Jeri Ryan says Paramount politics may explain Trek’s pipeline gap
Star Trek officially notched its 60th birthday last week, joining a select few TV and film franchises that have survived six decades of pop culture upheaval. But the milestone arrived without a confirmed successor to the franchise’s two remaining streaming-era series, both of which are preparing to wrap up their runs. The original series, starring William Shatner as Capt. James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, aired for three seasons on NBC beginning in 1966. It gave rise to a sprawling catalog of TV shows, films, video games, novels, comic books, conventions and collectibles, all centered on Starfleet — an exploratory and peacekeeping armada co-founded in the distant future by humans and connected to other alien species in a United Federation of Planets.
In the streaming era, Star Trek has spawned seven series and a movie, including Discovery in 2017, the animated series Lower Decks in 2020, and the last two franchise TV series, both planning to end: Starfleet Academy and Strange New Worlds. A Paramount+ executive told Deadline that the company wants to find a new iteration of Star Trek, NPR reported, and a writing team is supposedly working on a script for a new Trek movie for Paramount Pictures. There is no definitive film or TV show announced yet. If no new projects are revealed soon, 2027 may mark the first time in about a decade that there have been no new Star Trek TV series or movies in production.
Jeri Ryan, who joined Voyager in 1997 to play Seven of Nine and said she knew little about Trek at the time, marveled at how the original series featured a Russian character during the Cold War, alongside a Black female officer and a Japanese helmsman, sending “a not-so-subtle message of what it might take to survive and thrive in the future.” “The way that Star Trek has always held a mirror up to society and always been political in a non-threatening way … it’s fascinating to me,” Ryan said. “It was groundbreaking.” The franchise offered, she added, “an optimistic view … of what we could achieve if we stop screwing it up.” “If we learn to appreciate and celebrate our differences and stop being afraid of everyone who is different from us,” she said, ruefully.
Ryan questioned whether Paramount’s current corporate direction conflicts with Trek’s traditional values. “I have a hard time believing some of the disinterest is not political,” she said, noting Trek’s historic devotion to diversity and inclusion. “I don’t think that they necessarily appreciate the message of Star Trek so much. And I don’t know that [the franchise’s message] fits into where they’re trying to take things.” NPR reported that Paramount eliminated its diversity, equity and inclusion programs in 2025 and that CEO David Ellison has faced criticism for taking action in other parts of the organization to curry favor with President Donald Trump. Ellison has denied bending news organizations under Paramount’s control, including CBS News, to please Trump.
Critics have a lot of ideas about why Trek might not be resonating with new fans, from dissatisfaction with the direction of recent series, to the limitations of Paramount+, where most new iterations of the franchise have been confined.
Akiva Goldsman, who co-created Strange New Worlds and serves as co-showrunner, said Trek’s appeal as a morality play that shifts with the times is central to its enduring popularity. “[Its] about optimism, about exploration, about this notion that decency and kindness and empathy are the strengths of our culture,” he said. “I think the world often isn’t that. And I think we often yearn for that.” He conceded that some traditionalist fans may have objected to the big creative swings the series has taken during its run, including a musical episode and one in which most of the Enterprise crew is transformed into Muppet-like puppets.
Goldsman also pointed to the impact of streaming TV on viewer behavior. “Maybe people just want one or two great seasons of everything and then they move along,” he said. “This relationship that we once had with entertainment, was also when there was far less entertainment.” He recalled how early Trek conventions in the mid-1970s pioneered the modern fan convention, with fans gathering to watch an episode screened in a theater with better color and more scenes than the TV version. “From that point on,” he said, “all we wanted was more.”
Ira Steven Behr, who led Deep Space Nine as showrunner over four seasons, offered a different diagnosis. He said Star Trek was born during a time when people believed — amid unrest over the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — that the world could get better through movements that brought massive change and, thanks to the success of the space race and moon landing, that technology would be a big part of that success. “The secret message of Trek is that technology is good and that in the [future] it will be even better and its impact on our lives will be both beneficial and benign,” Behr said, citing the franchise’s warp drive and replicators, transporters, holosuites, tricorders and tractor beams.
Now, in a world filled with divisive social media, disinformation spreading across the internet and a backlash against data centers powering artificial intelligence, Behr said, few still believe the future will be better thanks to technology. “Those two major thoughts that Star Trek kinda relies on don’t make it anymore for people,” he said. “That s*** doesn’t fly.”
Behr added that some professed Trek fans now say the new shows are too focused on identity issues or classically liberal causes — that the franchise has grown too “woke.” Those fans, Behr noted, seemed focused on big space battles and high-adventure episodes, with little patience for the smaller, emotional storylines. “All these spaceships would explode and everyone dug it so much and no one’s thinking about the hundreds of people getting killed,” he said. “Now I realize there’s a whole segment larger than anyone thought that would watch Trek for those explosions. They’re not interested in any larger thing the show is saying.”
Anson Mount, who plays Capt. Christopher Pike on Strange New Worlds and has just completed filming the show’s final episodes in Nashville, said the franchise has been around for almost a quarter of America’s lifetime and is “baked into the cake of our culture” because humans are by nature “fatalistically optimistic” in a way the franchise highlights. While acknowledging that some fans have criticized Strange New Worlds’ more ambitious episodes, Mount said such experimentation was necessary to keep the franchise alive in the 21st century. “I’d rather it be completely polarizing while doing something new and taking a risk,” he said. “I think Star Trek would be dead if we delivered the midline of people’s expectations … I’m not happy that people are offended; I am happy that people are having a response.”
Mount identified one problem he said the franchise needs to solve. “Trek has one problem to figure out,” he said. “And that is that its audience is aging and the current strategy is not bringing in a new audience. There needs to be a well-considered plan aimed at changing that.” Older fans often came to earlier Trek series through syndicated reruns on broadcast TV, he noted, while the last Trek theatrical movie, Star Trek: Beyond, was released 10 years ago, further limiting access for younger viewers.
The fanbase that remains has wildly different visions of what the franchise should be based on when they started watching it — even down to series structure. For early fans, Trek was an adventure of the week, while Deep Space Nine and Discovery had more extended plotlines.
Behr remembered the last time Trek took a sizable break — after Enterprise was cancelled by UPN in 2005, there was no new TV show or film until Abrams’ Star Trek movie in 2009. He said Star Trek needed a break back then, and said a pause might not be a bad thing for the franchise now. “[Back then], we were talking about sheer overkill,” Behr added. “You know, give fans a chance to want Trek back again … Even freakin’ chocolate gets old after a while if you eat too much of it.”