The first season of a TV show is a tricky thing. It has to convince people to watch it and justify the show’s existence to the network (or streaming service) execs. It has to deal with actors and writers who may not have fully dialed into the characters and world yet. There are some shows with absolutely stellar first seasons — Stranger Things, Veronica Mars and Ted Lasso are a few — but many other hit shows stumbled out of the gate, like The Office and Supernatural.Star Trek is not immune to this phenomenon. The Original Series had a decent first season, with classic episodes like “The City on the Edge of Forever.” But the next four shows all have rather weak beginnings, with even fan-favorite The Next Generation stumbling badly with episodes like “Code of Honor.” That show picked up in season three, beginning a trend called “Growing the Beard,” in reference to how Commander Riker’s new beard coincided with the uptick in quality.This trend unfortunately continued into the current era, with 2017’s Star Trek: Discovery delivering a first season with an overwhelmingly dour tone and a lot of franchise changes that didn’t sit well with fans. The show made some tweaks in season two (including a change in setting that involved traveling 900 years into the future), and showed a lot of improvement with season three. Picard also floundered horribly, with an uneven first season that killed off some fan-favorite characters and also turned the title character into an android. Things started looking up after that, with shows like Strange New Worlds all posting strong outings with their first go-arounds. While episodes like “A Quality of Mercy” and “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” may not make the list of all-time classics, there are no outright stinkers. It seemed like the franchise as a whole was finally finding its footing in this new streaming era.L-R: Tatiana Maslany as Anisha, Sandro Rosta as Caleb, Kerrice Brooks as SAM, Bella Shepard as Genesis, and George Hawkins as Darem in season 1, episode 9, of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streaming on Paramount+.Michael Gibson/Paramount+That leads us to Starfleet Academy, which debuted in January on Paramount+. Prior to its premiere, the internet was full of people deriding it as “CW Trek” and declaring that they don’t want to watch a show about “teenyboppers” that wasn’t “real” Star Trek. Now that the show has finished its first season… the internet is still full of people complaining. But many folks who were wary of it at the beginning have been pleasantly surprised — every day there seems to be multiple posts on various Star Trek subreddits along the lines of “Starfleet Academy is actually good?!?” I personally didn’t enjoy the first episode, but episode two turned me around rather quickly, and it seemed that every week brought new converts.Granted, 10 episodes is a short amount of time to make an impact, but Starfleet Academy did a lot with that
