escaped the teen drama gravity well that nobody asked for. I wanted to love it, because I love Star Trek and I'll always give it a chance. But wanting to love something and it earning that love are two different things. That's the frustrating part — you could see what it could have been if they'd trusted the material and given it room to develop.

    The timeline fragmentation hasn't helped either. I know there are fans who embrace all the timelines, and more power to them — but for me, it's fractured any sense of a coherent universe. Kelvin timeline, Discovery's jump to the 32nd century, prequels contradicting established canon — at some point you can't even tell what's connected to what anymore. The TOSTNGDS9Voyager era had a coherent forward trajectory. You knew where you stood. That matters, because investment in a fictional universe requires continuity to mean something.

    For those of us old enough to remember, there was a stretch after TOS ended and before TMP where there was no active Trek at all. It survived. It came back. But it came back because people with genuine passion and understanding picked it up. That's what it needs again — not more content, but better stewardship.

    I honestly don't know what Gene Roddenberry would say about any of this. But I suspect he'd recognize the difference between a show that has something to say and one that's just wearing the uniform.

  • I don't think Star Trek makes sense any more. It was a show about tech optimism, whereas it's now clear that technology is now more harmful than good. It's not even an envisioning of a better future. It's a portrayal of an impossible future. So I think it's run its course.

  • But I did not like the TV shows. The Klingon Reboot alone was terrible. A starship powered with mushrooms? What? The spinning ship going into warp? Also silly. There were some bright lights and potential, but I lost interest. I know a lot of people loved Academy, but I made it maybe halfway into the first episode and realized I wasn't even watching it. And then there's Section 31.....

  • Prognosis (Score:4, Funny)

    by dsgrntlxmply ( 610492 ) on Saturday April 11, 2026 @01:05PM (#66088912)
    "It's dead, Jim."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Did it die from jumping the shark?

      (The joke I was expecting. Not following any of the series so I don't know about any shark jumping that may have occurred. Long ago I was turned into a newt/trekkie, but I got better.)

  • Star Trek used to try to make sense by loosely adhering to fringe, but not disproven, theories in science. Since Paramount took over they started traversing through space mushroom networks, because warp fields weren't exciting enough. Star Trek plots always resolved with a sprinkling of Deus ex Machina, but the newer Star Trek was a core of Deus ex Machina with a sprinkling of "maybe the Deus won't show up this time." It is very tiring and I can't believe anyone watches this garbage and enjoys it.

  • Let it go.

    Move on. Do something else. Perhaps in a decade or so, someone will make another new star trek that is worth the effort. Next gen was a good example of doing this, long after TOS had ended. Mostly, the newer treks have just been follow-on attempts to cash in.

  • There's other IP that could be developed (Score:3)

    by VAXcat ( 674775 ) on Saturday April 11, 2026 @02:18PM (#66089046)
    I'd love to see a series based on EE Smith's Lens stories, or Niven Man-Kzin wars. Or dozens of other classic SF universes that have never been done before.
  • I watched the first two seasons of Strange New Worlds and after looking forward to season 3, I watch the first episode and just never watched another. I'm not even sure why. The Orville seems like my only hope for Sci-fy adventure and a little comedy. I would also hope Adrianne returned if the show did.

  • After a while, it became stupid.

  • I finally have a solid reason to drop another streaming subscription. I was already considering dropping Paramount between seasons anyway.

  • I was a fan of startrek series and movies back in the day. But the series start to become political, and they avoid that for so many years. I don't want a series or movies to "teach" me what's right or wrong about our society, they supposed to show us stories about the future, space other civilizations and the challenges they need to address, not to teach us how to live in our society, leaving a lot of people with a bitter taste of mouth. So I stopped watching the series and future series that came out and

    • Hear hear. Some of my favorite episodes are those that present a moral quandary that at first seems obvious, but then end up with an ambiguous resolution that leaves you thinking. It makes me suspect that those who state that Star Trek has always been "pushing social boundaries" weren't really paying attention. I never got the impression that the show had a political agenda beyond showing what would happen if we put our differences aside and worked together for once. Can't we all just get along? (The answer

  • Star Trek's characters had so much adult, military, discipline: act now, feel later, and because of it they got shit done. I think that was its original appeal. In more modern versions of it all the characters were kindergarteners (..through to highschool depending on the series): they couldn't --- irl, beyond just Hollywood --- get anything done. I think that was what finally killed the all the series.
  • it just took from 1969 to die.

  • You know, like a battle Royale: young Academy grads battling network gobbling Kardashians

  • I'm not that much of a Trekkie, not at all to be precise, but given what I've heard of the new Star Trek Academy show it appears to be so shitty that even non-Trekkies like me feel the pain. From what I've heard and seen it's a complete disaster of a production, barely even at high school film project level in acting and writing, topped up with woke agendas and other trash. On top of that it costed obscene amounts of money from what I heard.

    What a bizarre event effing up a golden goose like that.

  • Starfleet is relly just too bad. Maybe it is time to start with en entire new space franchise.

    Volker and Gesa Engel for intance are working on a new space series for Bavaria [www.dwdl.de].

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