The first ratings for Starfleet Academy are in, and they don’t look good for Paramount+. According to Nielsen, the new Star Trek series didn’t even make the Top 10 list of original streaming shows.
This is particularly concerning because Paramount+ didn’t just release one episode to test the waters. They released two episodes at once, hoping to quickly attract a large audience and boost viewership numbers.
Despite this strategy, the show failed to rank among the most popular new series during its first week.
To understand how poorly the show performed, it needed at least 343 million minutes viewed to make the chart – the same number as the series Run Away. With only about 135 minutes of content in the first two episodes, it would have required around 2.5 million people to watch the entire thing to reach that goal.
That’s about 1.27 million full viewers per episode, and unfortunately, the show didn’t achieve that level of viewership. It also started at number three on Paramount+’s internal charts, which, while not terrible, was a weak launch for a show expected to be a major hit. Things got worse quickly, as the show fell out of the platform’s Top 10 list within just a few days.
Honestly, I was really surprised to see the new series getting overshadowed by older shows – reruns of The King of Queens and Sabrina the Teenage Witch were actually doing better! It gets a little bump in attention when new episodes drop, but then quickly fades away. It feels like people are just checking it out of curiosity, not really getting hooked. They even tried offering the first episode for free on YouTube, hoping to draw people in, but that didn’t seem to make much of a difference. The video was taken private pretty quickly, and when it was up, the view count was low and the comments were really mixed. It’s becoming clear that this show, Starfleet Academy, isn’t hitting the numbers Paramount was hoping for. It does have a fantastic cast, though – Holly Hunter, an Academy Award winner, plays Captain Nahla Ake, who’s the Chancellor of the Academy and commands the USS Athena. Paul Giamatti is playing the villain, Nus Braka – a half-Klingon space pirate with a really intriguing backstory. Plus, they’ve got a new group of young actors playing the cadets, including Sandro Rosta as Caleb Mir and Bella Shepard as Genesis Lythe.
As a long-time Trek fan, I’ve been following this new show, and it’s set about 300 years in the future, picking up the story threads from the later seasons of Discovery. It’s been awesome seeing some familiar faces pop up – Robert Picardo as The Doctor was a real treat, and I’m enjoying Tig Notaro as Jett Reno too!
The first season has ten episodes, filmed at Pinewood Toronto Studios, and it’s being co-run by Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau. While the initial ratings weren’t amazing, they’re already well into filming a second season, which is a great sign!
Paramount really seems to believe in this show, and they’re hoping that good word-of-mouth will bring in both older fans like me and a new generation of viewers. Only time will tell if it can really find its footing and become a hit, but I’m cautiously optimistic!
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2026-02-14 15:44