Star Trek Boss Says Starfleet Academy Has “Limitless Engine” For Future Seasons
Is this the Grey's Anatomy of the Final Frontier?
The first thing longtime Star Trek fans will likely notice about the new series, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, is that the cast is big. Not only are we getting a new crew of cadets — which, by the second episode, includes six regular characters — but also a whole host of supporting cadets, as well as the teachers and Starfleet officers that populate the USS Athena and Starfleet on Earth. And none of that includes guest characters, most notably, Paul Giamatti’s new villain, Nus Braka. But according to the current boss of all things Star Trek on TV, producer Alex Kurtzman, the format of Starfleet Academy allows its cast to expand and change even more in future seasons.
“It feels weirdly like a limitless engine that could go on for a very, very long time,” Kurtzman tells Inverse ahead of the launch of Starfleet Academy. “It's not just about the characters that we meet in Season 1, who will have four years in the academy, but every season brings in a new class, and then what happens when they graduate?”
To be clear, Kurtzman isn’t saying that Starfleet Academy is guaranteed for four seasons. We know that Season 2 went into pre-production in 2025, so beyond this first season in 2026, there’s at least one more batch of episodes of the series. However, what Kurtzman and co-showrunner Noga Landau explain is that the series' nature is designed for change and potential longevity. Whereas shows like The Next Generation or Voyager had a fairly fixed group of characters, the comings and goings of Starfleet Academy itself create an opportunity for a bigger canvas of characters and situations. And, part of that larger canvas of characters means that nearly all the cadets are audience surrogates for people who may not know much about Star Trek.
“I think for the new fans, we wanted to make sure that we wrote a show where you don't have to know Star Trek in order to really hook into it right from the very beginning,” Landau explains. She also notes that the lead character, Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta), doesn’t know much about Earth or Starfleet, which was by design. “He's the fresh eyes into the world. He doesn't know how it works. It's all a discovery for him and our audience. Our new audience is able to take that ride along with him.”
Caleb (Sandro Rosta) and his mentor, Nahla (Holly Hunter), in Starfleet Academy’s first episode.
So, in theory, Starfleet Academy could be a new gateway for new Trekkies to beam into the Final Frontier, especially if those fans are of younger generations who don’t know about the complicated backstory. Even the post-Discovery era in which Starfleet Academy exists is fairly free from canon constraints. Essentially, anything that happens in the future history of Starfleet, at this point, is unwritten.
This fact, combined with the unique structure of the show, makes Kurtzman think that there could be a lot of Starfleet Academy for years to come. “What's it like for them out in the field after they graduate?” Kurztman says. “It could go on for a very long time. Maybe it will become the Grey’s Anatomy of Star Trek.”
