Star Trek: Starfleet Academy will end after two seasons. Paramount+ announced Monday that the show, which wrapped its 10-episode first season just eleven days ago on March 12, will not continue beyond its already-filmed second season.
The second season has no premiere date.
The reason is straightforward and, for fans of the show, genuinely maddening: not enough people watched it. Across all ten episodes of Season 1, which ran weekly from January 15 through March 12 on Paramount+, not a single episode cracked Nielsen’s Top 10 streaming viewership charts.
The show also trailed other Paramount+ content, Tulsa King and Landman both outperformed it on Nielsen during the same window.
That’s the number Paramount looked at. That’s the number that ended the show.
What makes it sting is that critics were solidly on its side. Starfleet Academy earned an 87% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was certified fresh, with Variety calling it “a delightful entry point” into the franchise.
It had Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti in leading roles. It had Jonathan Frakes behind the camera for the penultimate episode.
It had Robert Picardo reprising the Doctor from Voyager. But it also had an audience score hovering around 43%, the result of coordinated review bombing from a vocal portion of the fanbase opposed to its diverse and inclusive cast, and apparently not enough viewers on the other side to offset it in the metrics that actually matter to a streaming service.
CBS Studios and Paramount+ addressed the decision in a joint statement,
“We’re incredibly proud of the ambition, passion, and creativity that went into bringing Star Trek: Starfleet Academy to life. The series introduced audiences to a bold new group of characters, welcomed familiar faces, and expanded the Star Trek universe in exciting new ways. We’re grateful to Alex Kurtzman, Noga Landau, Gaia Violo, and the entire cast and crew who pushed storytelling boundaries in the spirit of Gene Roddenberry’s vision.”
What Was Star Trek: Starfleet Academy?
Starfleet Academy was the 12th Star Trek series overall and the franchise’s first overt attempt to court younger viewers with a story centered on cadets rather than seasoned officers.
Set in the 32nd century, the far-future era introduced in the later seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, the show followed the first new class of Starfleet cadets in over a century as they enrolled in a newly reopened Academy and came of age against the backdrop of a Federation still rebuilding from the cataclysmic events of Discovery.
The adult cast was formidable by any standard. Holly Hunter played Chancellor Nahla Ake, the head of the Academy, a role written specifically with her in mind that she reportedly signed onto immediately when approached.
Paul Giamatti co-starred as Nus Braka, the Season 1 villain who put the entire Federation on trial for crimes against democracy, with Ake standing in as its representative.
The Season 1 finale, which aired March 12, saw Nus’s downfall brought about by a cadet’s impassioned testimony and Nahla’s own revelation about what really killed his people, by most accounts a strong conclusion to a confident first season.
The supporting cast brought additional weight from across the franchise. Tig Notaro and Oded Fehr reprised their roles from Discovery. Robert Picardo returned as the beloved Doctor from Voyager. Tatiana Maslany and Gina Yashere appeared in guest roles, and Stephen Colbert had a guest spot as well.
The cadet ensemble, Sandro Rosta, Karim Diané, Kerrice Brooks, George Hawkins, Bella Shepard, and Zoë Steiner, was composed almost entirely of newcomers, exactly the kind of fresh-faced cast a show about first-year students requires.
Season 2 was greenlit in October 2024, before a single episode of Season 1 had aired. Production ran from August 27, 2025 through February 24, 2026 at Pinewood Toronto Studios in Toronto.
The season is fully finished. It simply has no release date and, now, no future beyond it. In an open letter to the cast and crew, showrunners Kurtzman and Noga Landau quoted Roddenberry directly, “Star Trek places its bet on the best in human nature.
It dares to imagine a society of ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations,’ free of war, hate, poverty, disease, and repression,” a statement that reads simultaneously as a tribute to what the show was trying to be and a subtle rebuttal to the backlash it received.
What This Means For Star Trek
This is the part that should concern franchise fans beyond the immediate loss of Starfleet Academy: with this cancellation, there is currently no new Star Trek series in active development at CBS Studios or Paramount+.
That hasn’t been true since 2015. For a full decade, there has always been something in the pipeline, Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Section 31, and now Starfleet Academy. As of today, that pipeline is empty.
Strange New Worlds will close out its run with a fifth and final season. Season 4 is expected to arrive this summer. Season 5, already filmed, will air in 2027. After that, nothing, at least nothing announced.
The last Star Trek film to reach theaters was Star Trek Beyond in 2016, now a full decade ago.
The straight-to-streaming Section 31 film released in January 2025 to poor critical reception.
Paramount Pictures is said to be in “early development” on new film projects, a phrase that in Hollywood carries very little guaranteed weight.
Alex Kurtzman, who has been the architect of the entire modern Star Trek television era and served as executive producer across effectively all of its recent output, has an overall deal with CBS Studios that expires at the end of 2026.
He is currently in talks to renew it, but whether that renewal will include Star Trek specifically remains unclear.
His fingerprints have been on nearly every creative decision the franchise has made on television for the past decade, and his future involvement is genuinely uncertain.
When Strange New Worlds ends in 2027, it will mark ten years since Star Trek: Discovery first premiered and brought the franchise back to television after a twelve-year absence following the end of Enterprise in 2005.
The timing is almost poetic, and not in a good way. A decade of new Star Trek, ending not with a grand finale but with a whimper and a Nielsen chart nobody cracked.
Season 2 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is coming. It will be the last. No date has been set.
