Star Trek has become one of the most beloved television franchises of all time, and its fanbase might be the most vocal as well. The franchise started in 1966 with a series created by Gene Roddenberry about the crew piloting a starship called the USS Enterprise, exploring strange new worlds and seeing humans and aliens working together as the crew on the ship. Initially, the series was supposed to play out like a Western in space, but it ended up creating the template for the space opera genre that would lead to films and TV shows like Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica in the years to come.
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There are now 12 different Star Trek series (not including the shorts released from 2018 to 2020 and the 13 movies). However, not all those Star Trek series are created equally.
12) Star Trek: The Animated Series
After Star Trek: The Original Series was cancelled, there was about a decade before the first movie arrived, and the franchise really kicked off its long run. However, after TOS ended, and before the first film, NBC released an animated series with the characters from the original series. As a cartoon, this meant that the network could do things that were impossible at that time for live-action, but that isn’t what happened. Instead, this was a cartoon of its era and didn’t come anywhere close to the exploration of science fiction of the original series, and it just isn’t as good as anything that came out later.
11) Star Trek: Prodigy
Star Trek: Prodigy is another cartoon for the franchise, and it is a hard one to categorize. That is because this was not made to be a smart Star Trek series and was instead made for younger kids to watch, creating a gateway for young audiences to discover the franchise so they could move on later to discover the actual good shows when they get older. There is a good place for this kind of show, and for little kids, this is a solid entry point for the series, but it isn’t one that most Star Trek fans need to watch.
10) Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
The most polarizing show in Star Trek history is the one currently running today. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy might be seen as the next step up from Star Trek: Prodigy. While Prodigy was for little kids, Starfleet Academy was more for younger audiences who might feel basic Star Trek is a little too stuffy. That said, Starfleet Academy is nowhere near as bad as some fans might like to claim. This is a series that is looking at the next generation of crewmembers’ entry to the fleet, and in that manner, it is a solid show, but with more haters than almost any other Star Trek series.
9) Star Trek: Picard
Star Trek: Picard was an exciting series when it was released because fans wanted to see the return of Patrick Stewart as Jean Luc Picard. However, there was one big problem with the series. Stewart refused to do the series if it was just more of the same old stuff that he already did in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He wanted to show Picard in the next stage of his life, and that didn’t make many fans happy. However, the show course-corrected in the final season when the original crew finally reunited for the final Picard episodes, and that ending pulls this back up somewhat.
8) Star Trek: Discovery
Star Trek: Discovery was another series that didn’t make all franchise fans happy. Sonequa Martin-Green starred as Michael Burnham, who started as a science specialist and was promoted to captain in the third season. As the adopted human sister of Spock, raised as a Vulcan, this tied in well to the original series. This series had some of the best visual effects of any series, which helps raise its status. However, other than a brilliant second season, the show seemed disjointed and ended up seeming to outlive its welcome. However, it did bring in Anson Mount and Ethan Peck for the spinoff series Strange New Worlds.
7) Star Trek: Enterprise
Before fans were blasting Star Trek: Starfleet Empire as a “terrible” franchise show, many were doing the exact same thing to Star Trek: Enterprise. What is most tragic is that when the show was cancelled, it was becoming one of the franchise’s most enjoyable shows in the fourth season, when it started to look into the Mirror Universe. While it might not have started off very good, it ended up as one of the best in the franchise for fans who always wanted to see why certain things on TOS and The Next Generation were the way they are. Plus, Scott Bakula was a great captain.
6) Star Trek: Voyager
Star Trek: Voyager had a lot of things going for it, not the least of which was Kate Mulgrew as Captain Kathryn Janeway and Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine. Those two actresses alone helped elevate this above what fans might have expected from a Star Trek series. The only thing that held it down when it was airing was the fact that Deep Space Nine was so good, and they were on TV at the same time, but that doesn’t discount how legitimately great Voyager really was. Captain Janeway deserves her spot as one of the best icons in the entire Star Trek franchise.
5) Star Trek: Lower Decks
While Star Trek: The Animated Series and Star Trek: Prodigy left something to be desired, that does not mean an animated series can’t stand alongside the best shows in the franchise’s history. Star Trek: Lower Decks is proof that, when done right, an animated series can, in fact, be great. The series followed the lower-level staffers who no one saw in the regular shows. The animation is similar to Rick & Morty, and the stories and action are chaotic in the best possible ways. The jokes are sharp, with the overall meaning that nothing really matters, but Lower Decks has a lot of heart and is easily the funniest Star Trek show ever made.
4) Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
In the original Star Trek series, there was an episode that introduced Christopher Pike, the captain of the USS Enterprise before Captain Kirk. In Star Trek: Discovery, Pike was introduced alongside a young Spock, and both Anson Mount and Ethan Peck reprised their roles in the spin-off that surpassed that earlier series in almost every way. With Rebecca Romijn as Number One, the series showed Pike’s adventures, and the final episode is set to show Captain Kirk’s first day in the captain’s chair when it ends with its upcoming fifth season. As a whole, Strange New Worlds is the best modern-day Star Trek series, and it isn’t even close.
3) Star Trek: The Original Series
There is an enormous generation of fans who will always call the original Star Trek the best series of the entire franchise. Those fans have every reason to think so, thanks to the legacy this cast left behind and the icons that they remain to this day. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and George Takei are legends that are arguably the best cast, top-to-bottom, of any Star Trek series. The stories were groundbreaking, and Star Trek: The Original Series was doing socially conscious sci-fi stories years before that was a mainstay in the genre.
2) Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
The top three Star Trek shows could easily be interchangeable to many fans, depending really on when they started watching the franchise. Just like how many would classify The Original Series as the best, just as many would call Deep Space Nine the best Star Trek series ever made for a different reason. Deep Space Nine doesn’t have the iconic cast of TOS, but it has arguably the best stories of any show in the entire franchise. Just like TNG made the stories more important than the cast, this series took it to another level, and it seems more relevant today than ever. With stories based on race, fundamentalism, and constant culture wars, Deep Space Nine is the show that makes a viewer think about the issues long after watching the episodes. It is brilliant.
1) Star Trek: The Next Generation
While Deep Space Nine has more relevant storylines and stands up better today than any other show in the Star Trek franchise, the best series of them all was Star Trek: The Next Generation. This series stands up well beside The Original Series when it comes to its cast, as its lineup is almost as iconic, and for an entire generation, this was “their” Star Trek and surpassed the original series in almost every way. The stories from each episode was uniformily better than the original series, and while it might not be as topical as DS9, the episodes are more iconic and memorable. While TOS showed the Star Trek world could approach socially conscious sci-fi respectfully, The Next Generation proved that it could also be the smartest sci-fi on television. This was the best Star Trek series because this is where the franchise grew up and broke out.
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Courtesy of Shueisha / Kadokawa / Square Enix / Shogakukan
