Ben Lindbergh

Do a comedy.

Try animation.

Some of these experiments have worked really well.

others less so.

Starfleet Academy is essentially an experiment with kind of a CW show, just like a YA show.

We're going to have a bunch of kids, teens, adolescents, young adults at school, and they're also going to be learning how to become Star Trek officers, and it will follow their drama and their romance and all the ups and downs of daily life at the Star Trek Academy.

Now,

One of the curious decisions, I think, is to set this in the far future timeline.

So it's essentially a Discovery spinoff, which means that if you didn't watch Discovery to the bitter end, you may not know what's going on.

And the show doesn't do a great job of actually explaining the premise and the state of play in the universe, but you catch on eventually.

The other thing is that, look, I'm all for a low stakes franchise show.

I love it.

Night of the Seven Kingdoms.

Great show.

Wonder Man.

Great show.

I even sign up for Skeleton Crew.

The one way that Starfleet Academy went wrong, though, is if you're going to sort of start out low stakes, you want to keep it bite size.

You want to keep it to half hour instead of that full hour long drama length.

And some of these episodes, the stakes just did not match the running time.