Star Trek: Discovery

Skippable, and the most argued-about series in the franchise. It restarted Star Trek on television after twelve years off, and it did so in a register the franchise had not used: heavily serialised, visually expensive, emotionally demonstrative, and built around a single protagonist rather than an ensemble.

The first two seasons are set a decade before Kirk and spend a great deal of effort on continuity problems of their own making, which is the source of most of the complaints. The third season solves all of it in one move by throwing the ship nine hundred years into the future, into a galaxy where the Federation has collapsed to a handful of worlds. That is a genuinely interesting place to set a Star Trek show and the series is better from that point, though never evenly.

What divides people is the tone. Every crisis is personal, characters talk about their feelings at length and in the middle of emergencies, and the show's answer to most problems is connection rather than argument. Viewers who want the franchise's cooler, more procedural mode find it exhausting; viewers who wanted it warmer found the thing they had been asking for.

Sonequa Martin-Green carries a very heavy load and Doug Jones's Saru is the best-written character in it. Nothing else on this page requires it, except Starfleet Academy, which is set in the era it opens up.