About a year ago a new Star Trek show, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, was announced. Since then we’ve heard a little news about it, such as Tawny Newsome becoming a writer for the show, however we’ve had no big announcements regarding the show up until now. Executive producer Alex Kurzman just announced a bunch of big news about the upcoming series at SXSW!!

The first big piece of news is that we officially have a general timeline for the release of the show. They’re starting shooting late this summer and they think they’ll shoot for about 6 months. Then there’s 6-8 months of post production on the show. Kurzman believes it’s possible that we won’t be seeing the show until 2026 because he really doesn’t want to rush any VFX and post production work. The second piece of big news is that we officially know the length of the series. Like Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds the first two seasons will be 10 episodes long.

We still don’t know when the series is taking place however fans are pretty sure that it will happen around Discovery. In season 4 of Discovery we saw a bit of the Starfleet Academy and Tilly left to become a teacher. It would make sense for the writers to continue that timeline. Kurzman did confirm that they had not begun casting the kids but insinuated that some of the adult roles had already been filled (perhaps by Mary Wiseman’s Tilly…).

With the show being about teenagers and young adults, many people are worried that Star Trek is trying to shift its demographic, forgetting about its older fans. However, Kurzman reassured viewers this was not the case saying, “I’m always very vocal about this with the studio, you can’t do [bring in new and younger fans] to the exclusion of OG fans…You have to make sure that you are also pleasing people who have been around and are die-hard 'TOS' fans, die-hard 'Next Gen' fans, whatever iteration of 'Trek' is yours. You cannot alienate those people. You actually also have to invite them to the tent.” So if you were worried that Starfleet Academy wouldn’t be faithful to the core of the series, fear no more. 

We here at DSTN are all very excited for the new Starfleet Academy show and we hope you are too!!