“My goal is for All Access to have consistent Star Trek content,” CBS TV Studios president David Stapf told Deadline in 2018, when Captain Jean-Luc Picard returned for a new Star Trek series gave a taste in mind’s eye. Five years and a name change later, Paramount+ achieved that for a time – and promptly destroyed it with its own hubris.
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Paramount+, née CBS All Access, didn’t have the smoothest of starts from space dock in the rise and now fall of its quest to become the definitive online home of Star Trek content. But today, the streamer’s attempts met a crashing, messy end with the controversial removal of Star Trek: Prodigy. Around this time last year, the series was the bold frontrunner in an attempt to bring the venerable sci-fi franchise to new audiences in a way Star Trek hadn’t attempted in years, and the latest in one meanwhile entire fleet of Star Trek shows on the platform. In one swift, single move — not just the rescission of a second-season renewal, but the complete deletion of the series from its platform — the studio’s stratospheric ascent seems to have collapsed all around.
Of course, the only reason Paramount’s decision is so upsetting and so angry for Trek fans is because they’ve spent the last five years just as awkwardly gluing together the so-called home of Star Trek in a series of re-acquisitions. “Star Trek” used to stream around the world on various platforms, including at its peak on Netflix, before Paramount took back each title piece by piece and assigned it its own service — at a time when that service didn’t exist actually outside of the US (already Paramount+ is available in fewer than 30 countries worldwide).
As Star Trek began to expand again as a franchise with the release of Discovery and other new series, the studio’s reach extended beyond America to allowing the likes of Picard and Lower Decks to stream to others for a season or two -Platforms switched abroad to stay there Torn back as Paramount+ slowly made its way around the world. Even at the launch of Strange New Worlds, this was the case as international fans had to wait months after American audiences saw the series and were fixated on the aforementioned rollout.
Image: Paramount
The first known blunder paralleling the Prodigy situation Paramount finds itself in this week happened just a few years ago: Days before the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery season 4, in its April 20, 2019, Paramount announced the abrupt international Series Removed From Netflix Announced Fans expect to see a new season in the dark in the same week until Paramount+ arrives in their region. Then it took a little over a week for Paramount to partially reverse the decision. But things aren’t that simple at Prodigy — and there’s no real way to make up for what Paramount has done anytime soon.
But if this is truly the end of Paramount’s attempts to make itself the only place for Star Trek streaming, there have been signs for some time that the streamer’s home was built on bad soil. From random episode removals to the increasing shrinkage of the franchise, Discovery is set to end for good next year, and Picard appears to be over as well, leaving only Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks as current series, back catalog aside Let’s — it’s been clear for the past few years, Paramount’s grip on the franchise that has held it so tight has weakened in the worst possible way in recent years. It’s just that the fatal blow comes amid a spate of industry reckoning over the costs of these streaming-walled gardens, as the services that sprung up alongside Paramount+ slowly lose control of the content they’ve hosted over the last few years have hunted and devoured for half a decade, and doesn’t hurt quite as much when it’s not as own a goal as it is now for a series as big as Star Trek, thanks in part to its move into the streaming age.
Paramount+ might want to try to call itself the home of Star Trek for quite some time — but after today, it never really will be, and fans will never really agree with what the streamer has planned for the future of Trek , even though they know it can be switched off in the blink of an eye and need a tax break. For five years, Paramount made Star Trek its streaming guide, a franchise dream that made Paramount’s own digital walled garden where it is today. Now those stars are beginning to fade, and the studio is to blame.
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