Pleasantly surprised, especially since it’s coming out after the disappointing third season of SNW and set in the far future time period from Discovery.
It feels like a live action Prodigy, which should be taken as a compliment. The captain is that mix of chaos and principle that makes the best Starfleet officers, and the kids are a fun bunch. The in-universe context is a Starfleet in the process of recovering from a time of Adults In The Room and Hard Choices, which is portrayed as having been very bad and not cool.
Also the ship/school is pretty.
Disclaimer: the Burn happened in the later seasons of Discovery, which I didn’t watch past season 2 so everything I know about it is either from hearing about other people talking about it online, or from the intro to this new Starfleet Academy show.
In the later season of Discovery they got tired of being in prequel time so they time traveled the ship forward to something like 500 years after the TNG era. I’m told this improved the show but can’t personally vouch for this. The Burn was an event that happened in that far future time a while after Discovery got there where FTL stopped working for reasons and the Federation kinda fell apart. Adults In The Room Made Hard Choices.
Starfleet Academy opens with showing exactly how this was very bad and hurt a lot of people. The plot so far has centered on kids trying to unfuck the results of those Adults’ Hard Choices.
So Star Trek without stars and without treks? That seems a rather flawed concept.
So far as I understand it. But by the time Starfleet Academy starts, they’re Trekking those Stars again. The school is a ship.