Star Trek’s Starfleet Academy Gets Fewer Views Than Old Men Talking About Deep Space Nine

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 1 hour ago

As part of their bid to get people interested, Paramount released the first episode of its new Star Trek series, Starfleet Academy, for free on YouTube. At nearly the same time, as counter-programming, the YouTube channel Red Letter Media released a video discussing what many consider Star Trek’s greatest effort, Deep Space Nine.

Both have now been online for more than twenty-four hours, and the results are shocking. Paramount’s new series only has 82,000 views. Red Letter Media’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine discussion has 380,000 views. There are far more people interested in revisiting the franchise’s golden age than there are viewers willing to sit through an hour of their latest effort.

Paramount’s video versus Red Letter Media’s

This isn’t an aberration, and it’s not a phenomenon isolated to elder Gen Xers talking about the good old days. Interest in older Star Trek shows has grown almost in direct proportion to the release of newer, and generally less well-regarded, Star Trek shows.

There’s an entire, growing subculture of podcasts and video presentations from Millennials and Zoomers marveling at older Star Trek as they watch it for the first time. Some of these have been viewed by millions.

Our own Star Trek retrospective videos on Giant Freakin Robot’s relatively small YouTube channel tend to be some of the most popular things we do. More people watch what we say about the golden age of Star Trek than there are people watching the increasingly terrible Star Trek content Paramount puts out.

One of Giant Freakin Robot’s most popular Star Trek videos, a tribute to Star Trek: Enterprise.