I started with Star Trek after watching the Star Trek (2009) movie in college. After that I went wild watching everything I could since I was young with loads of time. I watched most of TOS, all of TNS, all of DS9, all of Voyager, all of Enterprise and all of the movies. I then stopped since I didn’t have the time and wasn’t ready to download a new app to watch Discovery.
I am interested in watching some of the new shows from Discovery onwards but don’t know where to start and what are worth watching. I no longer have hours to watch TV or movies anymore and want to prioritize series on an easy to find streaming service. What is worth watching and what is worth skipping? Is it worth while to watch them all the way chronically or just watch one series and then another one.
I would definitely recommend Strange New Worlds. It has a great cast and the return to an episodic format allows for a lot of variety in conflicts and dilemmas faced by the crew. Next up I would recommend The Orville. I hate Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane’s humor is very off -putting to me so I was skeptical, but really the show was delightful and felt a lot like TNG era Star Trek to me. The show has some crass elements still, but they aren’t overbearing. Honestly, Lower Decks is a lot worse on that front than The Orville and feels way more juvenile to me. People say Lower Decks is supposed to get better in season 2 but I watched some season 2 episodes with my roommates and still found it unbearable. If you like Family Guy/Rick and Morty, you might enjoy it more than I did since most people do seem to love that one.
The other new Trek shows are too busy facing overly big, galactic apocalypse-level threats throughout each entire season to delve into much real philosophy or analysis of the human condition and the crushing threats are so extreme that even when the shows do focus on the human side and try to look at something personal, you start to wonder why people are stopping to have a long discussion about their emotions and relationship struggles in the presence of immediate danger to their lives. Even when the discussions are good, the timing is bad enough for it to not make sense. A lot of details like that are very immersion breaking for me as a viewer.
Picard season 3 was a well balanced nostalgia trip. It was a lot more relatable than seasons 1 and 2 and has some really great human(oid) moments dealing with pride, regret, grief, belonging, and passing the torch to the next generation. It was fan service done well. It still does the new Trek thing of a big, impending threat but does a better job of keeping that threat at arm’s length enough for the interpersonal discussions to feel more impactful and logical in the moment. I was so disappointed in seasons 1 and 2 that I almost skipped 3, but now I am rooting for a spin off from season 3 with the new characters they introduced.