IT’S A MERCY KILLING: Divisive Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Canceled After Two Seasons.
So much for Paramount+‘s Gen Z Star Trek show.
The streamer has decided to end Star Trek: Starfleet Academy after season two.
Starfleet Academy had recently finished airing its debut season. Paramount+ had (rather optimistically, as it turned out) already ordered a second season, which recently wrapped production.
Starfleet Academy has been a polarizing entry in the Trek canon. Many critics have celebrated the show for focusing on a younger generation and its coming-of-age themes. On social media, the show has been a frequent target of mockery from those who claim the show is too “woke.”
On Rotten Tomatoes, the show had an 87 percent positive critics score, but a dismal 51 percent audience score.
The show also never managed to chart among Nielsen’s weekly top 10 streaming lists for viewership.
Funny, ten days ago, Engadget ran with the hottest of hot takes about the show: Starfleet Academy is the best first season of a Star Trek show ever.
The first season of a TV show is a tricky thing. It has to convince people to watch it and justify the show’s existence to the network (or streaming service) execs. It has to deal with actors and writers who may not have fully dialed into the characters and world yet. There are some shows with absolutely stellar first seasons — Stranger Things, Veronica Mars and Ted Lasso are a few — but many other hit shows stumbled out of the gate, like The Office and Supernatural.
Star Trek is not immune to this phenomenon. The Original Series had a decent first season, with classic episodes like “The City on the Edge of Forever.” But the next four shows all have rather weak beginnings, with even fan-favorite The Next Generation stumbling badly with episodes like “Code of Honor.” That show picked up in season three, beginning a trend called “Growing the Beard,” in reference to how Commander Riker’s new beard coincided with the uptick in quality.
“The Original Series had a decent first season.” What a way to dismiss all of the worldbuilding by Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon that set the stage for everything that followed over the next sixty years: The giant faster-than-light starship performing gunboat diplomacy at the edge of the known galaxy. The heroic young captain modeled after Horatio Hornblower. The stoic half-human, half-alien science officer. The crusty doctor and chief engineer. Once Gene Coon joined midseason, he fleshed out the series’ backstory, creating the “United Federation of Planets” as a futuristic substitute for the USA, and crafted the show’s most-popular bad guys, the Klingons. Heck, even Ricardo Montalban showed up in the first season, a decade and a half before replaying his role as the big baddy in the movie that saved the franchise, and gave Star Trek a new lease on life for the next four decades.
But hey, it’s no Starfleet Academy.
Exit quote:
If Paramount were really smart, they'd shelve both seasons, delete the files, take the tax write off, pretend the show never happened, and consider it a necessary down payment on winning back Trek fans. https://t.co/MVPEULjAH3
— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) March 23, 2026