Star Trek: Lower Decks

Skippable, and the last place anybody should start. It is an affectionate parody and a parody requires the original: the jokes are about Starfleet procedure, about the kind of anomaly that shows up in a third season, about the way senior officers always get the interesting assignment. A viewer with no Star Trek behind them will watch people shout references at each other.

With that behind you it is very good. The conceit is that these are the ensigns who clean the holodeck and repair the conduits while the bridge crew have an adventure in the background, and the show gets a lot out of the fact that the glamorous parts of this universe are somebody's shift. Half-hour episodes, dense, and much better plotted than a comedy needed to be.

It is also the most sincerely enthusiastic thing anyone has made about this franchise. It knows the obscure corners, it treats the sillier parts of the older shows as real rather than as embarrassments, and under the jokes it is straightforwardly in favour of the Federation. The later seasons do genuine character work on all four leads.

Five seasons, around twenty hours in total. Watch it after The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and ideally after Voyager, since a surprising amount of it is about that era.