I can’t believe I’m saying this, but my cursory experience with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has me kinda feeling like it’s somewhat good? and even somewhat true to the original spirit of Star Trek

specifically it seems to have the most important elements of a Star Trek show which are:

• presenting viewers with a utopia and making it clear that it’s possible for us to achieve this utopia
• showing that Starfleet is an organization of explorers and peaceful negotiators
• just generally trying to be inspiring, positive, and uplifting

I missed all of that, and it’s good to have it back

with that said, I’m not going to be able to keep watching it (I only watched S01E01 and S02E01 to get a feel for the show) because there are many things that I don’t like too:

• the slop levels have markedly increased compared to the TNG and DS9 eras, and that’s saying something because there were entire TNG/DS9 episodes that were nothing but braindead filler slop. but yeah all of the writing in this show just feels like it was rushed out the door - even in the moments when the captain is meant to give an inspiring speech, where just a little bit more time in the oven would have done a lot
• the characters are all immature for the sake of comedy and/or drama I guess, even though an important part of Star Trek IMO is how much society has progressed emotionally and interpersonally
• it’s a little bit irony-poisoned which unfortunately seems like it might be a necessity for modern TV shows :/ it’s doing that postirony thing where every moment of sincerity or positivity could be interpreted as “haha funi parody” or it could also be interpreted seriously
• it does that modern TV show thing where every quiet scene feels oppressively tense which I find exhausting
• the show goes out of its way to be disturbing, seemingly at least once per episode, because I guess that’s what people expect from scifi these days?
• also every character has a super edgy ultra traumatic Baldur’s Gate 3 backstory that they will not shut up about. the show centers around a whole crew of highly traumatized barely-functional people who are emotionally immature and I find that frustrating and very un-Trek. and the show fixates on this as if it’s going to hook me with the characters’ emotional immaturity and unrelatable scifi trauma