The Future Of Star Trek On TV: Where Should The Franchise Boldly Go From Here?

We've spent all week here at TVLine taking a look at "Star Trek" past and present... and now it's time to look ahead to the future.

The iconic sci-fi franchise turned 60 years old this week, and it's still going strong on Paramount+, with the prequel "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" currently airing Season 4 (not to mention another season in the works), and the new series "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy," starring showbiz heavyweights Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti, debuting earlier this year and set to return for Season 2 as well. But both of those series have announced that they're ending with their upcoming seasons, and no other "Trek" TV series has been announced or is in development at this point. So we find ourselves standing at a pretty significant fork in the road in the history of "Star Trek," and the galaxy-sized question is: Where does the franchise go from here?

Before we look ahead to the future, we need to take a full inventory of the past. After more than a dozen years without a new "Star Trek" series on the air, the franchise came roaring back to life in 2017, with "Star Trek: Discovery" debuting on streamer Paramount+ (or, as it was known in olden times, CBS All Access). But this new era of "Trek," overseen by executive producer Alex Kurtzman, has been a decidedly mixed bag. "Discovery" introduced jaw-dropping special effects and cool new technology like the space-bending spore drive, along with compelling new characters like Sonequa Martin-Green's Michael Burnham. But its best moments actually came when it directly tapped into past "Trek" in Season 2 by adding Anson Mount's Pike and Ethan Peck's Spock to the cast. After Mount and Peck left, "Discovery" drifted off into a fog of dense technobabble and grandiose speechifying from which it never really recovered.

"Star Trek: Picard" saw the welcome return of Patrick Stewart as "Next Generation" captain Jean-Luc Picard, but that show didn't find its footing until its third and final season, when it stopped trying to reinvent the wheel and gave us the "TNG" reunion we'd been wanting all along. "Starfleet Academy" did try to reinvent the wheel with a cast of fresh-faced recruits, but it ran into the same clunky, self-righteous pitfalls that "Discovery" did. "Strange New Worlds" has clearly been the strongest of the new "Trek" series from start to finish, getting back to the standalone, creature-of-the-week adventures pioneered by the original "Star Trek" TV show. But even "Strange New Worlds" has faced complaints from fans lately for relying too heavily on genre exercises — the soap opera episode! The puppet episode! — over pure science fiction. All told, we've definitely seen a healthy quantity of "Trek" series over the past decade... but the quality has been hit-or-miss.

So it's fair to ask: What do we want from a "Star Trek" show? Do we just want to see old favorites like Kirk and Spock back on the Enterprise again and get that rush of nostalgia? Or do we want to see something completely new, even if it's unfamiliar? Well, how about both?

We've had multiple "Star Trek" shows on the air at the same time in recent years, so we're proposing two new series: one old-school and one new-school. First, we'd love to see the rumored "Star Trek: Legacy" series come to fruition, building off of the "Star Trek: Picard" series finale, with Seven of Nine, Raffi, and Jean-Luc's son Jack helming a new Enterprise, with occasional drop-ins from Jean-Luc and the "TNG" crew. And then we'd love to see a show that does for "Trek" what "The Mandalorian" and "Andor" did for "Star Wars": an original story that reinvigorates the franchise by exploring a part of Starfleet we haven't seen on screen yet, without anyone named Kirk or Picard, and getting back to the sci-fi roots of new life and new civilizations.

Who should run these shows, then? If we were in charge at Paramount, we'd throw a big bag of money at Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, TV veterans who were a key part of the "Next Generation" glory days and went on to work on genre hits like "Battlestar Galactica," "The Orville," and "Outlander." They know "Trek," and they're more than equipped to lead the franchise into a new era. Plus, Terry Matalas did such a great job as showrunner of "Star Trek: Picard" in its final season, he'd be a perfect fit to continue the story he started with "Star Trek: Legacy."

At the end of the day, though, we just love this franchise and want to see it get the care and attention it deserves. "Star Trek" is one of the crown jewels of all of science fiction, and we want to see that great legacy continue on the small screen for decades to come. It's lasted 60 years for a reason, and it deserves to last another 60... and beyond.

Where would you like to see the "Star Trek" TV franchise go from here? Beam down to the comments to make your voice heard!