Star Trek’s TV Future Post-Strange New Worlds And Starfleet Academy Clarified By Exec
Adam has been writing in the entertainment news space for over a decade. Beginning his career of covering film and TV at CinemaBlend, he has also appeared on The Flash Podcast and done several radio spots.
Star Trek’s TV future has been cleared up by one of Paramount+’s executives.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy are ending in the next several years. Once they’re gone, that will wrap up the Star Trek era that began in 2017 with the launch of Star Trek: Discovery, the franchise’s first TV show in 12 years. However, Jane Wiseman, the head of EVP & Head of Originals for Paramount+, has assured fans that plans are in motion to ensure Star Trek continues to have a small screen presence after Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy are over.
In an interview with Deadline, Wiseman was asked about Star Trek’s status on Paramount+ given that no new series are currently greenlit. The executive first noted that “many people in this building” are Star Trek fans, including Chris Parnell, the EVP for Paramount+ Originals (not to be confused with the Saturday Night Live veteran of the same name), whom she described as the “resident number one fan.” As such, there’s active movement in keeping the Gene Roddenberry-created property going on the streaming platform, with Wiseman explaining:
It is our goal and it is our job to figure out what the next bounce of Star Trek is. We’re talking to a lot of writers, we are leaning on CBS Studios, and it is imperative that we figure out what the next iteration is in this franchise because it’s just too important. We also are in touch with Paramount Pictures, they have a Star Trek movie that’s in development.
Wiseman is referencing the Star Trek movie that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves duo Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley are helming. This project was announced last November following the merger between Paramount and Skydance, but the only plot details that have been revealed are that it will be unconnected to any of the prior Star Trek movies and TV shows. Plans to make Star Trek 4, i.e. the fourth movie set in the Kelvin timeline, have been scrapped.
In June 2024, it was announced that Star Trek: Lower Decks alumnus Tawny Newsome and Dear White People filmmaker Justin Simien were teaming up to make a Star Trek TV show following a resort planet in the 25th century. This show would be the franchise’s first live-action comedy, with Lower Decks having already tread that ground in animation. However, following the aforementioned merger, it’s unclear whether Newsome and Simien’s show is still moving forward.
Strange New Worlds season 4 hits its halfway point this week, and the show will wrap up with season 5 at a yet-to-be-determined date. Strange New Worlds season 5 will consist of six episodes rather than 10, and Dr. Leonard McCoy and Hikaru Sulu will appear in the series finale, played by Thomas Jane and Kai Murakami, respectively. Starfleet Academy season 1 ended in March, and it was revealed that same month that season 2 would be the show’s last.
New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 release Thursdays on Paramount+. Other shows from this Star Trek era include Picard and Prodigy, and the movie Section 31 was released exclusively on the streaming service after initially being conceived as a spinoff series of Discovery.