THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Starfleet Academy Sucks — And We’re To Blame.
After joking, “Wait, do they still exist?” the Drinker quotes from an article last week at the Mary Sue which claims: Those Dudebros Mad at ‘Starfleet Academy’ Aren’t Actually ‘Star Trek’ Fans.
Time and time again we’re confronted with “fans” of something who continue to miss the lessons within the media they’re consuming. We’ve seen it with Star Wars, our superhero stories, and it has become an increasing problem with Star Trek “fans.”
More recently, men like The Critical Drinker and Nerdrotic, known for hating anything that seems to be left leaning, have been dogging on the Paramount+ slate of Trek shows. The issue with these Right Wing figure heads talking about Trek is that they miss one important detail about Star Trek: It was never for them.
From the start of Star Trek way back when (60 years ago, to be exact), the series set out to do one thing: Change the world. And that it did. It made history for its inclusivity, including being the first interracial kiss on television in “Plato’s Stepchildren.” The kiss was between William Shatner’s James T. Kirk and Nichelle Nichols’ Lt. Uhura.
It really wasn’t: Sammy Davis, Jr. and Nancy Sinatra got there first, a year earlier, in 1967. Similarly, Star Trek was envisioned right from the start as a show for a mass audience, which by its nature means people from all sides of the aisle. The words “mass audience” were used explicitly in the writer’s guide of the original series, which aired on NBC from 1966-1969:
YES, THE STAR TREK FORMAT IS ACTUALLY THAT SIMPLE. IF YOU’RE A TV PROFESSIONAL, YOU ALREADY KNOW THE FOLLOWING SEVEN RULES:
I. Build your episode on an action-adventure framework. We must reach out, hold and entertain a mass audience of some 20,000,000 people or we simply don’t stay on the air.
II. Tell your story about people, not about science and gadgetry. Joe Friday doesn’t stop to explain the mechanics of his .38 before he uses it; Kildare never did a monologue about the theory of anesthetics; Matt Dillon never identifies and discusses the breed of his horse before he rides off on it.
III. Keep in mind that science fiction is not a separate field of literature with rules of its own, but, indeed, needs the same ingredients as any story — including a jeopardy of some type to someone we learn to care about, climactic build, sound motivation, you know the list.
IV. Then, with that firm foundation established, interweave in it any statement to be made about man, society and so on. Yes, we want you to have something to say, but say it entertainingly as you do on any other show. We don’t need essays, however brilliant.
If anything, Star Trek: The Next Generation, performed even better when compared to other syndicated TV series, as the L.A. Times reported in 1988:
It has taken no time at all for an audience apparently made up of hard-core Trekkies and more recently won devotees to embrace the new “Star Trek” family. In first-run syndication, which means it airs on different days at different times on each of its 210 stations (locally on KCOP-TV Channel 13 Sundays at 5 p.m., repeating Saturdays at 6 p.m.), the new show has earned a national 10.6 Nielsen rating, which translates into an average weekly audience of about 9.4 million households.
While that total audience is about half what Top-10 network shows, such as “Growing Pains” or “60 Minutes,” produce each week in prime time, it is about equal to such network prime-time staples as “Spencer: For Hire” and “The Disney Sunday Night Movie.”
Playing mostly out of prime time, those numbers, Harris said, exceed Paramount’s initial expectations.
And demographically, the raw data that is used to set advertising rates, the show’s numbers are even more impressive. During the February sweeps, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was the most watched show in its time period among Los Angeles-area men 18-54, according to Don Searle, KCOP’s research director, even beating the Winter Olympics.
The demographics were so good that Paramount’s share of the advertising revenue generated from the series each week is reportedly close to $1 million–greater than the approximately $800,000 license fees the networks generally pay for a one-hour prime-time program.
Those shows succeeded because the story came first, before the messaging, as the 1966-era Trek writer’s guide demanded. All of the modern-era streaming Trek are woke messaging first, story second (or third). Why, it’s as if:
If you read through the press materials it’s clear everyone involved thinks the most salient part of Star Trek was that it was a political show about the 60’s. And in that one misunderstanding you can see why everything has gone wrong https://t.co/1x4qtRYnp5
— George MF Washington (@GMFWashington) January 16, 2026
