Star Trek Producers Were Warned About Starfleet Academy Over 60 Years Ago

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 9 seconds ago

Ever since Starfleet Academy was canceled, the discourse around the show has grown more intense. Vicious battle lines have been drawn between two groups: the older fans who wanted the show to be more like Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the younger fans who praised the franchise for trying something new. Many of that second group have grown particularly shrill, blaming small-minded haters for why their favorite new sci-fi show got canceled. The first group, however, maintains that they just wanted a Star Trek show and not a teenage drama that just happens to be set in space.

What may surprise you, though, is that network executives warned Star Trek about creating a Starfleet Academy-style show over 60 years ago. When NBC was determining which episodes of The Original Series should air first, execs decided they didn’t like “Charlie X” because it focused on an adolescent boy with superpowers. As written in These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One, those executives thought this made the show seem like nothing more than a teenage melodrama set in space. They decided against showing “Charlie X” as the first episode, but thanks to its low postproduction costs (everything took place aboard the Enterprise), it ended up being the second episode ever.

Teen Drama In Space

In retrospect, “Charlie X” was a solid episode. Sure, it felt a bit more like The Twilight Zone instead of Star Trek, but Robert Walker did a great job as the titular Charlie. Plus, this episode was basically a one-off, and no other Original Series episode would channel those same “teen drama” vibes. However, 60 years later, Alex Kurtzman and the other architects of NuTrek ignored what those NBC executives said way back when and decided to give us the ultimate sci-fi teen drama show: Starfleet Academy.

Since Starfleet Academy’s cancellation, there has been endless discourse over why the show got canceled. Everyone knows it got the ax because it didn’t get enough viewers to justify its exorbitant production costs, but why did fans avoid this new show in a way they didn’t avoid, say, Picard or Strange New Worlds? For many fans of old-school Trek, the reason they hated SFA was that it looked like a teen drama in space. Ever since the first previews hit, that’s exactly what these fans dreaded the new show would be, and it justified those fears at every turn.

Star Trek Meets Dawson’s Creek

In-between delivering some life-and-death Star Trek misadventures, Starfleet Academy focused on wacky teen hijinks at every turn. This included prank wars with fellow students, silly love triangles (will the gay Klingon end up with the twink thug or the bisexual disaster?), bar fights, and multiple arcs (for Caleb, SAM, and Genesis) about everyone’s respective mommy and daddy issues. It was what all the skeptics feared: a CW-style teen melodrama that just happened to have the Star Trek name attached to it.

Given its sudden cancellation, it’s reasonable to assume that most fans rejected the new show (there are unconfirmed reports that it averaged only 40,000 viewers per episode). They rejected it because it didn’t feel like Star Trek in the way that Strange New Worlds (itself a direct prequel to The Original Series) or even Picard did. In this way, the fandom validated what those NBC executives tried warning Trek producers about 60 years ago: that this new sci-fi venture needed to be more than a reskinned version of a teenybopper soap opera.

Modern franchise producers like Alex Kurtzman have learned their lesson. Starfleet Academy is clearly not what the fandom wants. Paramount has seemingly learned this lesson as well, and they are preparing to effectively relaunch the entire franchise with a brand new Star Trek movie that ditches the Kelvinverse continuity. At this point, nobody knows exactly what the movie will be about. But based on the new Star Trek spinoff’s failure, it’s a surefire bet that it won’t focus on teen melodrama in space!