All 12 Star Trek Series, Ranked – TVLine

For 60 years, “Star Trek” has been boldly going places — sometimes where no one has gone before, and other times exactly where it’s already been, but from a different point of view. Gene Roddenberry created the show in part to give us an optimistic view of the future. In his ideal world, there was no more war on Earth, or hunger, or class distinction, and multinational, multiethnic crews of explorers ventured out into a galaxy of new aliens and planets to spread our views of basic decency. (Roddenberry’s “perfect” future also included really short skirts on women, apparently.)

Today, basic decency doesn’t always feel like a natural human trait, and we need the optimism more than ever. Fortunately, over the course of six decades, and excluding the theatrical movies (and one TV movie, “Section 31,” that many fans would rather forget), there are 12 “Star Trek” shows to choose from; a 13th, “Starfleet Academy,” just premiered in January 2026 and isn’t quite ready for a place on any ranking.

Which “Trek” is right for you? We’ve ranked them from worst to best, but just in case your taste disagrees, we’ve also laid out our reasoning for you to affirm or dispute. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations isn’t just a Vulcan motto that Roddenberry used to sell merchandise — it also amply sums up the arguments many Trekkers have amongst themselves.

Effectively a series of deleted scenes and one-offs, “Short Treks” vary wildly in quality. Some, like “The Brightest Star,” offer important backstory tidbits, in this case about Saru and his unique alien background. Others, like “Q&A,” feel superfluous, especially now that we have a whole show featuring Spock and Una Chin-Riley, though perhaps the success of the short helped that happen. At its very best, the short form allows narrative experimentation like following the adventures of a tardigrade, whose encounter with an initially hostile drone leads to the two of them raising the former’s eggs together.

The most egregious offense of “Short Treks,” though, is that it spawned “Very Short Treks,” which attempt non-canonical comedy that just feels really wrong. One where the Enterprise-D sabotages first contact with a booger-obsessed planet is gross, unpleasant, and completely inappropriate for a franchise that’s meant to appeal to our better natures. It’s by far the worst official “Star Trek” anything.

“Star Trek: Discovery” came out at a time when CBS and Paramount were separate entities, and as such, “Star Trek” movie and TV rights were split. On the big screen, the Kelvin timeline was still a thing, while CBS All Access launched with “Discovery.” Initially, it wasn’t clear if this was a show set in the original universe or an entirely new one, given its timeframe prior to any “Star Trek” series prior, and drastic redesign of Klingons.

Producer musical chairs gave the first two seasons inconsistent tones, with initial wild swings being retconned into classic continuity. Nonetheless, those seasons had fun prequel moments with a new young Spock (Ethan Peck) and Pike (Anson Mount) as regular guest characters. It was weird that Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) was a never-before-mentioned adopted sister for Spock, but viewers rolled with it

Then the show shot forward to the 32nd century, which not only hamstrings 23rd-century continuity, but also turned out to be… kind of boring? A decimated Federation having to start again in a post-apocalyptic frontier universe felt like a bad “Trek” ripoff. Worse, the Discovery’s crew seem to focus more on their love lives than the mission at hand. For representation’s sake, it’s good to see gay and trans couples. However, once Saru got a gratuitous love interest and Michael constantly ignored the way her lover Book flaunted the rules, the show’s soap-opera-like prioritization of sexual attraction over adventure became tedious. The best “Trek” knows how to balance those.

“Voyager” had a solid premise that should have been far better executed than it was. A Federation ship chases a terrorist ship, and both get thrown to the far side of the universe. With limited resources, they must combine crews and find a way home.

Yet the terrorists aren’t particularly smart, as they’ve let both a Vulcan spy and a secret Cardassian into their midst. As far as the inevitable crew tensions went, they tended to be solved by people sensitively talking things out. Initial villains include lame-o Klingon ripoffs the Kazon, and the combined crew soon got joined by the “Trek” version of Jar Jar Binks: Neelix, a clumsy and annoying aspiring chef with a creepily underage psychic girlfriend.

“Star Trek” course-corrected the show in the most obvious, fan-pandering way they knew how: adding the popular Borg, and an ex-Borg bombshell in the form of Seven of Nine. It worked, although we’re still trying to forget Seven’s terrible, nonsensical romance with Chakotay, especially with the character coming out as queer in subsequent shows. Many episodes of “Voyager” are among those that have aged the worst in the entire “Trek” franchise.

Somehow holding it together as best she could was Kate Mulgrew’s Captain Janeway, chugging coffee, kicking ass, and murdering Tuvix.

Was “Prodigy” a cartoon for kids, or a proper sequel to “Voyager”? Both, perhaps to its detriment.

The initial premise: Six alien kids find a Starfleet starship, and with the aid of a holographic Kathryn Janeway, attempt to fly it away from their dangerous lives and towards Federation space. With a very “Explorers” vibe, more action, and the pet-like antics of blobby sidekick Murf, “Prodigy” initially felt more like a cartoon for kids than “Star Trek” ever had before. Then Season 2 reintroduced Chakotay and the Doctor from “Voyager,” and Wesley Crusher with his Traveler powers, and fan service threatened to turn it into the same old, same old.

Canceled by Paramount+, picked up by Netflix, then discontinued (possibly for a tax write-off), “Prodigy” suffered from an inconsistent schedule and arguably never really had a chance. It’s an old “Star Trek” saw that, original series aside, the shows tend to hit their stride in the third season. Instead, “Star Wars” liberally borrowed the “Prodigy” concept, and “Skeleton Crew” became one of that franchise’s best spin-offs.

If we were only judging the third season of “Picard,” it would be closer to the top of this list. Finally giving us a “Next Generation” reunion after all these years, “Picard” Season 3 felt to ’80s kids the way the first “Motion Picture” must have felt to original fans. The previous movies with that crew came immediately after the series and never gave us a chance to miss them; now we do, and seeing them again — in a pretty good storyline that finally revealed Picard and Beverly got together for real, to boot — felt like something we’ve deserved for a long, long time.

However, there are two other seasons we had to get through first, and nostalgia for Patrick Stewart as Picard only goes so far when he’s given a brand new crew who are way less interesting. Part of that comes down to Stewart himself, who wanted the show to be about Picard, and not a crew reunion. Over the course of two seasons, however, it became abundantly clear that the best and best-liked parts involved the characters who did return: Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine, John de Lancie as Q, Jonathan Frakes as Riker, Brent Spiner as various Soongs, and Ito Aghayere doing a great Whoopi Goldberg impersonation as younger Guinan. When the show ultimately did the correct and logical thing, it was magic.

Like most Filmation cartoons, the “Star Trek” animated series utilized limited animation, cutting costs on the visual end in order to be made in the USA. Budget costs also eliminated Walter Koenig’s Chekov, and would have eliminated George Takei and Nichelle Nichols too. However, Leonard Nimoy stood up for them and refused to play Spock unless the original Sulu and Uhura — notably the only two non-white actors in the main cast — came back as well. The result, while cheap-looking, felt like a genuine continuation of the original series with the original cast, utilizing many of the same writers.

Still, while the actual animation might be limited, the sets and aliens no longer were; anything goes when everything is drawn. This allowed science fiction authors and others to imagine bigger adventures for the crew, sending them into deep space and stranger worlds, against giants and three-armed creatures that couldn’t have been done realistically on a live-action budget. Though positioned as a Saturday-morning show for kids, the animated series was smart and never talked down to audiences, and is lovingly considered canon by most fans and creatives today, despite the fact that Roddenberry himself disagreed.

It’s where we get Kirk’s middle name of “Tiberius,” too.

“Enterprise” came at a weird time in “Star Trek” history, initially seeming to distance itself from the franchise by removing the “Star Trek” name and replacing standard orchestral themes with one of the absolute worst theme songs possible. (Yes, that includes “Far Beyond the Stars” from “Buck Rogers.”) A season-long 9/11 allegory might not have been the best idea either, and the show’s initial Big Bad, an unseen foe from the future trying to rewrite the past (and thereby explain franchise discrepancies), never paid off with a big reveal.

There was plenty of good about “Enterprise,” though, from its submarine-crew aesthetic to its eccentric alien Dr. Phlox favoring natural remedies. The Andorians finally returned, and with Jeffrey Combs in blueface, too. The romance between dry-witted chief engineer Trip and deadpan Vulcan T’Pol was kind of sweet, and with Porthos the beagle, we got the very first official ship’s pet.

Season 4 finally seemed on track to really pull things together, embracing the pure “Star Trek” of it all with a crew that by then had pretty good chemistry going. Then the show was canceled, and it ended with a notoriously terrible “It was all a Holodeck program” finale that also unceremoniously killed off Trip for relatively little payoff. At least we got to see the founding of the Federation.

Not every fan has been on board with modern “Trek” storylines, so “Strange New Worlds” decided to take a new-old tack. What if we just did the original series, but with modern technology and sensibilities? Set in the time period immediately preceding Kirk and Spock’s classic adventures, the show is ostensibly a prequel centered on Kirk’s immediate predecessor, Pike. In fact, young Kirk keeps showing up so often that it sometimes just feels like a straight-up reboot.

Still, it feels good to get back to basics: the starship Enterprise, going to new planets, and discovering stuff. If the show decides it wants to do something weird like a musical episode, a Renn faire, a puppet show, or a parody of the original series, they get the insanely convoluted technobabble and tortured premise out of the way quickly so they can just go ahead and be goofy. For the most part, it works, though the rewriting of the Gorn into multiple “Aliens” ripoff episodes might be a mild mismatch and tonal incongruity. Anson Mount’s Captain Pike knows on one level that he’s doomed to meet a horrible fate, per the classic two-part episode “The Menagerie,” but on a week-to-week basis, he seldom lets it get to him.

The “Star Trek” movies, putting the classic cast into big-budget adventures with genuinely good special effects, begat a whole new generation of fans: the “Star Wars” kids who wanted more sci-fi. After the critical and commercial success of “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” Paramount decided the time was right to have Roddenberry create a new “Trek” for TV, 20 years after the original ended.

With the old cast aging out, Roddenberry pushed the clock forward by about a century. Putting the classically trained Patrick Stewart in the lead, and letting Paramount retain full control over the show in syndication, “The Next Generation” largely eschewed the occasional cheese and network pandering the original had to deal with. Klingons were reconceived as cool badasses rather than villains, and new adversaries like the Ferengi and the Borg served as more modern allegories for societal ills like greed and conformity.

Most fans agree it took the show a couple of seasons to find its footing, though the erasure of Season 2’s Dr. Pulaski from the discourse is unfair. Roddenberry initially hamstrung the show by insisting the crew wouldn’t have any internal conflicts; as his influence waned, the character dynamics began to evolve in a less bland direction. “TNG” was, in the end, what “Star Trek” was always supposed to be: a believable sci-fi series about our best selves, and hopes for the future.

Roddenberry famously disliked when “Star Trek” would get militaristic, and probably would not have been a fan of “Deep Space Nine.” The rest of us are, though. Indeed, it put the idea of a hopeful, utopian future on the back burner to essentially make the case that even a space UN is never going to successfully make a lasting peace between space fascists and the deeply spiritual planet they formerly oppressed. Yet its long-game storytelling was aces — it takes a repeat viewing of the series to realize just how early the show was seeding a massive, cross-universe conflict with the Dominion, an evil Axis-like counterpart to the ostensibly peace-loving Federation.

We got some of the best villains the franchise has ever seen, from slimy, two-faced Cardassian Gul Dukat to passive-aggressive fundamentalist Kai Winn, and of course Jeffrey Combs’ two classic creations: corrupt Ferengi Liquidator Brunt, and obsequious Vorta clone Weyoun. On the good-guy side, Avery Brooks’ Benjamin Sisko brought back a swagger that had been missing since Kirk, and ultimately a moral flexibility that made him (and us) question his own actions. Trill Jadzia Dax gave us an early and potent metaphor for transgenderism, while angry Major Kira represented generational and national trauma. Worf was brought aboard to goose the ratings, but while he added value, he ultimately wasn’t necessary: the final season offered expert serialized storytelling that even the Paramount+ era hasn’t yet equaled. Its best episodes are morally complex, challenging, and entertaining.

It sounded like a terrible idea: an animated comedy set in the “Star Trek” universe? Traditionally, when “Trek” actually tried to be funny, it rarely worked. In the hands of Mike McMahan, however, who came from “Rick and Morty,” a nihilistic cartoon surprisingly committed to big sci-fi concepts that it took seriously, “Lower Decks” became a miracle. Funny without being stupid, and at home in animation without breaking canon, it’s a show where every episode is a perfectly crafted gem, full of deep-cut references to “Trek” lore without depending on them.

The premise isn’t even as outlandish as it may seem at first. If the Enterprise is the best ship in the fleet, somebody else has to have the worst one, right? And that just might be the Cerritos, where the lowliest cadets often have a better grasp of what’s going on than the bridge crew, who are assigned to second-contact missions. “Lower Decks” brings back obscure aliens like the Pakleds, canonizes bizarre tie-in merchandise like the classic toy Spock helmet, but excels thanks to stars Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid. As the hyperactive Mariner and ultra-neurotic Boimler, respectively, they are us… nerdy, full of knowledge, and prepared to use it in the actual universe they’ve admired from afar.

Even “Star Trek” fans sometimes underrate “TOS,” as it’s known to Trekkers, usually because they forget just how groundbreaking it was. Along with “The Twilight Zone,” the original “Star Trek” brought explicit social critique and anti-war sentiments to TV in the form of allegories that would get past the censors. The pitch was “Wagon Train” to the stars; the execution was a dream of a better tomorrow by holding a space mirror up to the problems of today. At its best, like “The City on the Edge of Forever,” it married clever science-fiction concepts with emotional stakes. At its worst — “Spock’s Brain,” let’s say — it still had William Shatner hamming it up, Leonard Nimoy seriously committing to sheer absurdity, and DeForest Kelley yelling at them both.

As a bonus, it angered racists and xenophobes by depicting a multicultural, multinational starship crew in an era where such things were not commonplace. Indeed, intelligent Black women were so rare on TV at that time that Martin Luther King Jr. made sure Nichelle Nichols stayed on the show. The original “Star Trek” essentially created the fan convention as we know it today and contributed to the lexicon. Almost everybody knows what you mean if you say “warp speed,” “beam me up,” “Vulcan,” or “Klingon.”

Like Kirk said in “The Way to Eden”: “We… reach, Mr. Spock.”