Star Trek: Picard

Essential for anybody who watched The Next Generation, and close to pointless for anybody who did not. Every season is built on recognition, and the third is almost entirely built on it.

The three seasons are strikingly different and are usually ranked in reverse order of release. The first is a slow, melancholy story about an old man who resigned in protest and has been sulking on a vineyard for fourteen years, which has the best premise and loses its nerve in the last two episodes. The second is widely considered the weakest, a time-travel story to present-day Los Angeles that spends ten hours on material worth four.

The third season is why the show is marked essential. It reassembles the entire Next Generation cast for the first time in twenty years, and it is explicitly the send-off the films never gave them: seven people in their seventies and eighties who have drifted apart, brought back together by a problem none of them can solve alone. It leans hard on nostalgia and it earns most of it, and the sequence in the middle of the season that pays off a thirty-year-old television episode is the best thing modern Star Trek has done.

Watch The Next Generation first, and First Contact. With that behind you the third season is a genuine event. Without it, it is a group of strangers being moved by things you cannot see.