[COLUMN] Prodigy Was the Star Trek Show the Franchise Needed, Not the One It Deserved | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Two weeks ago, without any real ceremony, the entire second season of Star Trek: Prodigy dropped on Netflix. This feels like a pretty big deal in a number of respects.

Most obviously, it illustrates that the streaming wars are over. When the major studios decided to compete in the streaming space against companies like Amazon and Netflix, their main leverage was their libraries of intellectual property. Companies like Netflix had the advantage of a head start and seemingly bottomless pits of money, but the major studios had brands that accrued loyalty over decades. By keeping those properties in-house, they could effectively “starve” their competitors.

As recently as last year, Paramount+ was selling itself as “the home of Star Trek”, suggesting that it was a must-have service for fans of the franchise. Obviously, that isn’t the case any longer. Apparently, Paramount’s need for cash flow took priority over its desire to consolidate content. This isn’t unique to any individual studio. Warner Bros. have begun licensing their “Project Popcorn” movies and HBO shows to Netflix, effectively becoming “arms dealers” to the streamer.

However, the second season of Prodigy signaled the end of the streaming wars in another way. Prodigy was cancelled by Paramount in June 2023, and removed from the streaming service almost immediately. This was after its first season was released, midway through the production of its second. While Star Trek: Picard had wrapped up its third and final season in April 2023, that series had been allowed to go out on its own terms and after the three seasons that most streaming shows run.

As such, Prodigy was the first Star Trek show to be cancelled since the launch of Star Trek: Discovery in September 2017. Incidentally, it had been announced in March 2023 that Discovery would end with its fifth season, which came as something of a surprise to the cast and crew. So, between March and June 2023, one Star Trek show reached its predetermined end, another announced that its next season would be its last, and one more was cancelled completely and removed from the service.

For the first time since the launch of Discovery, the Star Trek franchise is contracting. Discovery will reportedly spin-off into a new Starfleet Academy show that will feature Paul Giamatti as a recurring villain. However, there have been no other announcements of new shows. For all the excitement among certain sections of the fanbase over the third season of Picard, the proposed Star Trek: Legacy spin-off never gained traction and showrunner Terry Matalas has moved to Marvel.

Of course, it’s important to situate all of this in a larger context. The absurdity of the modern streaming model is that these cancellations have no real relationship to the quality of the shows in question. This is an inevitable result of the contraction of the streaming marketplace in the wake of “the Great Netflix Correction”, perhaps accelerated by the corporate woes at Paramount itself, which was recently merged with Skydance after an extended period of uncertainty.

This is the fate of most franchises, even those at more successful companies. Disney has slowed production of its Marvel Studios streaming content. It has also signaled a clear intention to transition Star Wars back into cinemas and away from streaming. However, given that Star Trek has never consistently worked as a blockbuster theatrical franchise, it is likely going to be a very lean period for this particular brand. Then again, Star Trek has had multiple extended hiatuses in its history.

To be fair, the second season of Prodigy was eventually picked up and finished by Netflix. The service opted to release all 20 episodes in a single drop, eschewing the weekly release model that Paramount has traditionally employed with the franchise. Netflix even avoided splitting the season into two parts, as Paramount’s marketing seems to suggest. While fans hope for a third season, showrunner Dan Hageman acknowledges that such a possibility is likely “outside the sphere.”

Obviously, this is far from the worst possible outcome. In a world where movies like Batgirl can just disappear into oblivion, it’s great that these 20 episodes of Prodigy are available for fans to watch. However, the cancellation and abandonment of Prodigy hints at one of the deeper problems with modern franchise media in general and with recent Star Trek shows in particular. The cancellation of Prodigy, and the removal of it from Paramount+, is just bad brand management.

Prodigy is a unique show within the larger Star Trek. It is not the first Star Trek series to be animated. Star Trek: The Animated Series is an interesting curiosity in the franchise’s history, and Star Trek: Lower Decks is due to return for its own final season later this year. However, Prodigy is notable for being the first Star Trek show to be aimed primarily at children, to the point that it was launched under the Nickelodeon brand, Paramount’s child-friendly subsidiary.

However, this is only part of what makes Prodigy so distinctive within the context of the modern wave of Star Trek shows. To put it frankly, Prodigy is the first Star Trek show since the first season of Discovery that is designed with the intention of making new fans instead of appealing primarily to existing audiences. This isn’t a subtle aspect of the show. When it was first announced, Hageman promised that Prodigy would offer “a totally new way into Star Trek that would be relatable.”

This is very obvious watching Prodigy. The concept of the show is built around a bunch of teenagers who stumble into possession of a Starfleet vessel. As they fly it, they have the basic concepts of the larger Star Trek franchise explained to them, from in-universe technology like transporters to franchise terminology to away times to core philosophical ideas like “the Prime Directive.” Prodigy is designed to be somebody’s first Star Trek show.

This carries over into the second season, where Prodigy takes the time to explain the mechanics of trivial technology like turbolifts and also bigger franchise narrative devices like temporal mechanics, sentient holograms or parallel universes. It is possible to sit a younger audience member in front of Prodigy and have them come away with a firm grasp of what Star Trek “is.” It is an onboarding ramp from the larger franchise, a pipeline designed to get kids up to speed on the brand.

This is perhaps a ruthlessly cynical way of looking at modern franchise media. Unfortunately, it’s also necessary. During the earlier era of Star Trek overseen by Rick Berman, there was a conscious effort to ensure that shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were accessible to audiences without an encyclopaedic knowledge of the original Star Trek. Ira Steven Behr has talked about having to fight to even say the name “Spock” on The Next Generation.

In contrast, most of the modern Star Trek streaming shows require an incredible level of investment to follow along with, let alone to emotionally engage with, what is happening on-screen. Star Trek: Picard degenerated into a fan-service overload, a guided tour through a literal franchise museum. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is essentially a spin-off from a failed pilot from 1964 that didn’t air on television. Star Trek: Lower Decks is a sitcom riffing on the tropes and continuity of the franchise.

These are all shows aimed at pre-existing fans rather than casual viewers. They assume that the audience is already heavily invested in Star Trek. Indeed, the moral, thematic and character arcs of Strange New World literally do not make sense unless the audience can recite the original Star Trek from memory. Given that there are over 700 episodes of Star Trek, that is a daunting amount of continuity for any potential newcomer.

That said, this is probably why Prodigy was a harder sell for Paramount in the short term. The show had to build its own audience. It had to win converts from outside the franchise. It didn’t start with a baked-in audience of existing fans (like your humble author) who think that it’s hilarious when an episode of Lower Decks opens with a lovingly detailed homage to “Masks”, an infamously maligned adventure from the final season of The Next Generation.

To be fair, Prodigy has its fair share of continuity. It brings back a lot of Voyager characters, including Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), Chakotay (Robert Beltran) and the EMH (Robert Picardo). The second season introduces the Voyager-A. Still, it is the modern Star Trek show with the most distinct internal mythology, with much of the show built around the alien world of Solum, a culture specific to Prodigy. As such, it doesn’t sell itself as hard to viewers already invested in Star Trek.

However, these franchises can’t rely on existing fans forever. If nothing else, the recent contraction of the market is proof of that. However, even looking outside streaming, there is an understanding that fans tend to age out of active engagement with their obsessions. If nothing else, one of the bigger issues with a franchise that is nearly 60 years old is that your target audience eventually dies if you don’t start appealing to younger viewers.

The Next Generation wasn’t a hit because it appealed to existing fans of the original Star Trek, it was era-defining television because it was accessible to casual audiences. The Next Generation was so popular that Picard was largely able to coast off lingering good will. Do Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks have enough broad appeal to create enough lingering good will to sustain the next revival of the Star Trek franchise? At what point is this the victory of the echo over the voice?

This all feels like “cultural fracking”, a desire to extract the maximum immediate value from a given resource with no regard for long-term sustainability. Prodigy might not have been the most popular of the modern Star Trek shows, it might not have pandered to older fans as shamelessly as Picard, but it was the one modern Star Trek show that made it feel like Star Trek had a future beyond recycling familiar iconography. The fact that it was discarded so casually and so callously suggests that Star Trek has given up on finding the next generation.