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Every Star Trek series ranked from worst to best - from The Original Series to Starfleet Academy
From The Original Series to Lower Decks.
- Alex Moreland
Published: Tuesday, 8 September 2026 at 12:00 pm
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Today marks 60 years since Star Trek began.
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In that time, it’s grown from a sci-fi western almost always on the verge of cancellation to a vast franchise encompassing thousands of hours of television, with countless spin-offs, sequels, prequels and reinventions along the way.
Of course, that raises the question: with 12 different Star Trek series to watch, which of them is the best? Does Voyager win out over Enterprise? Is Strange New Worlds’ modern take on the Star Trek pilot stronger than The Original Series? Could Picard ever really compare to The Next Generation?
So, without further ado…
12. Picard
Gates McFadden as Dr Beverly Crusher and Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: Picard Trae Patton/Paramount+.
Must a Star Trek series be “good”? Isn’t it enough for Patrick Stewart just to have a fun time on set? If it is enough (and, honestly, it might be) then Star Trek: Picard is an obvious success.
If not, then Star Trek: Picard’s awkward first season, meandering second, and overly-nostalgic third – not to mention the regular behind-the-scenes shakeups that left each new instalment feeling like it had little interest in following coherently on from what came before it – adds up to what can only be considered the most disappointing Star Trek series in the galaxy.
11. Star Trek: The Animated Series
Spock (Leonard Nimoy) in Star Trek: The Animated Series Paramount+
Maybe more of a curiosity than anything else that features on this list, but what a charming curiosity it is – a colourful artefact from the days when Star Trek was first becoming popular, but before it became a rigorously stage-managed piece of corporate intellectual property.
Never again will Star Trek feature, for example, casual crossovers like The Animated Series’ inclusion of Larry Niven’s Kzinti – if nothing else, it’s a reminder of what you lose when a television series becomes a Franchise™.
10. Enterprise
Coming at the end of a near-unprecedented production run, you can forgive Enterprise for feeling a little bit tired at times – every so often it’d throw out a new idea, from the prequel setting it began with to its experiments with more serialised storytelling in its third and fourth seasons, but for the most part Enterprise feels like it demonstrates the natural endpoint of a particular style of Star Trek on TV. Still, though, it has its charms (including – genuinely – the theme song).
9. Star Trek: Prodigy
Star Trek: Prodigy Paramount
How do you introduce a child to Star Trek? I am at once too old and too young to have a particularly informed answer to this – if anyone’s wondering, the first episode I watched was Deep Space Nine’s Invasive Procedures, channel hopping with chicken pox – but if nothing else Prodigy stands as a clearly worthwhile endeavour at a time when children’s television budgets are being cut across the board.
Possibly it’s a little too invested in being a stealth sequel to Voyager to really work for its intended audience, but again it’s hard to say for sure – or, at least, not until 2046, when the childhood fans of Prodigy have become the grown-up showrunners of the live-action Star Trek: Jankom Pog.
8. Voyager
Star Trek: Voyager stars Kate Mulgrew, Jeri Ryan, Ethan Phillips, Roxann Dawson, Tim Russ, Garrett Wang, Robert Picardo, Robert Beltran and Robert Duncan Mcneill. Getty Images
In a lot of ways, Star Trek: Voyager is perfect for dipping in and out of – catching an episode here and there on different channels, in the middle of the third series one day, towards the end of the sixth the next, right back to the beginning again after that.
Any given episode is always going to be basically solid and reliable, whether the crew are looking for coffee in a nearby nebula or debating the ethics of separating Tuvix. But if you’re trying to watch the series in order, it’s hard not to be distracted by how little Voyager lives up to its own premise, and wish for a series that committed more fully to the idea of a patchwork crew making a long journey home. (The solution, of course, is for Paramount+ to add a shuffle button.)
7. Strange New Worlds
Anson Mount as Captain Pike in season 4, Episode 1 of Strange New Worlds. Jan Thijs/Paramount+
Strange New Worlds always feels like a programme that could maybe be doing something a little more interesting at any given moment, but that focusing too much on that feeling always risks distracting from all the things it does so well week on week. It’s got a charming cast, great production design, and its embrace of something-of-the-week episodic storytelling is a genuine breath of fresh air in a TV landscape defined by formless, binge-watch sludge.
6. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
Robert Picardo as The Doctor, Kerrice Brooks as Sam and Bella Shepard as Genesis in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Brooke Palmer/Paramount+
Much like its parent show Discovery before it, Starfleet Academy deserves credit for its ambition first and foremost – 60 years on, there’s something to be said for trying to find a new way into telling Star Trek stories, and seizing on a coming-of-age story like this one is clearly a smart pitch. (Also worth appreciating: its ongoing commitment to diversity, even if much of its audience had apparently forgotten they were watching Star Trek.)
There were some growing pains, true – much like all of its predecessors! – but it’s a real shame that corporate reshuffles mean we won’t get to see how and where the show would’ve evolved across a longer life. Here’s hoping that in Season 2 they find the time to include a story about the highs and lows, the epic triumphs and defeats of Parrises squares.
5. Lower Decks
Star Trek: Lower Decks Paramount Plus
Easily the most surprising of the recent Star Trek series – who would’ve thought that a vaguely Rick and Morty-esque riff on The Next Generation would work this well? But it manages to be genuinely very funny, often quite inventive (the Series 2 finale, with the Cerritos stripped of its outer hull, is one of the best moments of the current Star Trek era), and has a fantastic cast in Jack Quaid, Tawny Newsome, Noël Wells, and Eugene Cordero. More than any of the other Star Trek spin-offs, Lower Decks feels like it proves the creative value of having multiple Star Trek series running concurrently (beyond keeping Paramount+ afloat, anyway).
4. Discovery
Sonequa Martin-Green as Burnham and Doug Jones as Saru in Star Trek: Discovery Marni Grossman /Paramount+
Discovery is not – and it’s never really been – a perfect series. It’s at times overstuffed and underbaked, and the number of behind-the-scenes creative shakeups can leave it feeling disjointed from episode to episode, never mind season to season.
But it’s also a show that’s not afraid of taking a big swing, and always feels like it’s trying to make a case for what Star Trek is and can be in the 2010s, anchored by a genuinely fantastic lead performance from Sonequa Martin-Green (arguably Star Trek’s first true lead performance). Put another way, of Star Trek’s modern era, Discovery is the series that still feels like it’s boldly going somewhere (even if it doesn’t always know exactly where).
3. The Original Series
William Shatner as Captain James T Kirk in Star Trek: The Original Series. CBS via Getty Images
The one that started it all – and, revisiting it, you can always see exactly why it’s lasted as long as it has. It’s a show full of big ideas, and for every episode that hasn’t aged particularly well – and there are certainly some – there are two more that are obvious classics. (Deciding which, of course, is part of the fun of watching any show that’s 60 years old – getting to come at it from a new angle, setting aside all the homages and the parodies and the recreations, and realising that a fan-favourite episode is rubbish, the famously awful one is better than anyone ever admits, and actually William Shatner really is a great actor.)
2. The Next Generation
John de Lancie as Q in Star Trak: The Next Generation. Getty
The platonic ideal of what Star Trek is and can be. Everything that works about The Original Series has been refined and perfected, and (most) of what comes after The Next Generation is an attempt to recreate what worked so well here. So many of the best episodes across the whole sixty years come from The Next Generation, from The Inner Light to Darmok to The Offspring, and so many of the best characters and performances too – not just the best of Star Trek, in fact, but the best of science fiction as a genre.
1. Deep Space Nine
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. CBS via Getty Images
It’s the obvious answer – but sometimes these things are obvious for a reason. Coming after The Original Series and The Next Generation, so much about Deep Space Nine feels like it simply shouldn’t work – even the most basic part of its premise, the fact it’s set on a space station in a fixed orbit rather than following a ship from one planet to the next, seems to miss the basic appeal of the show. (They’re not trekking anywhere!)
But it quickly turned out to be a stroke of genius: staying in one place meant Deep Space Nine became Star Trek’s most effective piece of drama, thoughtful and nuanced in its depiction first of post-occupation Bajor and then later of the Federation drawn into war. Its character moments are never really matched, before or since (it’s the only Star Trek spinoff to avoid a nostalgic sequel – which feels apt, in a way, leaving Deep Space Nine in its own little corner of the galaxy).
Star Trek is available to stream on Paramount+. You can sign up to Paramount+ for a seven-day free trial.
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Alex Moreland
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