Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (2026) Review

Ten episodes on Paramount plus between the fifteenth of January and the twelfth of March 2026, set in the thirty-second century, roughly a hundred and twenty-five years after the Burn, about a class of cadets at the Academy in San Francisco.

I’ve watched a lot of bad television and a lot of bad film. Battlefield Earth is reviewed on this site and it’s held the bottom of my list for a quarter of a century. This is worse.

There’s no redeeming value in it beyond one thing. The sets were well built. Beyond that it’s poorly written, it’s a poor premise, it’s boring, nothing happens across the entire run, it’s shot badly, the plots are weak, the performances are awful and the setting is awful.

It’s also one of the wokest things I’ve watched in my life, and I have no problem saying so. There’s a section below on why that’s a different claim from the one I refused to make about Discovery, and why the craft failures are the ones that would sink it on their own.

There was also an organized review-bombing campaign against it, which I don’t use as evidence, for reasons set out below. A number somebody manufactured is worthless to me even when it points the way I’m already pointing.

Worse Than Battlefield Earth

That comparison needs justifying because it’s a serious claim and Battlefield Earth is the standard for this. What makes Battlefield Earth watchable as a disaster is that it’s attempting something. It’s an aesthetic, however deranged, it’s Travolta committing to a performance nobody asked for, it’s shot at angles somebody chose deliberately, and every frame of it is a decision. It fails enormously and it fails in a direction. That’s the difference between a catastrophe and nothing, and a catastrophe at least gives you something to look at. This has no direction to fail in. It’s competent in the way an assembled thing is competent, correctly exposed and correctly cut, and absolutely inert. There’s no aesthetic, no argument, no ambition anybody could name after watching all ten hours.

A film that’s trying to be extraordinary and fails badly is a more interesting object than a series that’s trying to be adequate and reaches it. The second is worse to sit through because there’s nothing in it to react to.

So the ranking isn’t about which has more mistakes in it. Battlefield Earth is a bad film with an identity. This is ten hours with nothing in it at all, made by people who appear to have had no view about what they were making beyond the demographic they aimed it at. That’s why it’s at the bottom. Incompetence at least takes some effort, and this is ten hours of vacancy. I’d sit through Battlefield Earth twice back to back before I’d face one more episode of it.

The Sets Are the Only Thing

The physical production is accomplished, and that makes everything else worse instead of better.

It was shot at Pinewood Toronto Studios across about six months, the Academy campus is a real standing build, and the USS Athena is a proper ship set instead of a corridor and a bridge.

The money is visible and it was real money. This was Paramount’s flagship launch for the franchise’s sixtieth anniversary year, with a first episode running seventy-five minutes and directed by Alex Kurtzman himself. Resources, then, weren’t the constraint. Everything that’s wrong with this show is a decision somebody made with a budget in hand. That’s the opposite of the situation the original series and the animated series were in. My reviews of both of those make the same point from the other end. The 1966 show spent nothing on planets and everything on scripts, the 1973 cartoon spent nothing on movement and bought scale, and both of them are watchable sixty years later.

This had the budget for either and chose neither. A well-built set with nothing happening on it is the most expensive way to produce nothing, and there are ten hours of it.

The photography is where that distinction shows. A standing set that cost real money, lit flatly and covered without a single composition anybody chose.

That’s how a production ends up with an expensive-looking show that has no images in it. Good sets and bad shooting aren’t in tension, and this has both. I kept waiting for one frame I’d want to pause on, and the camera treated that whole campus like the waiting room at a tire shop.

You can see where the money went and you can’t see where the thinking went.

A Teen Drama Wearing Star Trek

The structural problem is that this is two shows nailed together and neither of them was finished. It’s a genre hybrid, half science fiction and half young adult drama, and the critic who put it most precisely said that only one of the halves is developed enough to satisfy anybody and it’s not the half that’s new to Star Trek.

The young adult material is the part that should have been the show, and it’s the part that’s cliche from the first scene. An orphan with a troubled past who turns out to be an unlikely cadet, a rival, a romance, a secret about a parent, and an origin story for two leads that reviewers described as cliche-ridden before the first two episodes were out.

None of that is inherently unusable. Boarding school drama is a functioning form with decades of good work in it, and a Starfleet Academy series is an obvious idea that people have wanted since the eighties.

What kills it is that the show won’t commit. It won’t be a teen drama properly because it keeps stopping to be Star Trek, and it can’t be Star Trek properly because the cadets have no authority, no ship of their own and nothing at stake beyond assessments. I’ve felt more suspense waiting on a parking ticket than I felt over any of these kids’ grades.

The co-showrunner arrangement explains a lot of that. Alex Kurtzman has overseen the television franchise since Discovery and Noga Landau ran the Nancy Drew reboot for the CW, which on paper is a sensible pairing of franchise custody and young adult craft.

In practice it produced a show that’s cautious in both directions. The Star Trek half is too reverent to do anything and the teen half is too sanitized to have any teeth, and the result is bland where it needed to be one thing or the other.

The Nostalgia Gives It Away

The clearest evidence that nobody trusted the premise is how much of the running time is spent importing other shows.

Tig Notaro returns as Reno from Discovery. Robert Picardo returns as the Doctor from Voyager. Oded Fehr returns as Admiral Vance. There’s an animated pre-title sequence showing off the franchise’s favorite starships. Paul Giamatti is fan-cast as the villain and Tatiana Maslany appears as a guest.

Individually none of that is a problem and Picardo in particular is a real pleasure, which my Voyager review says at length. Collectively it’s a confession.

A new show about new characters that keeps reaching for old ones doesn’t believe its own cast can hold an audience. Every legacy appearance is an admission that the seven cadets at the center weren’t considered sufficient reason to watch. The sharpest version of that criticism I read was that the show mainly cares about the franchise’s past instead of about its audience’s. That’s exactly backward for a series aimed at viewers who haven’t seen the previous eleven.

That’s also a structural trap instead of a taste question. A young audience new to Star Trek gets nothing from Reno appearing, and an old audience watching for Reno isn’t the audience a teen drama was commissioned to find.

As a result, the nostalgia at the same time fails to help the new viewers and fails to satisfy the old ones. That’s the same audience-splitting problem my Lower Decks review describes, except that show at least did the references well.

What Was Spent and Wasted

Holly Hunter is in this, and that fact deserves to be recorded properly because it’s the clearest measure of the waste.

She plays Nahla Ake, Chancellor of the Academy and captain of the Athena, written as a long-lived half-Lanthanite, and she’s the one element most critics singled out as working. The word that recurs in the reviews is magnetic.

My own reaction is that she’s doing what a good actor does with nothing. An Academy Award winner can’t rescue material that hasn’t been written, and the resources spent on her are the clearest measurement of what wasn’t spent on the script.

Giamatti is the other one. He’s by several accounts enjoyably villainous and he’s a guest antagonist in a show whose regular cast can’t carry a scene against him. That makes every episode he’s in a demonstration of the gap. The cadets are the problem and it’s a writing problem instead of a casting one. Seven young performers were handed characters defined by a single trait each, an orphan, a Klingon who wants to be a doctor, a prodigy, and asked to generate a series out of that.

None of them is given an interior. The performances are awful in the sense that matters: nothing any of them does lands, and I wouldn’t put that on seven people at the start of their careers who were given types to play. I ended up feeling sorry for the actors, and a drama that leaves you pitying its cast has failed at the most basic thing it was hired to do.

That’s the recurring finding across this entire set of reviews. Discovery, Picard and this show all handed capable people material that couldn’t be performed, and in all three cases the failure reads as acting because there’s nowhere else for it to show up.

It Is Also the Wokest Thing I Have Watched

I have no problem saying that and I want to be exact about how it sits alongside what I’ve written elsewhere, because it’s not the same claim I refused to make about Discovery.

My Discovery review argues at length that the political complaint against that show was the wrong criticism. It was wrong on the facts, because a Black lead and a gay couple cost that series nothing, and it was worse than wrong tactically, because a production that can file its critics as bigots never has to answer the real objection. That was five showrunners and no accumulated story.

I hold to every word of that. It’s not a general rule that the complaint is always illegitimate, and treating it as one would be its own kind of laziness.

Here the ideological content is a feature of the show instead of a feature of its casting, and that’s the distinction. Discovery had a diverse cast and a broken structure. This has a worldview it’s delivering, and the delivery is most of what the running time is for. That’s a defensible thing for a production to do and it’s not defensible to do it badly. A work with a position has to earn it through character and consequence, and a work that states it through dialogue is writing a pamphlet with sets.

It also magnifies every other failure instead of sitting beside them. A show where nothing happens has nothing to convey a position, so the position has to be spoken. That’s why the dialogue does what the plots were supposed to.

And the test I applied to Discovery still applies here. Recast this show entirely and it would still be badly written, still have a poor premise, still be boring and still be shot badly, and those failures are the ones anybody can verify.

So both things are true and neither cancels the other. It’s heavily ideological and it’s incompetently made, and the second is the part that would sink it regardless.

The Audience Score Is Not My Evidence

This show was also the target of an organized campaign, and I’m not going to lean on it, because a manufactured number is worthless to me even when it agrees with my conclusion.

The facts are documented. Critics rated the first season around eighty-eight percent. The audience score sat near forty-three on Rotten Tomatoes and four point nine on IMDb, and Forbes reported the review bombing directly, naming Stephen Miller, End Wokeness and the Babylon Bee among the accounts driving it and comparing the pattern to The Acolyte in 2024.

So forty-three percent measures a campaign instead of a reception. Anybody citing it as proof of quality is citing an operation, and I’d rather make my case badly on my own evidence than well on somebody else’s.

My evidence is what’s on screen across ten hours. The premise is poor, nothing happens in it, the plots are weak, the writing is bad, it’s shot without any visual idea, and the cadets have one trait apiece.

The eighty-eight percent is the number I find harder to account for and I won’t pretend otherwise. My real reading is that critics writing in January had seen two episodes, were assessing a competent seventy-five minute premiere with Holly Hunter in it, and that whatever they saw didn’t survive the season.

The commercial record is the better indicator and it’s not disputed by anybody. It never charted in the Nielsen top ten across its run, appearing only intermittently in Paramount’s own list and on Amazon Channels, for the franchise’s sixtieth anniversary flagship.

I’d put weight on that figure. Not a score anybody organized, and not a critical consensus formed on a fifth of the season, but the fact that almost nobody watched it to the end.

It Is Already Cancelled

Paramount announced in March 2026 that the series would end with its second season. That had already finished shooting by February.

From the people who paid for it, the verdict is effectively in. A show renewed for a second season before the first had even aired, then canceled within three months of the premiere, with the remaining episodes already in the can.

The commercial evidence supports it. It never charted in the Nielsen top ten, appearing only intermittently in Paramount plus own list and on Amazon Channels, which for a sixtieth anniversary flagship launch is a failure.

That pre-emptive renewal is a production pattern in itself. A studio ordering a second season on the strength of a pitch instead of a season is the same confidence that produced Section 31 and the same confidence my Discovery review documents, and it keeps producing this outcome.

Season two will air, probably in 2027, made by people who didn’t know it was the last when they shot it. On the evidence of the first I have no expectation of it. What the whole exercise shows is that an obvious idea isn’t a premise. A series at Starfleet Academy is something fans have wanted for forty years, and wanting a setting isn’t the same as having a story to put in it.

My lesson for anybody at Paramount is this. The idea was free, the money was there and the execution was the entire job, and they spent ten hours proving nobody in the building wanted to do it. I’ve seen more narrative ambition on the back of a cereal box.

Should you watch Star Trek: Starfleet Academy?

No. The worst thing I’ve ever watched, film or television, and worse than Battlefield Earth because that at least had an identity to fail at. Pure garbage, horseshit, something written by small children with crayons on drugs. A poor premise, weak plots, nothing happening across ten hours, beautifully built sets shot without a single composition anybody chose, seven cadets with one trait each, the wokest thing I’ve seen, and a cancellation three months after it started.

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