If you haven't seen Picard or Discovery yet, they're both definitely worth it as well (and only available on Paramount+).
I liked
Picard and
Discovery well enough, but I found them both really uneven in quality. And prone to coming up with interesting original takes on characters and stories and then either watering them down to nothingness or abandoning them altogether. Disposing of a character like Gabriel Lorca after a single season should count as a war crime, and I enjoyed Burnham and Stamets a lot more when they were in “Don Draper-esque arrogant dicks but
really good at their job” mode rather than the chipper team players they made them into. And
Picard was on an interesting path with their first season “crew of lovable Chaotic Good rogues just fucked up enough to be relatable, operating just outside the law” schtick, and then said fuck it, it’s now the
TNG Reunion Special.
I don’t know if there’s an “official” trope name for it, but I think of it as the Skywalker Effect: no how vast and complex a franchise universe becomes, somehow writers will always end up tying everyone and everything to the same central 2-4 characters.
I could never get into
Strange New Worlds. I get that the idea was to recapture the Original Series vibe, but it always felt like they were trying too hard. Like really well-funded cosplayers. Which is a shame because Anson Mount should be way bigger in Hollywood than he is.
