Starfleet Academy’s Biggest Haters Have Been Proven Right, It’s Just Math

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 18 seconds ago

If you’re a Star Trek fan, chances are that you watch Red Letter Media, the channel that deconstructs the worst films in the funniest possible ways. RLM cohosts Mike Stoklassa and Rich Evans are huge fans of Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi franchise, and they talk about it onscreen whenever they can. Most recently, the two released a video where they reviewed the first season of Star Trek: Voyager, a show that both of them enjoyed much more upon rewatch.

While the video primarily focused on the adventures of Captain Janeway and her crew, Stoklassa admitted something shocking: that he is connected with an insider who claims that Starfleet Academy only received 400,000 views. That’s not per episode, but for the entirety of Season 1.

Stoklassa hasn’t revealed his source, so it’s worth taking his claim with a grain of salt. But if he’s right, these low-view numbers reveal something sobering: Starfleet Academy’s biggest haters are right, and this now-canceled show was deeply, deeply unpopular.

The Front Lines Of A Culture War

As I have written about before, Star Trek was dragged into the culture war with the release of Discovery. That divisive rhetoric had an unintended side effect: from that point on, any attack on any NuTrek show could be dismissed as bigotry. If you had genuine problems with the portrayal of Michael Burnham (the teary-eyed Mary Sue who was inexplicably raised by Vulcans), for example, you’d get accused of being someone who screams because they saw a Black woman onscreen.

The same thing happened with Starfleet Academy when it was released earlier this year. Fans hated the show for a variety of reasons. Those included vulgar humor, profanity-laden Zoomer speech, and the mishandling of classic Trek lore.

However, because Starfleet Academy had some markers of diversity (like a same-sex faculty couple, a bisexual disaster, and a gay Klingon in a skirt), defenders of the series tried to paint all of its critics as bigots who hated the show for how woke it is. But if RLM’s insider source is correct, Starfleet Academy’s haters have been proven right: relatively speaking, nobody was watching the show at all, and most of those defenders may not even be real people.

The Power Of Math

The first season of Starfleet Academy only had 10 episodes. If Mike Stoklassa’s information is correct, it means that each episode averaged only 40,000 views. Worse, it means it’s likely that far fewer than 40,000 actually watched the entire series from beginning to end.

There is no way to verify Stoklassa’s claim, but it would explain why Starfleet Academy was canceled after Season 1. The cast had already wrapped filming on Season 2, and it’s unusual to cancel the show so far before the new season, which had already been completed, premiered. However, if Paramount knew that Season 1 had less than half a million total views while costing reportedly $10 million per episode, the network would know for certain that there was no way a second season could ever recover enough to justify throwing more money at a failing show. 

Great Call By The Haters

In thinking about all this, I keep thinking about one of my favorite copypastas: “The haters said I couldn’t do it. And they were correct. Honestly, great call from the haters.” Starfleet Academy has had haters dunking on this show from the beginning, claiming it’s something nobody really wants to watch.

Now, the show’s cancellation, along with Mike Stoklassa’s alleged insider info, proves that the haters were right: the show didn’t die because it was woke. It died because nobody was watching.